MTGArena One-time Manabase purchase: promoting deck diversity and player engagement
One of the base issues new players face when attempting to get into MtgArena vs other forms of magic is developing a collection that allows for creativity and deckbuilding. In the standard format a large issue of this is the prohibitive number of wildcards needed to establish a manabase. Jumping into the game and needing 20+ wildcards to create a multicolored deck limits creativity and diversity. This ultimately leads to a favoritism towards mono colored decks and skews the metagame. If a new play does indeed spend a vast number of resources in order to craft a 2+ color manabase, they effectively lock themselves into that color pairing. Each time shifting to a new manabase can become costly and makes players adverse to experiment with new deck ideas, leaning heavily on only tried and true decks as to not squander their wildcards.
My suggestion - Make ALL lands available to players for a one-time fee. This could be $25-$50 or whatever makes sense to wizards but could be suggested much like the welcome bundle. Make future lands drafted from limited or packs add more to the vault or even better give a wildcard as a replacement. Free2play players can still draft and grind out all the lands they need if they don't wish to pay the fee.
While this might seem like too much value to give to players, i disagree and think it would solve MANY of the glaring issues players have with this platform.
-Improve metagame diversity by reducing favoritism for mono colored strategies or reliance on tried-and-true decks (crafting only decks that have won tournaments or from streamers).
-Improving metagame diversity not only for players but opponents will improve player satisfaction, ultimately leading to more time spent on MTGA. More engagement means more potential revenue for WOTC.
-More color combinations available to players will ultimately lead to more wildcards getting used naturally as more decks means people will need to craft different things.
-Drastically improves experience for players who do not have hundreds of hours each set release to grind.
The benefits greatly extend past the few points posted above, but ultimately with standard seeing the largest number of sets/cards in MTG history we are approaching a point where it is unreasonable for players to engage with the standard format. My hopes with this fix would be to ease this and create a scenario where standard could be improved on the platform WOTC has developed.
Ideas about how to implement this could be a little symbol at the top of screen, showing a system similar to vault where every 5 lands gets a wildcard or something similar. Also could have the information about what the benefit of this "Item" is, pretty much telling your collection will include all lands for constructed play and rare/mythic lands will fill up this meter. Initial purchase of item will then "fill" for all Non basic lands the player has Omitting of course a set number that is gifted to the player (Each account comes with some in decks etc. but would be easy to adjust with each set release.)
I don't think this would be very difficult to implement, but any thoughts or suggestions on how to improve the system would be good and welcome.