Magic The Gathering Arena has been out for some time now and the number of packs available on the online Magic client is expanding at a rapid rate. If you are new to MTGA, you may be wondering what the best packs to buy are to start your collection off in the best way possible.
On average, the best packs to buy on Magic The Gathering Arena are Strixhaven: School of Mages. Strixhaven contains a larger amount of rares than most other sets on MTGA with many of them seeing play in multiple Magic formats. Strixhaven packs can reduce the amount of wildcards a player needs.
If you want to know what packs to buy for Standard or Historic and you do not want to waste a dime of your hard-earned money, read on because we will show you how to choose the best packs from the correct sets. Additionally, what else to look out for when considering packs, decks, and bundles.
What are MTGA packs?
MTGA packs are similar to standard paper booster packs that you can purchase, but they are the online versions for MTGA.
Regular packs will be bought from the MTGA store, earned from weekly rewards, or won as prizes from events.
Aa with regular booster packs that you buy, you are guaranteed a specific number of cards and rarities. However, the one thing to note is that the online packs have fewer cards and fewer rare cards in them.
Any pack that you purchase from any set on MTGA will contain eight unique cards that consist of;
- 1 Rare or Mythic Rare cards
- 2 Uncommons cards
- 5 Common cards
A wildcard may also replace a card of any type. A wildcard is used to create any card that you wish of the same rarity that the wildcard is.
Are MTGA bundles worth it?
MTGA offers bundles that you can purchase before a release of a set, and then they also offer bundles in-game at the store throughout the year.
Bundles can include cosmetics, lands, stickers, pets, and at the moment, they are offering Historic anthology bundles.
Bundles can be purchased with gold which you can accumulate through playing matches and getting your daily rewards for completing quests. Then they can also be bought with gems that you can purchase with real money.
Bundles offer a way to entice you as the player and make the game more appealing. There is nothing more extraordinary than having an excellent cosmetic for a card that you have played a thousand times.
Due to the fact that you can buy bundles with in-game currency that you can accumulate for free, they are definitely worth a look-over. Playing for a week doing your dailies and playing some matches can easily get you a bundle a week without having to spend any real money.
Other bundles include the mastery passes and then pre-order bundles for sets that are coming out. These are also something to consider if you are an avid fan, and the price for these won’t break the bank, especially if you are planning to buy packs for the new sets anyway.
What are the best packs to buy on MTGA?
MTGA offers a variety of formats, so it would be best if we considered which packs would be beneficial considering the formats you get and would play on MTGA.
The three main formats you can play on MTGA are Standard, Historic, and Brawl. Standard considers the current set of cards in rotation, while Historic allows you to play with any cards in your collection (except for the banned cards). Brawl is similar to Commander, where you will build a deck around a specific legendary creature or planeswalker.
What are the best packs for Standard on MTGA?
The current sets in rotation for Standard in MTGA are;
- Strixhaven
- Kaldheim
- Zendikar Rising
- Core Set 2021
- Ikoria Lair of Behemoths
- Theros Beyond Dead
- Throne of Eldraine
If you are looking for the best bang for your buck and looking to build winning meta decks that are currently in the standard format, then you should opt to buy packs that will give you the chance to get those cards you need (without using wildcards to male them).
One thing to note is that top winning meta decks will comprise of cards from many sets but what you should do is try to buy the packs with the sets that will give you the mythic or rares that you need because those are always expensive to make (you typically have fewer wild cards). To put it simply, you do not want to buy packs of sets looking for commons.
Let’s take an example of a deck that saw a lot of play in the meta on MTGA at one time, boasting an estimated play rate of almost 17% of players – Sultai Ultimatum.
Now there were variations of this deck, as you would expect, but we will go over the cards the rare and mythic rare cards that you needed to make this deck work so you can understand how to priorities what packs to buy when looking to build a deck in the current standard meta.
The mythic rares needed for this meta deck would have typically been:
- Valki, God of Lies
- Vorinclex, Monstrous Raider
- Elder Gargaroth
- Polukranos, Unchained
- Kiora Bests the Sea God
- Elder Gargaroth
- Polukranos, Unchained
- Koma, Cosmos Serpent
Then the rares that would typically be placed in the deck would be:
- Extinction Event
- Shadows’ Verdict
- Emergent Ultimatum
- Ketria Triome
- Temple of Malady
- Clearwater Pathway
- Darkbore Pathway
- Barkchannel Pathway
- Fabled Passage
- Zagoth Triome
- Kaervek, the Spiteful
- Yorion, Sky Nomad
- Shark Typhoon
So now what you would do is find as many cards as possible that come from the same set and purchase those packs and work your way through.
Depending on how you build the deck, you may need only a single copy of a card or 4 copies. It would be optimal to choose to purchase packs where you need mythic or rares of more than 1.
As you can see if you take a look at the cards that most of these Mythics come from;
- Kaldheim
- Zendikar Rising
- Theros Beyond Dead
The rares on the other hand stem from;
- Ikoria Lair of Behemoths
Hence, if you were looking to buy packs to build this winning meta deck, your best bet would be to purchase packs from these sets because your probability of obtaining the cards without making them would be greater.
This same methodology can be applied to any deck that you are looking to try and build in MTGA, now or in the future. Just make sure you know which packs have most of the cards you need to build the deck and start there for the most optimal buying order.
What are the best packs for Historic on MTGA?
Trying to deduce which packs would be best to buy if you were looking at playing historic games on MTGA will be a little bit more complicated.
MTGA is relatively new, it contains cards from Remastered sets and includes MTGA Historic Anthology cards from numerous sets.
However, Strixhaven has been released in conjunction with Mystical Archive, a non-Standard set of cards associated with it.
WotC reprinted 63 of the most famous instants and sorceries of all time and are available for you to get if you purchase and open Strixhaven packs on MTGA.
This means that you can get new packs with unique cards that can be used only in Historic play by purchasing Strixhaven packs.
One thing to note is that seven of the cards won’t be available on Historic due to power level reasons, but you won’t have to worry about receiving those cards in the packs you open until you have a complete set of all the orders rares in the set.
Hence, if you are looking to get packs to play some games in the MTGA Historic format, you should probably get some Strixhaven packs and then look up some great decks that have used cards from the available sets in MTGA and purchase those.
If you are looking for a more comprehensive guide to the best packs to buy to grow your historic collection, check out this video by professional Magic The Gathering streamer Jeff Hoogland.
Conclusion
We discovered that buying packs in MTGA has some method behind it if you plan to put together some winning decks and not just throw your money away on random cards.
The best thing to do is look at what meta decks are being played in the current Standard and purchase packs around the mythic rares and rares that make up the deck you like. This will give you a chance to get those cards without having to craft them from your wild cards.
For Historic, your search can be much wider and will continue to grow as sets go out of rotation. To go over every pack or deck that is good in Historic is beyond the scope of this article, but once again, you would look at the available sets and then consider a deck you would like to play and purchase packs from those.