Wizards' Attempt To Fix Magic The Gathering Arena's Economy Only Made Things Worse

thegamer.com:

How do you solve Magic The Gathering Arena's economy? It's been a huge source of anger in the MTG community for many months, as players were expected to buy more and more booster packs for the precious card-crafting currency, wildcards, to keep up with the constantly-changing metagame.

Things hit an all-time low with the introduction of Alchemy, which can digitally rewrite the cards you bought at a moment's notice. The backlash was so strong that senior communications manager Blake Rasmussen promised a livestream to hash out all the problems with Arena's economy with Arena's executive producer Chris Kiritz. That stream finally happened last night (followed by a blog post summing it all up), and it may have only made things worse.

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First, a quick explanation on MTG Arena's economy: you can purchase booster packs using in-game gold or the gem microtransaction currency, and each of those packs has a chance of including a 'wildcard'. These wildcards can then be used to craft individual cards you want, whether it be to tune a deck you own or finish off a collection. Wildcards are the only way to craft cards, as there's no 'dusting' mechanic to break down cards you don't want to make new ones, as seen in games like Yu-Gi-Oh! Master Duel.

The problem with this system is that it takes a lot of booster packs to make a competitively viable deck. For example, one of the Standard format's best decks right now is Mono-white Aggro, which needs three Mythic Rare wildcards and 42 Rare wildcards to craft. Considering rare and mythic rare wildcards only appear in 4.2 percent of boosters, and only a few more added in between one-in-15 and one-in-30 packs as a pity