A new player on MTG Arena was recently asking about the sequence of turns, the multiple main phases and more. I got to thinking how new Arena players have a disadvantage when trying to learn since they are missing out on some nice helper cards that the physical products for new players usually come with.

Here are all of the different cards I've set aside to help teach friends.
I hope new Arena players will find these useful.

Summer 2019 Update

It's been a while since I got around to editing my photos from Appalachia this summer. I wanted to catch up and start making this a regular blog feature each month or quarter.

I got a few nukes, some nice landscape shots, some weird scenes and a lot of photos of me posing with various critters.

Enjoy!

I have been waiting for today to arrive for some months now, ever since the latest Magic: The Gathering (MTG) set, Throne of Eldraine, was announced.

This new set is unique in that it encompasses two major themes: Fairy Tales and Camelot. This is especially exciting because it's one of the first themes that my wife was truly excited about. She casually plays MTG with me, but wished there was a more appealing theme or set that interested her. This is it!

Another unique first for this set is the new "showcase" border art they are using on certain cards as an alternate version that you have a small chance of getting in a booster pack. These new card frames feature scrolling vine-work around the card's art, and many feature alternate art. These are collector pieces. They are absolutely stunning.

I would love to buy lots of booster packs and boxes for this set, but it is not in our budget. Instead, I have been buying the full common play-sets every three months when new sets release as an affordable option to building my collection.

Another affordable option for buying into new sets is to purchase the Planeswalker decks. Each of these decks includes the basic strategy of the set, some of the game's latest settings and characters and the newer mechanics.

These decks are considered starter decks, and not something that are used at a competitive level. These are for the casual and new players that are wanting to pickup a fully working deck and play right out of the box.

Throne of Eldraine offers only two Planeswalker decks this set, Oko, the Trickster and Rowan, Fearless Sparkmage.

"Oko is a shapeshifting iconoclast, uncommonly clever even for a faerie, who prefers trickery and manipulation to all-out battle. Deploy evasive creatures and augment them at crucial moments to build and unstoppable force" states the back of the Oko, the Trickster box.

Rowan, Fearless Sparkmage's boxes states, "As the daughter of a king, Rowan has trained extensively in both swordsmanship and etiquette- but she greatly prefers to solve her problems with a blade. Marshal an army of noble knights and assault your opponent with military precision."

Each package contains one full, ready-to-play 60 card deck, as well as 2 booster packs for Throne of Eldraine and a code to unlock the full deck on Magic: The Gathering Arena, which is the digital version of the game on PC. Each deck retails for about $13.

These decks contain a special foil Planeswalker and several supporting cards that are unique only to this deck, and not found in the rest of the full set.

Game play was quite good for these two decks. I chose Oko and my wife chose Rowan. While it's clear that many of these cards are unplayable outside of this deck, you will have to look beyond that and think of this as a standalone product. That said, I thought the deck synergy worked very well and they both played nicely against each other.

I was constantly countering my wife's creatures, while she was building up a strong army and leading the charge early on when she got Rowan out. Once Rowan came out, there was not much I could do to stop her. She pounded away at me while I continued to draw land after useless land and had no answers left to counter her attacks with.

Aside from my brutal beating, I found that the game play was quite fun and we really enjoyed these decks. They will be played often.

Since my wife is a casual player, I will be adding both of the Arena codes to her account so that she has more decks to play against me. The added value of the Arena codes are a really good value add to this product if you also play Arena, which we do.

After playing, we got to cracking those booster packs!

I was hoping to see at least one of the showcase cards, as I had not seen many get opened in some of the booster box openings I have been watching from some of my favorite Youtubers. I was not expecting much.

Instead, I was greeted with four showcase cards! I couldn't believe our luck! One of them is even a foil!

As far as card value goes, we pulled a few $1 cards a few $2.50 cards. The foil Planeswalkers are worth about $8 each. I was most excited to pull the showcase cards though.

Total value for each deck is:
~$19 Rowan, Fearless Sparkmage (~$9 deck + $6 booster packs + ~$4 Arena code)
~$22 Oko, the Trickster (~$12 deck + $6 booster packs + ~$4 Arena code)

We picked each one up for $12.99 at our local game store.

I would highly recommend these decks for any beginner, returning player or those that just play the occasional casual game of Magic.

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You can grab it for free from the Epic Game store until 10/10/19.
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Many players think that virtual game items have no real world value. And they're absolutely right!

The value you get from your purchased virtual items are strictly to let you enjoy the game more, be it changing the way something looks, using a more powerful item, or simply for bragging rights. That virtual item you bought brought you some kind of joy.

However, what if there was a way that you could parallel your virtual items with real world items to find a real world value?

After all, you most likely did spend real money on Magic: The Gathering Arena. Even if you did not, you can look at it as if someone gave you a large collection for free, just for playing.

Since there actually is a direct comparison to a real world product in this virtual game environment, then this makes it easy to calculate what your in game virtual items are virtually worth.

If you have not yet read my previous article on Throne of Eldraine Season Rewards and Real World Value, then check out that article HERE

While that article goes very in depth on how values are calculated, fortunately you won't need to do any math at all to figure your collection value out. All that is needed is an Arena tracker to export your collection, a quick cleanup of the data, and then you can import it into another collection system to give you the values.

Let's get started!

This is not difficult if you are somewhat computer savvy, but if you are not very technical, you may want to skip this project.

I am in no way sponsored or paid by any of the companies whose products I will be referring you to. I simply use them myself.

Things you will need:

• MTG Arena installed with an already established account
• Tracker that can export your entire collection. I use MTGArena.Pro
  • A comparison of others can be found HERE
• Something to edit a spreadsheet with, I use Google Sheets in this example.
• Notepad, or other simple text editor
• EchoMTG Account, make sure you can log into the website (Free account)

There are many trackers available for Arena.

You can find a quick table of features of the various trackers HERE to choose which one you want. Just make sure it includes a Collection Tracker and/or Browser.

I use MTGArena.PRO. It's the most powerful one of all the trackers I've tested.

For a full write-up of how to install MTGArena.Pro, click HERE (COMING SOON)

Make sure that your tracker has synced itself with its website counterpart. To check this, log into the website for your tracker and check your card collection inventory to make sure everything is showing up correctly.

Once your MTGArena.Pro client has synced itself, then you may now log into the website.
Their site is located here: https://mtgarena.promtgarena.pro

Once you log in:

• At the top of the site, click on My Arena --> Collection

An Export window will pop up, asking you to select a format to download to.

• Click on MTGGoldfish CSV

A window will pop up asking to open or save the file.

• You can either save it or go ahead and open it with a spreadsheet application.

It should have opened and/or saved as the file name "collection.csv"

Before we can import this into another system for pricing, we will need to clean up the data first. You may be asking, "But why can't I just import this into MTGGoldfish?". It is because MTGGoldfish will not let you bulk import a collection unless you pay for a premium membership. Since we want to find this out for free, we will be using another system.

• Open the collection.csv file in your favorite spreadsheet application. For the purposes of being free, I will be using Google Sheets as an example. You are free to use Excel, Libra Office or any other spreadsheet software.
  

Once the file is opened, we can see what MTGArena.Pro exported.

You should see a spreadsheet with a few columns, such as the card name, the set it is from and the quantity.

The only two columns we are concerned with are Card and Quantity.

• Delete the other columns.
• Next, you need to move the quantity column in front of the card column.
  
• Next, you can delete the header row that says Quantity and Card.
  

You should just be left with two columns, one with numbers and the other with the card names.

If you wish to sort alphabetically and remove all the basic lands, you can. You may also remove the lands later after importing it into the pricing website.

• Once completed, save this as a CSV file (Comma Separated Values).
  
• Let us call it "collection.csv"
  

We have one more cleanup step to perform.
Open collections.csv in a simple text editor, such as Notepad.

You will something like this:

Note the commas between the card names. We need to remove all of these commas using the Replace tool in Notepad.

• Click Edit--> Replace

The Replace window should open up.

• In the Find What field, type in a single comma
• In the Replace With field, type in a single space (just hit the space bar once)
• Then click the Replace All button
  

Your file should now look like this:

• Save this file as "collection.txt" and close it.

Now we need to log into EchoMTG.
EchoMTG is a collection tracker for the physical MTG card-collecting world. It tracks and bases all of its values on TCGPlayer.

Here is the address for EchoMTG: https://www.echomtg.com


The free version only allows you to import 350 cards into its collection database. But there is a cool feature called Lists/Decks that allow for unlimited cards, without adding them to your collection. This will also show you the value of this list/deck.

• On EchoMTG, on the left hand menu, click on Lists/Desks

Give your List/Deck a name in the field above
Click on the Select File button, then find where you saved your collection.txt file

• Click on the Create New List button
  

You should see a list of card names scrolling quickly by on the right hand side of the screen. This could take a minute or two depending on your internet connection and how large your collection is. Once completed, the scrolling will stop.

You can now click on your newly created list. Give it a few seconds for the card names to populate. Remember, there is probably 1000's of cards in here.

As you can see from the image above, as of this writing, my MTG Arena virtual collection is worth virtually somewhere between $1,369-$2,576.

Due to the basic lands being imported, it automatically selected some of the vintage lands, which, in total, added about 150 cards to my list, totaling about $75 in value. Therefore, I would also just subtract this from whatever final value I came up with. Basic lands in Standard have little to no value. You could add in each land you have, but it is just not worth the effort.

You could remove the basic lands from the spreadsheet earlier in the process, or once imported into EchoMTG, you can slowly click the - (minus sign) next to each of the 5 basic lands and remove them all. It all depends how tech savvy you are.

The easier option is to just mouse over each of the basic lands and see what their value is. Looking at my example image below, you can see that it EchoMTG chose to import a Fifth Edition basic Island, which is worth quite a bit more than any basic land in Standard.

For this example, multiply $.79 x 31 cards = $24.49 and subtract that from your total value.

Do this for each of the other basic lands as well.

Speaking of lands, if you have the full art basic lands for Unhinged or Zendikar,those are worth roughly $1 on average in the real world.

Figure you probably bought 24 of each of them in real life, 24 of each full art basic lands (120 cards total) is worth another $60-$120. Double this if you have both sets.

Pricing for EchoMTG is pulled from TCGPlayer. The values shown are between lowest market value and the average market value. Lowest value typically lists damaged or high play cards as well, so this may not be entirely accurate for near mint cards. Keep in mind the Average price includes those that have listings that are multiple times more than a card is worth, which can skew that number as well. You should probably just take the average of the two values for a more real world representation of what your collection is worth.

This pricing does not take your card styles into account either. Since the card styles are essentially "foils" in Arena, you can value them in this manner. Though, they now look like the extended art cards from Throne of Eldraine, so this would signifigantly increase the value over a foil.

I hope you enjoyed this article. It was certainly fun to research and write! If you would like to see more articles such as this, please leave me a comment or contact me with more ideas.