The Ultimate Guide to The MTG Arena Economy

Last updated on July 23, 2024

Hit the Mother Lode | Illustration by Diego Gisbert

Magic: The Gathering is a wonderfully complex game, and MTG Arena adds all the trappings of free-to-play video games on top. Its economy can be a bit intimidating and overly complex, above all if you're not used to how F2P games and their many currencies and resources (gems, gold, wildcards) work.

But worry none – things are fairly simple and straightforward once you dig into it, and I’m here to provide some solid rules of thumb that’ll help you quickly determine what you should buy with which currency, depending on your preferred formats and playstyle.

Let's begin!

How Does the MTG Arena Economy Work?

Currency Converter | Illustration by Sean Murray

There are several currencies you can use in Arena: cold, hard cash, plus two in-game currencies, gems and gold. Their conversion rate depends on what you're buying: There are things that are optimal to buy with cash, others with gems, and others with gold. There are also tokens that serve to gain entrance to some events and wildcards, which is Arena's crafting system.

If having so many currencies with varying conversion rates sounds overly complex and convoluted, it's that way on purpose. To put it plainly and bluntly: Free-to-play video games are designed that way, to obscure a bit how much things cost in-game when you try to convert to real-world, hard-earned cash.

That's why the entry fee for most Arena events when you pay in gems (MTGA's premium currency) is a multiple of 15 – usually 750 or 1500 gems –  instead of making things simpler and making it a multiple of 10. The math is made more complicated on purpose to nudge you towards not making the comparison.

Here are a few conversion rates to keep in mind:

• 200 gems are worth around $1, assuming you buy the best-value gem bundle.
• 200 gems are worth 1,000 gold when buying most things on the MTG Arena Store.
• You get a 25% discount if you pay an event entry fee with gems – that's to say, 150 gems are worth 1,000 gold when paying for an event.

To get into the nitty-gritty, let's start with the most powerful card in all MTG: your credit card. There are three things you can buy directly with cash:

• Gems, which are the in-game premium currency and let you buy everything in MTGA that you can't buy with cash.
• Wildcards, which you can use to “buy singles“, so to speak.
• Bundles that contain a variety of goodies, from gems to packs to cosmetics to event tokens.

You can buy gems with cash or you can earn gems as a reward for paid events.

With gems, you can in turn buy:

• Packs from the MTGA Store.
• A wide array of cosmetics, also from the Store.
• The entry fee for paid events (Draft, Sealed, Constructed and events for all formats in Arena – there are really a ton of them!).
• The Mastery Pass, which is MTGA's battle pass.

Last but not least, gold is MTGA's F2P currency – you can’t buy it (neither with cash nor with gems), but you can earn it as you play and complete daily quests and rack up daily wins. Occasionally you'll see deals in the Store where you can “buy” gold as a one-time purchase, in which you spend 50 gold to get 550 gold. It's like a gift from Wizards, and makes it a good habit to check the store's deals each time you log in. Gold can buy you pretty much everything that gems can buy, with two notable exceptions: the Mastery Pass, and the entry to Sealed events (those are gems-only).

Save for the occasional cosmetic, most of your gold and gems go toward packs and/or entry fees for events.

As a rule of thumb of how to spend your gold, gems, and/or cash:

• Spending your gold and gems in entry fees for events is the most efficient, albeit also the slowest way to build your collection – events give you more cards per gems/gold in the long run.
• Buying Arena boosters from the store is much faster but less efficient – in the long run you'll get fewer cards per gold/gem spent when compared to events, but you'll get them much faster.
• Buying wildcards directly with cash is the lightning-fast, yet very expensive way to get exactly the cards you want.

How Do Wildcards Work?

If you've played other online CCGs, wildcards are fairly intuitive: They’re MTGA's crafting system.

This system may be new to you if you're coming from tabletop. In simple terms: We get to print Magic cards in Arena (and these aren’t like proxies that you print at home; these are totally real, and legal to use)!

Wildcards are what you use to “print” new cards. They come in the same four rarities that MTG cards do (common, uncommon, rare, and mythic), and you can spend one wildcard to craft/”print” any one card of the same rarity.

So, how do we acquire wildcards in MTG Arena?

There are three main ways. As noted, one way is to purchase wildcards directly from the shop with cold, hard cash.

If you go down this route, wildcards are pretty similar to buying singles in paper Magic: You buy the wildcards, then redeem them for the exact card you need. Personally, I don't recommend buying wildcards this way – but if you're in a hurry and know exactly what cards you need, the Wildcard Bundles will get you those cards ASAP.

The second way to get wildcards, and by far the most common, is by opening Arena booster packs. You can buy packs with either 200 gems or 1,000 gold from the store or earn them in a variety of ways.

No matter how you got it or which set it's from, each Arena booster you open contains eight cards and advances your Wildcard Track progress – every six packs you earn an uncommon and a rare wildcard. The mythic wild card shows up after four rounds of rare wildcards. You'll see this Wildcard Track every time you go to the “Packs” tab.

The wildcard track progress is 100% deterministic – you'll advance one pip per pack you open.

Packs may also contain wildcards. Unlike the wildcard track, these are random – you can check all the details in WotC's official article about Drop Rates, and here's what’s provided:

That's why I don't recommend buying the wildcards bundle. For a quick comparison:

• Spending $30 bucks on wildcard bundles gets you 4x rare wildcards and 4x mythic wildcards.
• Spending $30 bucks buying gems (at the best rate) and then buying packs gets you 5x rare and 1x mythic wildcard (from the wildcard track), plus you have good odds of finding another rare and another mythic inside the packs, plus all the actual cards you get from the packs. And if you bought packs from the latest set, you also get one Golden pack (which also advances the wildcard track!).

By the way: Wildcards work for all sets, no matter which pack they came from. If you find a rare wildcard in a Streets of New Capenna pack, you can use it to craft any rare you want, from any set available in MTG Arena. And you can save as many wildcards as you want, in case there's nothing you want to craft right now.

And a neat little feature: Arena packs have a duplicate-protection system that makes sure that you never open a rare or mythic that you have a full playset of until you have all the set's cards of that rarity (once you have all the rares from that set, extra rares turn into 20 gems; extra mythics turn into 40 gems).

If you spend your wildcards crafting a playset of rares from a given set, you don't need to worry about finding that card when you crack your next pack from said set – the duplicate protection system makes sure you get a different rare until you’re set-complete.

Gold vs. Gems

From the point of view of spending them, gems and gold work similarly: Pretty much everything you can buy with gems you can buy with gold, too. The two notable exceptions are the Mastery Pass and Sealed events – those you can only pay for with gems, not gold.

There's one important caveat, though: For most events, if you pay the entry fee with gems you get a 25% discount when comparing with the conversion rate for buying packs.

For example:

• On the Arena Store, you have to pay either 200 gems or 1,000 gold per pack. If you want to buy 10 packs, it's either 2,000 gems or 10,000 gold,
• But when paying for entry fees for most events, like a Traditional Draft, note that instead of 2,000 it's either 1,500 gems or 10,000 gold.

There are a couple of events that are exceptions to this rule (for example the Arena Open; you get no discount there if you pay with gems), but by and large, the rule of thumb is:

• When buying from the store, pay with gold – 200 gems are worth 1,000 gold.
• When paying an event's entry fee, check if you get a discount (i.e. check if you're paying 150 gems, rather than 200, for every 1,000 gold). If you do, pay gems.

Spending is of course the best part… but how about the hard part? How do you get gold, since you can't buy it with cash or gems?

Time to head for the gold mines: daily wins, and daily quests!

Vets of other F2P games are probably familiar with similar systems, but it may be a bit of a head-scratcher for those used to paper Magic and with less video gaming experience. Let's start with the gist of it:

• For all practical purposes, Arena's sources of gold are daily quests and daily wins (there are other sources, but they’re very rare and overall don't amount to much).
• Daily Wins are exactly what they sound like: Win games, earn gold. The first win of the day gives you 250 gold, the second and third give you 100 gold each, and there are diminishing returns from there up to your 15th win of the day – then this gold vein dries up.
• Daily Quests come in two values (500 gold, and 750 gold); you get a new quest every day, you can have a maximum of three active quests, and you can reroll one quest per day (as in, you get to reroll any one quest, but only one reroll per day).

While daily wins ask you to win, daily quests ask you to perform a specific action – the majority of quests are about playing or casting cards of some specific color pair, but there are also quests that ask you to play lands, spend mana, kill enemy creatures, etc. You can advance all active quests at the same time, which saves a bit of grind: In the example below, I could clear all three of my quests by playing either a Blue-Green, or a Green-Red deck.

As a small tip, you should always use your daily re-roll on a 500-coin quest if you can. Even if that quest is something you can complete easily, you always have the chance of upgrading a 500-coin quest into a 750-coin quest once per day, with the failcase that it just rerolls into a different 500-coin quest instead. The 750-coin quests are not significantly harder, so get into this practice and you'll earn more coins over time. The opposite is true, too: Never reroll a 750-coin quest, because there's a good chance it downgrades to 500 coins.

And how about gems? As it happens, you can earn gems, too!

Most events with an entry fee give you some gems as reward – not all, though, so make sure to check the reward track (in some rare cases you only get gold, packs, and/or cosmetics, but not gems.

As you may remember, a Traditional Draft gives you 1,000 gems and 3 packs if you win two matches, and 2,500 gems and 6 packs if you win three matches.

To recap:

1. You get gold from fulfilling daily quests, and accruing daily wins.
2. You use gold to either buy booster packs from the store, or pay the entry fee for events.
3. Most events reward you with booster packs and gems.

Gems are the only currency you can buy the Mastery Pass with, and they’re the optimal way to pay for more events (it's more efficient than entering events with gold).

Going Infinite in Limited to Earn Gems

You may have noted that a Traditional Draft's entry fee is 1,500 gems, and if you go 3-0 the reward is 2,500 gems.

In other words, enough to draft again and increase your hoard by 1,000 gems.

This is true for most events, by the way, both Limited and Constructed: The rewards for doing well exceed the entry fee.

“Going infinite” is slang for “being so good at the game that, on average, I earn more gems than I spend.” A small handful of players can pull this off consistently, but the win rate required is very high: North of 68%. So, you know, not something average players can set as a realistic short-term goal!

But don't let those insanely high win rates discourage you – the good news is that as long as you perform a bit above average, Arena Drafts are better value than buying packs directly (in the sense that you’ll complete your collection faster).

Equally important, events are a way to convert gold to gems. If you've run out of gems and would rather not spend more money in the game, paying entry fees with gold and accruing rewards in gems is the only way to rebuild your gem stash.

Which, as noted, is the only currency the store accepts for buying the Mastery Pass.

Are Mastery Passes Worth It?

The Mastery Pass is Magic Arena's version of a Battle Pass – a system that rewards consistent, daily play.

As with most Battle Pass systems in other games, the Master Pass has two reward tracks: the free track, and the premium track.

As you play, you accrue experience points (XP), and as you do your tracks gain levels. Once you reach that level, you gain the reward from the free track; if you've bought the Mastery Pass, you also get the reward from the premium track.

So, is the Mastery Pass worth it?

Depends on which formats you enjoy, and how much you play.

• If you're interested in Standard packs and play at least a few times per week, then it's a fairly good deal.
• If you enjoy both Standard and Draft and play daily, the Mastery Pass is the best deal on Arena outside of the welcome bundles, and it's not even close.
• If you only care about non-Standard Constructed formats (like Timeless or Historic) and dislike drafting, then no – the Mastery Pass probably isn’t a good idea because it rewards Standard packs (which you don't have much use for) and a Draft token (which you don't enjoy playing).
• If you play infrequently (just once a week or less) you probably won't finish the tracks and the Pass won't be worth it.

Let's take a look at what the MTG Arena Mastery Pass for Outlaws of Thunder Junction contains if you complete it:

• Bucketloads of cosmetics.
• 20x packs, all from Standard sets: 4x Outlaws of Thunder Junction, 4x Murders at Karlov Manor, 4x The Lost Caverns of Ixalan, 4x Wilds of Eldraine, 4x March of the Machine.
• 10x random mythic cards from Outlaws of Thunder Junction, plus a playset of Gonti, Canny Acquisitor, Olivia, Opulent Outlaw, Yuma, Proud Protector, and Stella Lee, Wild Card.
• 1x Draft token.
• 4,000 gold.
• 1,200 gems.

Let's look at just the last three items (the token, gold, and gems):

• You get 1,200 gems back.
• 4,000 gold is equivalent to 600 gems, if we use the 150:1000 conversion rate from entry fees.
• The Draft token is worth 1,500 gems (since that's the entry fee to a player Draft).
• 1,200 + 600 + 1,500 = 3,300 gems.

And as you can see, the Mastery Pass costs 3,400 – in other words, you get 20x packs and lots of cards and all the cosmetics for just 100 gems, assuming you complete the Mastery Pass. Best deal in Arena!

Best MTG Arena Deals

The MTGA store offers many deals and bundles, some evergreen, some only available for a limited time (and sometimes even some weird battlepass-adjacent reward tracks like the Psychic Frog’s Horizon Hideaway).

The absolute best deal on the MTG Arena store, by a huge margin, is the one-time Welcome Bundle. You can buy it only once per MTG Arena account; it's perfectly possible to play MTGA without spending a dime, but if you're considering spending any money at all, the Welcome Bundle is the best.

The Adventure Bundle, the Planeswalker Bundle, and the Spark Bundle are also one-time deals. The first two are excellent value; the Spark Bundle not so much, unless you really value the wildcards.

All these one-time deals stick around until you purchase them, so there's no hurry if you're undecided.

Gem bundles are also always available, and you can buy them as many times as you want. It goes without saying that, if possible, you should buy the 20,000-gem bundle since you get the most gems per buck.

A few weeks before each major set launches on Arena, WotC offers a handful of preorder bundles, including a Mastery Pass bundle – this is a slightly better price than paying for the bundle with gems and there's often some extra goodies. These preorder bundles must be purchased with real-world currency, so if the Pass's rewards appeal to you, try to grab this pass before the set releases, because the bundle will leave the store.

Last, and in my opinion least, you have the Wildcard Bundle – I personally don't recommend it, but if you'd like to go down that route you can buy as many wildcards as you can afford.

Tracking Your Collection with Arena Tutor

Of course, one of the best ways to inform your decisions on what to purchase is knowing what you already have. Arena Tutor is a free and easy-to-use add-on that can help you track your collection, give you valuable statistics on your games, and provide AI-driven insight into MTG Arena Drafts. If you need that extra push or guidance during your games, we highly recommend Arena Tutor for all your Limited, Constructed, and collection-tracking needs.

Wrap Up

Curse of Opulence | Illustration by Kieran Yanner

And that would be it for this introductory guide to Magic Arena's economy!

As we saw, the game's economy can be a bit convoluted at times (and it's designed that way on purpose, to disconnect in-game fees from real-life prices), but it's fairly straightforward once you get the hang of it:

• If you spend money on MTG Arena, start with the one-time Welcome Bundles – best value by far.
• If the current season is about to finish and the next MTG set will drop soon, see if some pre-order bundles interest you. These pre-order bundles will be gone the moment the incoming set arrives, so keep that in mind.
• Don't buy the wildcards bundles unless you know exactly what you need, and unless you need it right now.
• Use gold to buy things in the store.
• Use gems to pay for events and the Mastery pass.

I hope you've enjoyed this mechanical deep dive, and if you have comments or questions, please drop a comment below, or stop by the Draftsim Discord for a chat.

And good luck out there!