Psychic Frog’s Horizon Hideaway: Is it Worth It?

A common complaint with Magic Arena is that it’s largely remained the same piece of software since its release in 2019. Most of the features that were there from the beginning function the same way they did five years ago, and there has been little innovation on the platform in that timespan.

MTG Arena’s shaking up its in-game economy ever-so-slightly with the release of Modern Horizons 3, via something they call “Psychic Frog’s Horizon Hideaway.” That mouthful of an experiment introduces a new, temporary currency to the platform, which can be used to unlock new items from a new in-game store.

But, like anything on Arena, it’ll cost you. Let’s see if it’s worth your gems.

What Is Psychic Frog’s Horizon Hideaway?

Frogify | Illustration by Chris Seaman

Source

The weirdly-named “Psychic Frog’s Horizon Hideaway” is a temporary in-game store in MTG Arena that will be offered on Magic Arena from the release of Modern Horizons 3 (June 11, 2024) and remain available until the release of Bloomburrow (July 30, 2024).

During this time, players will receive Horizon Hideaway tickets through daily quests and daily match-wins. You can spend 2,800 gems to “unlock” the Horizon Hideaway store (a bit like spending gems to unlock the premium track of the Mastery Pass), where you can spend those tickets on various cosmetics, Arena booster packs, etc. Everything in the store is related to Modern Horizons 3.

You’ll acquire tickets even if you haven’t paid to open the store yet, which means you can put off paying the 2,800 gems until you’re certain you’ll have enough tickets to get what you want from the store.

How Do You Earn Horizon Hideaway Tickets?

Horizon Hideaway tickets are awarded for finishing daily quests and for achieving daily match-wins, up to 10 wins per day. The exact prize structure is as follows:

• 45 tickets for completing a quest. There appears to be no distinction between 500- and 750-coin quests here.
• 2 tickets per daily win for the first five wins each day.
• 1 ticket per daily win for wins #6-10.

This structure means that you’d max out at 60 tickets per day, 420 per week if you played daily.

Psychic Frog’s Horizon Hideaway Rewards

The Horizon Hideaway rewards range from avatars and depth styles to booster packs and even a Draft token! Let’s take a look at everything that’ll be available from the store:

Cosmetic Rewards

Consumable Rewards

Is Psychic Frog’s Horizon Hideaway Worth it?

Spending 2,800 gems to unlock the Psychic Frog’s Horizon Hideaway store is only worthwhile if one of the following is true: You either really value the cosmetics and are willing to pay in-game or real-world currency for them, or you value the consumable rewards and intend to play often enough to accumulate the tickets needed to purchase those items. If you spend the 2,800 gems and only play once or twice a week, you’re almost certainly not getting your money’s worth.

Cosmetics aside, this pass is only worth the 2,800 gems if the Draft token, the booster packs, and the MH3 mythic rares are all valuable to you.

The Hideaway is really only appealing for people who play a mix of Constructed formats and Arena Drafts. The player Draft token is by far the most valuable item in the shop, justifying more than half of the 2,800 gem price by itself. If you don’t Draft, there’s no way this shop’s worth your gems. The reverse is true, too. If you are a regular drafter but don’t play Timeless, Historic, Brawl, or any other MTGA format where MH3 cards will be legal, the booster packs and mythic rare cards aren’t going to appeal to you.

Let’s break it down further. The consumable items alone have the following general values:

• Player Draft token: 1,500 gems
• 8 Booster Packs: 200 gems each / 1,600 gems total
• 10 Mythic rares: Hard to put a gem value on this since you can only purchase wildcards with real-world money. However, 3,400 gems costs $20, which is also the price of 4 mythic wildcards. That makes 10 mythic wildcards roughly equivalent to 8,500 gems. However, these are restricted to mythics from Modern Horizons 3, so the exact comparison is off.

To summarize, if you’re interested in all three consumable items and think you’re going to get enough tickets to max out buying each one, it’s probably worth your 2,800 gems to do so. If even one of these items isn’t something you intend to use, save your gems for something else.

Can You Buy Everything In Psychic Frog’s Horizon Hideaway?

Let’s do some math together. Psychic Frog’s Horizon Hideaway will be open for approximately 52 days on Arena. Your daily quests should reset the day this update goes live, which means you can acquire 150 tickets on the first day, and 60 tickets for each of the remaining 51 days. That’s 3,210 total tickets available during this timeframe, if you got every possible ticket every day. Pro Tip: Always try to complete all your quests the day before a major set release, since all three reset after these updates!

The total ticket value of everything that’s available in the store comes to 2,799 tickets. 1,039 of that applies to the cosmetic items like avatars and sleeves, and the remaining 1,760 is what it would take to buy all the “practical” items, including the Draft token, the booster packs, and the mythic rare cards.

As long as you’re diligent about completing your quests without letting any go to waste, you should be able to buy all the consumables and have tickets left over for any cosmetics that appeal to you. That means you really only have to log in and play once every three days to complete your quests, that way they can fill back up and you won’t miss out on any. All the better if you’re actually winning a lot and picking up the match win tickets, too. For the record, if you finished every quest available during the time the store’s up, you’d acquire 2,430 tickets from quests alone.

And remember: You can acquire tickets even if you haven’t unlocked the Hideaway.

That means you can wait until late July to see how you’re doing on tickets before making a decision about whether to spend the gems. You should spend the 2,800 gems only once you’ve acquired the tickets necessary to buy everything you’re interested in, not before. If you’re in dire need of MH3 cards before August, you could buy the pass earlier for the boosters and mythic cards, but I’d still only recommend doing this if you’re pretty confident you’ll get the remaining tickets needed to buy the rest of what you want.

Wrap Up

Plaxcaster Frogling | Illustration by Greg Staples

It’s a little strange to see Magic Arena give us another Battle Pass style offering when they already have their Mastery Passes for that purpose, but Psychic Frog’s Horizon Hideaway seems like a perfectly fine way to opt into extra goodies from Modern Horizons 3.

Is it for everyone? No. In fact, it’s debatable whether it’s for that many people at all. But you’re not really missing out on much if you opt out of it altogether, so engage with it at your own discretion.

Assuming this performs well (and we can probably guess it will), we might expect to see more of these limited-time stores in the future. For now, I’m interested in what people have to say about this. Cool idea that you’ll be partaking in, or total cash-grab rip-off from Arena? Let me know in the comments below or over in the Draftsim Discord or on Draftsim's Twitter/X.

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