Welcome to Four Daily Wins, your one stop reference for how to get the most bang for your buck in the Magic: The Gathering Arena Free to Play Experience.
All About Wildcards
The Bottom Line: Prioritize good multicolored rare lands when crafting. Use The Vault to convert Common and Uncommon wild cards to rares.
But How?
First, a quick explanation of how Wild Cards are earned. There are a few different ways to get them:
1. When you open packs in your inventory, sometimes one of the cards in that pack will be replaced with a Wildcard of the same rarity.
2. When you open a pack in your inventory, two progress trackers are advanced (visible in the top right corner of the Packs screen). Both trackers fill up together and don’t compete with each other.
a. The tracker on top shows you how close you are to a Rare or Mythic Wildcard (every 6 packs you open get you a rare Wildcard, except the 24th, which gives you a Mythic).
b. The tracker on bottom shows you how close you are to an Uncommon wildcard (every 6 packs you open will get you one).
3. You can buy them for real money, but it’s a bad deal.
4. You can redeem your Vault Progress, explained in more detail below.
Inevitably, you’re going to acquire more than 4 copies of a card on Arena. When that happens, the extra copy will go away and you’ll receive a reward in its place. If the card was rare or mythic, you’ll get a few gems. If it’s common or uncommon, progress will be added to your Vault.
The Vault is a percentage counter, but it can go beyond 100. You can spend 100 points of Vault progress to receive 3 Uncommon, 2 Rare, and 1 Mythic Wildcard.
Most players tend to accumulate more Common and Uncommon wild cards than they’ll ever need. If this happens to you, wait for a new set to release. On the day it comes out, craft as many commons and uncommons as you can (I recommend leaving 30 Common and 30 Uncommon Wildcards in your inventory, just in case). That way, when you start drafting, most of your picks will immediately contribute to your Vault total, effectively allowing you to convert lower quality Wildcards into better ones.
If you’re undecided about what to craft first, it’s hard to go wrong with rare dual lands. You’ll be able to play them in deck after deck until they rotate, and you’ll have more flexibility in your constructed deck choices.
It’s worth noting that, because so many rare lands are required to build most competitive decks, rare wildcards are the biggest bottleneck of the four. It’s worth being a little more discerning before spending your Rares (as opposed to Mythics, which are often more abundant).
One more tip about Wildcards: if Wizards bans a card from any format that’s on Arena, you will receive a free Wildcard for each copy of that card in your collection when the ban is implemented. There is usually a short window after a ban announcement when you can craft the banned card(s). This is like getting free cards, which can still be used in the formats where the card is not banned.