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.
Gold, Gems, and Other Currencies
Gold and Gems are the most common currencies in Arena (other than cash, but if you want to do that, check out How to Spend Real Money)
Gold is the currency that you’re rewarded with for playing the game. You can’t buy gold with real money.
Gems are the currency that you can buy with your money, but we won’t be doing that, because you can also earn gems by playing in events (both Limited and Constructed), and you can pay for most event entry fees with the gold that you earn for playing.
There is not a consistent conversion rate between Gold and Gems, but in general, one gem is worth between 5 and 7 gold.
The following currencies are less common, but still worth mentioning:
Jump In! tokens allow you to participate in Jump In! events, where you’re given two specially constructed packs that are shuffled together and, if you want, you can play against other people who have done the same. You can also resign from the event immediately and keep the cards you’ve opened, which I’d recommend for the purposes of this guide. I haven’t found a consistent source of these tokens.
Draft tokens let you play in one Premiere draft event, which normally costs either 1500 Gems or 10,000 gold. You can acquire these through the Mastery Pass, and they’ll occasionally show up in Daily Deals.
20 Play-In Points can be used to cover the entry fee to a Qualifier Play-In event. You can earn 4 Play-In points by going undefeated (5-0 in matches) in a Traditional Standard Event, and they are sometimes included in Prerelease Bundles.
Wildcards sort of count as a currency, but there’s a whole entry dedicated to them.