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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.
What Formats Should I Play?
The Bottom Line
Play Premier Drafts of the most recent set and build your collection with smart drafting and discipline. If you don't feel confident that you can win at least 3 games before you lose 3 games, then save your gold, practice in the constructed queues, and study to improve your draft game until you feel ready to try drafting.
If you're avoiding drafts, scroll down for advice more well suited for you.
But Why?
This entry is really about the most efficient gameplay loop for expanding your collection.
If you’re just starting out, build the best deck you can after completing the steps in Getting Started , and go to the Constructed queue of your choice (I recommend the Ranked Constructed Best of 1 queue to start). You will be matched against players whose decks have similar card quality to yours. Earn gold by winning games and completing quests.
In the opinion of this guide, the easiest and fastest way to build a collection that will eventually let you play any deck you want is to do a lot of drafting, and I go over that process in detail below. Some people have no interest in draft, though, so through some trial and error I've come up with a method to streamline the process as much as possible for the folks who only care to play with Constructed decks. If that's you, then skip down this page to the heading labeled What If I Don't Want to Draft?
If you're new to Magic or are not accustomed to drafting, then you should practice and study up before diving into the draft queues. My personal recommendation for getting better at draft specifically is to watch a Bronze to Mythic run from Jim Davis because the point of his series is to help viewers improve their limited game, but there are other streamers who do a lot of limited, or you can study data from 17lands or Untapped.gg, or come up with your own plan. But if you don't know how to draft properly, barging into the draft queues unprepared is going to be a waste of currency.
When you have enough gold (or gems) for a draft, and you feel confident enough in your play skill to approach a 50% win rate, enter an event and draft to build the best deck you can (see details about when to raredraft here – it’s probably not as often as you think.). Play through the event. Hopefully you were able to win at least 3 games, which is very close to the break even point. Anything more than that is a bonus.
If you’ve already bought the current set’s Mastery Pass, feel free to use gems for your next draft. Otherwise, save your gems. Go until you’ve earned enough gold for another draft, and repeat the pattern.
What If I Don't Want to Draft?
If this applies to you, don't worry: you can still play for free, and you might have a complete, competitive Standard deck sooner than you think. It will take you much longer to have a well rounded collection that will give you the flexibility to play almost anything you want, but in the test account that helped me develop this method, I was able to complete a fully crafted stock mono-red Prowess list three days (twelve wins) after I finished the tutorial, pictured here:
The first thing you need to do is figure out your goal. You won't be able to build every Standard deck you see, so you'll have to pick one to focus on building. Find a deck list at Untapped.gg or your favorite strategy website and import it to Arena.
I'm not a great authority on picking the right deck for you, but at the time of this writing, monored Prowess is a highly competitive deck in the Standard metagame. Because it's only one color, you won't have to spend a ton of Wildcards on rare lands.
If you want to build a deck with a multicolored mana base or a lot of other rares, I hear you, and that's a fine goal to set. I have not tested how long it should take to get there from scratch. I can tell you that, for the monored list I built, I needed 4 Mythic Wildcards, 11 Rare Wildcards, and 22 Uncommon Wildcards, and I had that only a few days after the tutorial.
Before you finish the full deck, you can get your Daily Wins by taking a mostly-complete version of that deck, with some substitutions, and go into the Play queue to get a feel for your deck.
When the deck is done and you feel comfortable enough with it to win around half of your matches, you'll want to focus as much as possible on Standard Events or Traditional Standard Events. These will be your primary sources of Gems, Packs, and Play-In Points.
Many of the entries in the guide are universally applicable whether or not you're drafting. When that isn't true, I will highlight the important differences in blue text.
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