How did you do your Platinum grind?

BigMao

I got to Platinum tier for White by repeatedly playing Nissa in Heroic Encounters (the first one where they don't start with Supports or creatures). I think it took about 10 hours total to go from silver to platinum, and I don't recall it being too bad. I mastered all of my White mythic and rare cards, and a good fraction of colorless mythic/rare cards as well as white uncommon cards.

So how did you do your grind to Platinum? Did you discover any interesting cards or combos?

shteev

Mostly working through the later story modes with dual colored planeswalkers collecting the crystals I could never be bothered to farm before.

Yvendros

i'm working on it currently. I just finished red (5 pts short of platinum).

I just choose a low lvl planeswalker for the color i'm working on. I throw in all of my unmastered cards, mostly cheap mana, a few expensive ones. Lvl 20 pw seems to be a good spot to be.

combos? i remember running in to a lot of cool combos. all of which i've forgotten... i don't think they were super viable though.

Crimmy

Why, at this point, would anyone attempt to move into platinum on purpose? The rewards for events may be very slightly better, but the difficulty level is so much higher.

I'm staying in silver as long as possible. I rarely see many mythic heavy decks in nodes events, and getting a top 5 reward (mythic, Saheeli) can be done with a few losses. Plus, easier matches = more wins = higher coalition ranking, as the coalitions aren't separated into silver/gold/plat.

Is there something I'm missing?

shteev

Crimmy wrote:

Why, at this point, would anyone attempt to move into platinum on purpose? The rewards for events may be very slightly better, but the difficulty level is so much higher.

I'm staying in silver as long as possible. I rarely see many mythic heavy decks in nodes events, and getting a top 5 reward (mythic, Saheeli) can be done with a few losses. Plus, easier matches = more wins = higher coalition ranking, as the coalitions aren't separated into silver/gold/plat.

Is there something I'm missing?

You're absolutely right, but I didn't come here to be in Silver Tier

tm00

Crimmy wrote:

Why, at this point, would anyone attempt to move into platinum on purpose? The rewards for events may be very slightly better, but the difficulty level is so much higher.

I'm staying in silver as long as possible. I rarely see many mythic heavy decks in nodes events, and getting a top 5 reward (mythic, Saheeli) can be done with a few losses. Plus, easier matches = more wins = higher coalition ranking, as the coalitions aren't separated into silver/gold/plat.

Is there something I'm missing?

I can win 80%-95% of the games of platinum ( depending on what the pool of possible opponents is) , but I don't really have time to play 35 games a days, so I'm just taking the better progression rewards.

10/10 would take a bunch of good stuff for sporting a 45% win rate again.

Irving

Grinding up to Gold was 2/3 fun, 1/3 drudgery. It was a lot of fun to have an excuse to put together combos and themes that you *know* aren't quite good enough, but cool to watch happen. (The Zada + buffs deck, for one, or the Starfield of Nyx + a million supports deck.) And once in a while something would surprise you with how good it was. It's very efficient to start with a couple of key rares/mythics and build a shell around them with interchangeable commons/uncommons, so that you can actually have 5-6-7 cards in your deck at a time that are being mastered. I did that with the zombie deck and Diregraf Colossus/Prized Amalgam (just had to deal with the crashes until they fixed it, but they weren't more than occasional).

Grinding to Platinum was more like 1/4 fun, 3/4 drudgery. I started doing the same thing, but most of the viable cards were gone and before long I just had to run 8 good cards and swap out two useless ones constantly, or go all in on a really iffy deck concept and accept a high loss rate. I guess there was a certain novelty value in beating down with a 12/12 Llanowar Empath or something.

If the deck is no fun to play and you're just trying to level up, then yeah, do the easiest Heroic Encounters, which give the most points toward mastery, and you might as well farm the story objectives for crystals while you're at it (but now that events make crystals so much easier to get, it's not as important). I did a lot of my leveling in Quick Battles, which take twice as long to master cards but which have a lot more fun variety.

So far there'd be no purpose in leveling more than three colors to Platinum (since Terrors in the Shadows uses three colors, and if any one of those is in Platinum you'll be in that tier), but I did all five just to be completionist. I took my time with the last couple, though. Definitely feeling ready to drift away from the game again, since it's frustrating to see cool decks but have no viable way to get the cards to build them - the only good way to get mythics now is to be in a top coalition, and I don't want to have to commit to the grind. But the mastery was a smart addition and gave many hours of fun.

madwren

I mastered all my cards by doing the early Heroics, primarily Nissa. I'd build myself a core shell of 4 cards, but the other 6 would rotate as they were mastered. I find having a reliable core downplayed the frustration of playing with incredibly weak cards by making them largely superfluous.

At times, though, I found a lot of very enjoyable interactions with little-used cards and combos.

EDHdad

I achieved Platinum in all 5 colors by spamming heroic mode, Gideon. I put 2-3 creature removal spells into each deck, and then the other 7-8 cards were unmastered.

bk1234

Why on Earth would I want to go to Platnium??

majincob

bken1234 wrote:

Why on Earth would I want to go to Platnium??

It's where all the cool kids are.

Rootbreaker

Also, you get more crystals and runes in each event, assuming you can handle the competition.

BigMao

Right - because I'm not able to put in the time to actually win any competitions, I prefer to have more challenging matches and better progression rewards.

HunMike

I went platinum becouse the slightly better rewards and i'd say it's worth it for that alone. Those narrow additions to the fixed rewards earned me rughly a big box since then. Compared to my newbie days (2 BB in the first couple months) it is a difference.

Another addition was that here in platinum i run into optimized decks way more often, which make the game a lot less like grinding. There is on average 1 to 3 matches in every event where i'm on a brink of losing becouse it's perpared against my current color. It is way more satisfactory when i can overcome those ones. Not to mention i picked up a few ideas too.

edit: I made most of my progress with heroic Liliana 1 and 3. At first, i too revolved around 2-3 core OP cards but i switched to full inferior decks lately just for the challenge (and the lols) to work with the limited card pool.

bk1234

majincob wrote:

bken1234 wrote:

Why on Earth would I want to go to Platnium??

It's where all the cool kids are.

Ha! But then I can't play Gunbunny, Killwind and Kiora1 on repeat.

No fun in that.

Morphis

I grinder only to get gold heavily.
It's was unpleasant.

Then I did not grind to platinum until last few points(like last 50).

Starting to regret it.
I wanted a little more challange but platinum basically melded my two most hated things: terror in the shadow random enrage loss and Olivia.

In platinum a cascade Olivia with some other creature can basically almost(or outright) kill you.
So my hatred toward **** is increase by Olivia being in almost every red deck I face.
It's a lethal combination....

Fiddler

Origins Chapter 2, Part 1.

You can grind any set of un-mastered cards against the first battle, as long as you are using a high level PW. Works like a charm. Battles are fast.

THEMAGICkMAN

So how long did it take you to get the cards to hit platinum? How many mythics did you have to master to get there? I'm currently in gold for green and working on getting red and white there, but I don't have enough cards yet. However the fact I've been playing for little over a month may have something to do with it. So far I just played the origins chapter 2 battle 1 to get to gold. I reckon I can handle platinum as I'm winning 90% or more of my games in gold

buggyracer

I have made Platinum in all 5 colors. It took awhile; I mostly built decks that were 6-7 unmastered and 3-4 mastered to keep things competitive, especially once I had mastered all of the useful supports. I mostly achieved it via quick battles, although I did repeat some low-level 'story' stuff at the end just to get over the hump.

I'm glad I did it, because it forced me to try new combos and I found some unexpected cool stuff. Of course, I found a lot of stuff that was just as useless as I expected

I agree that the prizes aren't that much of an upgrade; however, with Sorin and Kiora in particular I typically win 90-95% of my platinum event matches. I'm missing a few key bombs in the other colors.

EDHdad

So how long did it take you to get the cards to hit platinum? How many mythics did you have to master to get there?

All cards generate mastery at the same rate on a per-game basis.

In Story Mode, Heroic level it takes:

16 wins to master a Mythic, which nets 16 mastery points.
8 wins to master a Rare, which nets 8 mastery points.
4 wins to master an uncommon, which nets 4 mastery points
2 wins to master a common, which nets 2 mastery points.

If a card is 2-colored, it gives those points to both colors.

If a card is colorless, it gives 1/2 as many points to all colors.

If you've only been playing for a month, you might not have enough cards to get Platinum. But it isn't just because you don't have enough Mythics. You also might not have enough commons, uncommons and rares.