Authentic new player experience

Narcoticsagent

All the conversations happening about Greg's cascades and skill vs collection size makes me want to start and alt account and see how I do. I am 100% on skill trumps collection. 

My question for the forums is this: what if any amount of money would I be allowed to spend to get an authentic new player experience? Would VIP ruin the experience for me? 

Another question is, what win record or results would I have to achieve to demonstrate that skill trumps collection?

Thank you in advance for any feedback.

jtwood

Buy the new player kit. That’s all. 

God speed. 

Mburn7

Yeah, I'd agree with @jtwood

No VIP, just the new player bundle (and maybe 1 or 2 other bundle offers).

If you don't give up during the tutorial lets see how it goes

madwren

I don't think you need to be completely F2P, because that isn't realistic. I suspect many newcomers will be tempted to speed up the process a bit. VIP is completely viable, because even if you're opening non-dupes, the chances of you getting a useful card are still low. 

ih8regin

I say spend zero, not even the starter pack, although it's a likely purchase for a large subset of new players.  I used tutorials to acquire my initial card pool with what to enter events to get me bootstrapped. Nothing too fancy, no removals as well, then got em pulled via daily/6h packs.

Larz70

I would be curious how long this would take but a good test of skill vs collection would be to quickly get to platinum and see how well you do in ToTP.

Since it would probably take some time to do that, while you are in the lower tiers, one way to test your skill would be to see how high you rank in PvP events (ideally, you'd want to always come out on top) and PvE events (what level boss do you start to struggle?).  Also, how quickly can you beat the heroic encounters?

I would agree with madwren that going F2P is not realistic.  In fact, if you stumble on some new ways on how to snipe the most useful cards early on (in addition to buying Olivia and Drowner for under $5 if they're available, Basic VIP for $5 a week for a steady stream of 10 guaranteed new cards, etc), this would go a long way in helping new players get a head start.

Thanks for doing this.  Good luck and I hope you don't get sick of the grind and start hating the game.  lol.  One way I would look at this is like a boss rush mode in adventure games where you try to complete all of story mode and heroic encounters as fast as you can.  One month?  Weeks?  A matter of days?  I think this would really show skill (not to mention dedication and just having a lot of time to burn).

madwren

Yeah, and it's worth mentioning that for the first three years, they didn't sell singles for cheap like they do now. Well, small bundles, but you know, when you buy the Drowner package, you're just buying it for Drowner.

The community asked them to sell GOOD cards for reasonable prices for a very long time. It's a shame that it took them so long to start doing so, but I'm glad to see it. It really does help  mitigate the fact that so many Legacy cards will be useless. 

ZergKawaii

You can take VIP, it gives you added benefits like extra deck slots that would be tough to do without after using them for so long especially with the lower number of PWs early on.

Since this is about skill vs collection, perhaps you can refrain from buying card sets and just play with what you get organically playing the events, opening packs, etc .

I think victory will be getting perfect score in any PvP event in gold / plat (depending on how hardcore you want to get).

BTW join some other coalition as a newbie and work your way up coalition rewards too.

Please do post your progress.

morgue427

lot of legacy wont be useless i dont think, if drowner is all you have pretty sure you will use the heck out of it until something better gets pulled, but their is better cards to be had but an expensive old one still works good until you have them

greenmeanie

Feel free to spend what you want.  If it were me  doing this, I would not do vip.  Kinda feels like cheating.  Quicker access to better cards than trying to see if your skill is better than having a large collection.  I never spent a dime here and I have been grinding this out for over 3 plus years.

morgue427

skill will always win if you can outsmart greg which isnt hard except just after an update you can figure a way to beat most things even meta. mostly it is building good solid decks with proper creature/ spell/ support ratios. heck even how you match gems, i mean sometimes taking off color matches to prevent greg from getting on color matches, koth and elespeth, mana starving them can win the battle

Narcoticsagent

Thank you for all the replies. I think there are probably a few different new player experiences. The whale is going to have a very different time than the FtP person. I think what I will do spend what I'd likely spend if I really was just starting out. That would be Master VIP and nothing else. 

morgue427

up to you, good luck will still take a while to get back up to a usable amount of card to be competitive and way more grind than i would want to do again. lol

Pantagruel

Starting from zero is capable; You should be able to win RT every time - it might take a few extra games but many times people field pretty random decks there because of mastery. There are plenty of easy PvEs in rotation and even the hard PvEs have easy levels.

RT and TG decks are often made from jank, although you will lose sometimes. Low PvE levels are very achievable for the novice.

I'd advise buying the 120 jewel Elite packs. Experienced players avoid them like plague because they want guaranteed non-dupes, but if you have less than a quarter of the rares already, I'd say they're worth it because of the good chance of a mythic and slight chance of a MP.

Right now is a good time for start a new account as you can leap into ZvE at the last second for some snacks.