TOTP revisited

Recently I've started playing TOTP again.

No doubt the pompous, compulsive yay-sayers of the forum will be just dying to remind me that I once said something like 'I'd rather rub steel wool over my eyeballs than play TOTP ever again' [citation needed], so, what's changed?

Well, the prizes, one thing! +5 unobtanium! Big Whoop! 30 more crystals if I get a perfect!! Nope, that's not the reason.

Actually, it's largely because Baral has been nerfed. Being a human being like the rest of you (no, really, I am!), I also didn't like it when Baral exploded out of nowhere and combo'd my face into a nice chianti. And as a sore loser, I didn't like the fact that my best chance of winning was to play Baral myself, and sit through those loops every single game. I particularly didn't like the way that each node featured 3 games, and I'd have to lock my PW in for all 3, so I couldn't play a more speedy Nahiri deck against easier opponents for fear of running into a Baral later on (NB: I've discovered that since 2.0 you can actually change your PW between games inside each node in TOTP... I don't know if you could do that before, it might have changed my opinion of the event. A little).

So, I started playing TOTP again, and blow me, if I'm not having some fun. As it stands now, there don't seem to be a lot of people playing it, and those there are are the people who can afford to spend 60 crystals a day on it. So the decks are of a really high standard. Couple that with the enraged and supercharged modes, and there's some real challenge here. Most times I don't get the 30 crystals for a perfect run.

Interestingly, when the Black TOTP was run without it's entrance fee this week, the standard of the decks I faced dropped dramatically; obviously far more players entered than normal. My Tezz2 SA/BTB deck, quite used to facing the mirror match in TOTP, instead fought decks featuring a Weaponcraft Enthusiast; then Shadows of the Past and Unholy Hunger; then Abundant Maw. Don't look at the card, and see if you can remember what Abundant Maw does.

So clearly, the 60 crystals entrance fee is currently acting as a significant barrier to keep players with weaker collections out. The thing is, tho, why can't I always face opponents who present a significant challenge to me in TOTP, regardless of how many low level players join? It's not like we're actually playing against each other in live PvP. Matchmaking, and Tiers, are still a problem.

Also a problem is the green node. Green planeswalkers can be divided into 2 difficulty levels: Kiora, and everyone else. Playing against anyone else with Kiora is not a challenge. Also, I'm bored out of my skull by my looping Kiora deck now, but I sure as hell am not going to lose games by playing anything else against someone else's looping Kiora deck. Standard is most likely going to cut Kiora's balls off a bit, but she'll still be way OP in Legacy (what are we calling Not-Standard? Vintage doesn't seem right to me, what with the cards not dating back to 1993, so I'm going with Legacy). Actually, even in Standard, my prediction is that she'll still be head and shoulders above all the other green planeswalkers... Baral remains OP, for a start, and she'll get better use out of the insanely broken Rishkar's Expertise than any other green walker will. Blue draws cards, don't you know.

Is the entry fee of 60 crystals worth 20 unobtanium and a booster? No, probably not. I reckon my stack of crystals probably hit 0 when AKH is released, and then I'll have to take a long hard look at whether I can afford to play TOTP any more when I need to build up 650 crystals to buy new planeswalkers. I have yet to be rudely awakened to the fact unobtanium will be practically the only way to get my hands on mythics in the future, but that does not mean that 20 unobtanium is worth anything. Hell, if unobtanium was valuable, maybe I'd have spent some of my enormous stash of it already on Elite packs or Mythic boosters. Who knows if there will Elite pack with Amonkhet Innovations in them to buy soon. D3/Hibernum conspicuously failed to answer this question:
http://forums.d3go.com/discussion/comment/679540/#Comment_679540