Thoughts about how to spend Mana Orbs

FindingHeart8 said:

hmmm I wonder if in a while after booster crafting is released, I'm going to be facing a lot of decks with the same staple cards

we probably will. mtg games tend to gravitate to similar decks for everyone that has the cards to build them, until new better cards are released to supplant them. 

I will complete my origins set and move on from there. Then again it looks like origins will maybe rotate out so maybe I should just hold on to my orbs and wait for discounted crafting. I’m already doing alright without the cards I don’t have. 

The thing about "facing decks with similar builds and cards" that people keep mentioning is that it means you don't have to worry as much about what you might be facing, if that really does end up coming to pass. The problem I do see with this is mostly that it could lead to a boring meta, as more and more people start building decks the same way. What I don't see as problematic is the difficulty level. There are viable strategies for facing all sorts of decks. No deck is truly "unbeatable", especially with how dumb the AI is. If people really do start playing the same deck as everyone else, then that will minimize the level of unpredictability you can expect.

Oh, you're matched up against Dovin Baan? Welp, time to sideboard the support destruction.

Also, I think the majority of people who stand to gain from booster crafting are here on the forums, and over on Facebook and Reddit, and they probably comprise a minority of the total player base. I wouldn't be the least bit surprised if most active players lacked the foresight or knowledge to start saving duplicates early this year when crafting was first hinted at by Hibernum. So I also don't think many people will be in a good position to truly take advantage of what this update will offer.

I'm lucky for a number of reasons. I had plenty of warning about this (I'll be getting just over 140K orbs upon conversion). I have a pretty great collection, with 89/184 mythics, 273/309 rares, 463/465 uncommons, all commons, and many of those mythics and rares are top-tier cards. And finally, the gaps that do exist in my collection are small enough that I can reasonably target everything I actually want right now without breaking the bank.

Most people won't be able to make similar claims, which I think will minimize the amount of similarity that we'll see, at least at the beginning. As time goes on, sure, more people will gather more of the important cards, and things might level out. But that's where the constant flow of new sets and cards (one of the greatest aspects of MTG is this continuous diversity) will come into play. Those new cards will keep the game fresh and "alive". And since Oktagon has had the foresight to charge us more to craft these new sets, I think that will still ensure some degree of diversity as the game progresses.