Ok, earlier today I was late for work so I didn't have time to write a longer comment here, so here we go now.
So, after reading most of the comments here, I have to say, some of y'all are absolutely oblivious, completely out of your damned minds. You're talking smack about the trade system? Really? The trade system is what single-handedly made PTCGO, despite its flaws, the BEST card game client of all. You heard that right. Who gives a f*** about cosmetics. Ultimately the single most important thing you have to be able to do is to play the damn game, and PTCGO, unlike any other, allowed you to do that in the most affordable, fair, and relaxed way possible. Some of you are saying the trade system is bad because Shadow Rider costs 20 packs a pop and your random garbage and ugly rainbow Vmax is worth 1? You're completely and utterly nuts. Of course a super highly in-demand card is gonna cost more, and your rainbow Galarian Slowking Vmax that nobody wants will cost less, it's just basic common and economic sense. But you didn't have to play Shadow Rider. With the same amount of packs it would cost you to buy playsets of both SR V and SR Vmax, you could build upwards of 10 lower tier decks or 2~3 other high tier decks. For example, back when Chilling Reign came out, with the amount of packs that a single Shadow Rider Vmax was going for, you could buy like 3 Ice Riders and have another tier 1 deck for like less than a third of the price.
And don't get me started on Trainers. The trade system allowed you to get sometimes as much as like 10 cards between commons/uncommons for a single pack. A single freaking pack. You start playing day one and have nothing? No problem, spend like 10~20 packs and that would net you playsets of literally EVERY SINGLE STAPLE IN STANDARD, Trainers and special energies-wise. Plus, with time, even the biggest staples became affordable because there was an ever increasing supply of it being put into the game, for instance, Rapid Strike Urshi also used to cost like 30 packs, but when Chilling Reign Came out I saw it hit as low as 5 market price on the trades. Now with the the new "improved system", where you can't just trade into what you need, you'll have to just spend insane amounts of money to HOPEFULLY build ONE single deck of your choice. Oh, but you want to build Rapid Strike now that it's been out for a while? Well to bad, since it doesn't exist in a spontaneous market place, it essentially costs just as much to build now as it did day one when it was first released. Oh you wanna have fun and build that soon-to-rotate deck? Sorry, it costs as much to build as it costs to build the newer "hot stuff" deck of the moment...will you spend money to build that and let it go to waste?
Have you people even ever freaking played PTCGO or tried acquiring any single card, be it digitally or in real life by cracking random packs? I cracked probably more than 200 CR locked packs on PTCGO. How many Shadow Rider Vmax do I have? ZERO. I sure do have a lot of jank, but zero Shadow Riders. Do you think with the new system, the amount of packs you'll be able to buy with in-game "free currency" will be anywhere near as the amount you were able to get on PTCGO? You wish. They wanna milk you to the fullest and sell you gems and whatnot, they want you to buy stuff, they ain't giving anything substantial for free anymore. So if you wanna try to get that SR Vmax that you claim was "abusive" or whatever at 25 packs, your only option will be to crack packs bought with real money and hope you get it. Before, it cost 25 packs (today that would be what, like 15 bucks tops?) to directly get one. How many packs do you think you'll have to crack to get one, let alone a full playset? And how much money do you figure it will cost you to crack that many packs? Again, it boggles my mind how absolutely off you people are about all this.
And for some reason some of you seem to be under the impression that you'll be able to directly get the "singles" you need, I even read the head of the news again to see if I had missed something, but other than duplicate protection, there is nothing that suggests that you'll be able to directly acquire cards you actually want/need. There's still a lot of information missing, but I'd be EXTREMELY surprised if the whole system isn't just pratically a clone of Arena's model. Have any of you, babbling about how bad the trade system is, played Arena? Back when Throne of Eldraine came out I wanted to play standard, and I hate building just a single deck, it's utterly nonsense to think anyone can build a single deck and run with it a whole season without being overwhelmed by both the meta evolving week to week and by you simply getting bored to death from playing the same deck over and over, so I put a lot of money into the game so I could have playsets of a lot of stuff and play many different decks. I poured hundreds and hundreds of dollars into the game (good to note that my country's currency is worth like less than 1/5 of a dollar as of today), I had pretty much playsets of every rare in the set, but even then, I had almost none of the mythic rares. Which is something like saying I had playsets of every V but almost none of the Vmaxes or something to that effect. For a while it was fun, but then came another set and guess what? You'll have to pour another shit-ton of money to keep up, either that or content yourself with outdated decks and/or playing just a new deck and being bored after less than a week. So I saw that it was utterly impossible to keep up with it. Plus you start getting really tired, really fast of all the money grab FOMO-related stuff like those cursed "battle passes" or whatever, it's just made to make you feel like you're missing out on stuff or missing a "great deal" money-wise to keep you playing and on the grind EVEN when you're already spending money a lot. It's ridiculous.
You people have no ideia what you're wishing for, and you're unbelievably naive if you think there's any chance "feedback" from the community will be able to change any of the crucial stuff in the business model. Arena has been out for a while now and it just gets worse and worse, because at the end of the day, no matter how many players just quit playing the game, they will be making a load of money from content creators and other "whales" alone. Content creators will be all over this, they'll be static about how they have finally done what they've been asking for years. Of course, they have sponsors, fully unlocked accounts, etc, they don't have to worry about not getting bored to death because even after spending a couple hundred dollars you only have like a deck and a half. But here's the thing, I only consume content from those creators because right now I'm able to actually play the game, the second I stop being able to play it, is the second I have no more reason to consume their content. Oh well, let's see how it shapes up to be, but right now I'm just devasted by the prospects.
