f13.net

Well it seems finally someone at WotC has begun to understand the wants of some of the community who are looking for lower cost options but still relavent formats.
This announcement covers it in detail (http://www.wizards.com/Magic/Magazine/Article.aspx?x=mtg/daily/other/07242012d) but the big new concept is "phantom booster packs"

Basically, for Thursday night magic online events, you now pay 5 tix no matter what type of event (constructed, draft, sealed) but the booster draft and sealed gives you phantom packs that you draft and play matches with, but are NOT added to your collection when the event is done.  You can still win real booster prizes, but it basically means they cut the price for a booster draft from $14 to $5 if you dont care about keeping cards.  For those of us who love draft but have no desire to assemble a standard collection or play the trade game afterwards, this is a very welcome change.  Plus it changes the nature of the draft too, so instead of forcing yourself to rare drafting for money when you open a pack 3 bomb, you can just concentrate on making a good deck to play.

They also added new player event tixs and new player phantom sealed and draft that cost 1 new player tix (again they supply phantom boosters) to get new people into limited formats with no risk.

Step in the right direction wotc.  Still hate your new client though :)

Nice. I haven't tried the new client yet but it certainly looks nicer than the old one, what about it don't you like?

They need this as an option for every draft.

A few months back i was beta testing it and not only did it not add a single improvement that I could find, it was also buggy as hell.  I think in 10+ trys and just regular games, drafts, sealed etc i was never able to complete a full 3 game match due to crashes and bugs.  You name it, it didnt work right - deck construction, collection filters, chat channels, games themselves.  And these were issues known for weeks/months.  My first post on the beta boards was basically how shocked i was at the state it was in consifering how long it had been in development.  I think most testers got so frustrated they gave up (i know i did).  They were even giving booster packs to the real game away to testers who participated in certain events and they still couldnt get enough people on.  Think about that - people refusing to play free magic b/c the client was that bad.

Who knows, maybe they "Miracle Patched TM" it.  :awesome_for_real:

Sounds like smart changes, everything you said was spot on.

Too bad each new client is worse than the last.

God dammit.  How hard is it for them to just steal the UI from DotP?  It works fine and looks good.

DotP is absolutely godawful for deck construction. The gameplay UI is fine, everything else has galling degrees of consolitis.

Whoa whoa whoa. That GUI is awful on consoles also. This has nothing to do with consolitis. It's just a bad GUI.

It's all very clearly meant to work with an xBox controller. No click and drag, no anything, but a lot of thumbstick scrolling and click X/O.

Working with something doesn't mean it's good. It's probably at its best on the iPad (dragging works) - and it's still a bad GUI there.

In typically WotC MODO incompetent fashion, they took was should have been a positive idea ($5 TNMO drafts and sealed) and screwed it up.
Instead of doing what i thought they would do, i.e. have continuous queues for TNMO $5 sealed, draft plus constructed run a set times, they instead decided to treat all of them as PREMIER scheduled events.
So basically, each Thursday there are 4 TNMO events - not four of each type, 4 total.  And to make it worse, because they run at set times (7am, 12noon, 6pm and 10pm) most normal people probably only have 1! shot to even try and get in one, and with a max number of players at 512, it means for the entire day at best they can have 2048 people play "Thursday Night Magic Online".  Limiting yourself to 2000 people for a day of pure digital profit?  /facepalm  

So that whole $5 draft thing I was looking forward too?  None currently scheduled; the first month of this new plan is 1 standard, 2 sealed, 1 momir.

Sheer idiocy.