Lilly Tellian began playing Magic Arena during the Ikoria launch, primarily as a F2P player. “I thought the trailer was cool,” Tellian told us. “I got into it and played every day, using the gold I earned to open packs.”
After quite some time she had accumulated a fair amount of rare and mythic wildcards. Not knowing what deck she wanted to play she merely continued to lose match after match on Magic: Arena in order to accumulate more wildcards. “Sure, I didn’t win which wasn’t too fun, but I figured I’d learn more about the cards and, as they say, you learn more losing to someone better than you than winning against someone worse.”
Everything was going well until one fateful night. “I woke up in a sweat. I was familiar with the cards I dreamed about, but had never thought about using them in conjunction with each other. I thought that a deck based around the combo would be the perfect use for my stockpile of wildcards.”
Lilly, not wasting a second, booted up Magic: Arena and went on to begin crafting her dream deck, spending hours fine tuning the mana based on researching how to make a mana base. She opened up her wallet to buy the card-styles for each of the cards. After all, this was her idea. Her deck. She wanted the world to see it looking its best when she took it online.
“The sun was rising when I finally was comfortable taking my deck onto the ranked ladder. I’d worked on it all night, buzzing on coffee, hands trembling from excitement.”
What happened next came as a surprise.
“I ran into the same few decks at first. Most prevelent was mono-green aggro. I wasn’t even able to get enough lands on the board for my deck to do my thing before losing game after game. I went online to reddit to ask how I could avoid this and everyone told me that I really wouldn’t be able to compete with my deck outside of the meta. Everyone listed cards for me to craft, though looking at my empty bank of wildcards and significantly smaller balance in my bank I just uninstalled the program.”