Magic The Gathering: Arena – How To Use Your Wildcards Effectively

Whether you’re a curious new player or a fan of Commander looking to go digital, Magic: the Gathering (MTG) Arena is the easiest way to get involved due to the presence of wildcards. Spending your wildcards carefully allows you to try a variety of ways to play the game.

So, let’s dive in and take a look at how wildcards work, how to earn more of them, and what kinds of cards you ought to craft. In the end, you’ll be prepped to craft a collection to play MTG: Arena for years to come!

What Are Wildcards?

Wildcards can be pulled in all of MTG: Arena‘s rarities from any booster pack you open. When building a deck, you can use a wildcard to “craft” any card of that rarity.

Wildcards don’t care about sets, formats, or any other restrictions—if the Wildcard is the right rarity, you can craft it! Ease of use is one reason MTG: Arena is the most popular way to play rotating formats like Standard.

How To Get Wildcards

Wildcards pop up in a couple of different places:

• Packs
• Wildcard Reward Track
• The Vault

The main way you’re going to get wildcards is by cracking packs. Each card has a chance to become a wildcard of the same rarity.

Each pack you open also advances the Wildcard Reward Track. You can track your progress on the top-right side of the screen while opening packs.

The Wildcard Reward Track doesn’t care about where your packs came from—prizes, new set promos, Mastery rewards, etc. Instead of consuming excess cards manually, every pack counts toward your next Wildcard.

As you open packs, you might open duplicates of cards already in your collection. Opening your fifth copy of a common or uncommon adds progress to The Vault.

The Vault opens when it reaches 1,000 points. Each excess common adds 1 point, and each excess uncommon adds 3 points. A percentage displaying your progress is shown if you hover over the orange “lotus” symbol on the top of your screen.

Opening the Vault takes a while, so it’s best to think about it as a “nice bonus” rather than a goal. When it’s open, you’ll receive 6 new Wildcards.

Card Crafting Strategy

When choosing how to use your Wildcards, consider which formats you’re most interested in playing. Rotating formats are fun because they keep changing, but in Eternal formats you can continue ruining your opponent’s day with your favorite Mill Crabs long after they’ve left Standard— no need for drastic gameplay changes here!

I find it’s hard to go wrong if you craft MTG: Arena staples using your Wildcards. Good cards which are playable in both types of format keep your collection flexible enough to play a variety of ways.

Two types of cards remain powerful even when rotating into an Eternal format’s more competitive card pool: multicolor lands and strong removal spells.

Lands

While they’re not terribly exciting, lands are terribly important. Having a good manabase will win you games.

Popular lands are also a type of card more likely to be reprinted in future sets. On MTG: Arena if you crafted a copy for a prior set, you can use that card again if it re-enters Standard.

Strong lands to craft for an enduring collection include the surveil lands from Murders at Karlov Manor, the fetch lands from Khans of Tarkir, and the shock lands from Guilds of Ravnica and Ravnica Allegiance. Not only are these lands great in Eternal formats, it’s likely they’ll be reprinted for you to use in future Standard formats.

Removal Spells

Magic‘s creatures seem to grow tougher and tougher, but there’s less power creep in its removal spells. Staples from the 90s like Lightning Bolt or Counterspell still see play on MTG: Arena when format-legal.

Removal which will last from Standard into Eternal (and perhaps even get reprinted!) tends to be cheap, direct, and unconditional. One classic example is Supreme Verdict from Return to Ravnica, which I still think is the best board wipe ever printed.

Because there’s a pretty firm “ceiling” to how powerful removal can get, Wildcards spent this way will let you play with them for a long time. That’s what makes MTG: Arena so enticing even on free-to-play accounts—the ease with which you can build a lasting collection of fun, powerful cards.