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Wildcards in Magic: The Gathering: Arena are the backbone of the game. A wildcard can be used to craft a card of the same rarity (so a rare wildcard can craft a rare card, a common can craft a common card, etc).
If you are interested in Wildcards, be sure to also check out the best MTG standard decks. You can also check out how to get MTG Arena Wildcard and how to use them.
Wildcards are the primary way to craft decks as they let you skip out on having to open booster packs or playing draft and sealed events and just hope that you open the card you want. There are many different ways to acquire wildcards, and the best way varies based on your skillset. These are the best ways to get wildcards on Magic: The Gathering: Arena.
Purchasing Packs
Every booster pack you open gives you progress towards getting a wildcard for free. It takes six packs to get a rare wildcard, and after going through four cycles of this the next six packs will reward you a mythic wildcard before resetting. There is another track that awards you with an uncommon wildcard every six packs that does not rotate.
Inside of the packs, you are guaranteed either a rare or a mythic card (some packs can give more than one). There is a chance one of these cards will be a wildcard instead of an actual card, letting you craft whatever card you want instead. Uncommon wildcards can also replace an uncommon card in a pack.
If you already have all the rares or mythics of a set, duplicates will be replaced by 20 gems for a rare and 40 gems for a mythic. There is still a chance you can open a wildcard in place of an actual card even if the set is rare or mythic complete.
Collected Booster Packs Only
While you do get wildcard progress for opening packs, this does not apply to booster packs you get for entering Sealed events. The same is true for the packs used when playing in Draft events. Only packs opened on the “Packs” screen will count for wildcard progress.
Buying Them Directly
If you do not want to grind for wildcards, you can purchase bundles of four inside the item shop. Four rare wildcards cost $9.99 and four mythic wildcards cost $19.99. These can be a bit pricey, but if you do not want to grind for wildcards and have the money for them, buying wildcards is the easiest way to acquire them by far.
You can only have a maximum of four copies of a card, so these wildcard bundles let you play a playset of whatever card you want. These can be used at any time, so if you want to save them for future sets you can do that.
Opening The Vault
When you have four copies of a card, you can no longer acquire more in your collection. Rares and mythics are converted into gems, but the same is not true for commons and uncommons. Instead, you get awarded progress in the Vault.
In order to open your Vault, you need to acquire 1,000 progress points. Each excess common will give you one point and each excess uncommon will give you three. If you play a lot of Limited events like Draft and Sealed, you can amass a lot of points since you will have a lot of extra commons over the course of playing them.
You can see how far along you are in your Vault by clicking on the wildcard icon in the top left of the screen (next to your gold). When the Vault can be opened, a flashing treasure chest icon will appear. Clicking on it will award you with a mythic wildcard, two rare wildcards, and three uncommon wildcards.
The Vault does not open unless you open it yourself. You have the option to keep it shut and you will keep making progress on it. If you reach 200%, all the rewards will be doubled. However, there is no benefit to waiting to open the Vault and no reason to not open it as soon as you can.
Limited Events
A great way to acquire wildcards is by partaking in Limited events. These are the Draft and Sealed formats available on Magic: The Gathering: Arena. Sealed you give six booster packs and you make a deck out of those cards and Draft will have you pick one card out of a booster pack and pass those along until all the cards in the packs are gone.
These events greatly help your Vault progress, as every time you take a card that you already have max copies of, you will gain points for the Vault. It also helps you to get extra rares and mythic to push you closer to completing a set to have higher odds of opening repeat cards.
Limited events will award you both gems and booster packs depending on how many wins you get. Sealed events will guarantee you three booster packs no matter how many games you win, but the more you win the more gems you get. Draft events will always reward you with at least one booster pack, and give you six packs if you claim seven wins (or three wins if you play Traditional Draft).
While the packs you open during the events themselves will not give you wildcards or wildcard progress, the pack you are rewarded with will when you open them.
Constructed Events
If Limited is not your thing, you can try your hand at Constructed Events. These events can be played in any format on Arena (currently Standard, Explorer, Alchemy, and Historic) for 2500 gold or 375 gems (or 5000 gold and 750 gems for Traditional events). Traditional events guarantee one booster pack if you do not win any games, while best-of-one events will only give a booster pack if you get at least two wins.
If you are good at constructed formats, you can “go infinite” and keep playing the events to get as many booster packs as possible. For best-of-one events, you need at least five wins to be able to enter the event again for free since you get more gems than the price of admission. Traditional events need only four wins to make your gems back. You will also gain booster packs for making it that far in both style of events.
The way to get wildcards out of these events is to open the booster packs you are rewarded with. If you have a strong deck and can pilot it well, you can continuously get more booster packs to get as many wildcards as you can through the wildcard wheel that grows for every booster pack opened.
How To Redeem Wildcards
To redeem any of your wildcards, you will need to go to your collection in the “Decks” tab. You can type in the search bar for the card you want to craft. By default, it will not show up. To view cards you do not own on Arena, you can either click on the “craft” button on the right side of the screen or open up the advanced filters (the three lines with sliders that appear at the end of the mana filters) and check the box saying “not collected.”
Cards you do not own any copies of will appear grayed out. If you have a certain number of a card, the diamond above the card will have an orange outline for each copy you already own. You can only craft enough copies of a card to give you four, and cannot craft past that. Be wary, if a card has been in multiple sets, you can still craft four copies of the other printings. There is no benefit to this except having a different art and set symbol when you play it.
To craft the card, you simply have to click on the card to bring up the crafting menu. You can choose how many copies of a card you wish to craft by clicking on that many diamonds underneath it. After you choose how many copies you want, click the “craft” button and those cards will permanently be put into your collection.
If a card is not currently in the Standard or Alchemy formats (as those both rotate), you will have a warning in orange at the bottom of the crafting screen, meaning they are only playable in non-rotating formats (Historic and Timeless. Explorer does not rotate, but no cards that have not been in a Standard set are allowed there). If you craft a card that has been digitally rebalanced, you will get both the rebalanced version and the original printing for no extra cost.
You can also see how many wildcards of that rarity you have on this screen on the far right. Wildcard redemption is one-for-one, meaning one wildcard is the equivalent of one card.
When Should You Craft Cards?
Generally, you do not want to craft cards until you know the deck you want to build. If you slowly craft cards as you get wildcards, the desire to play that deck may no longer be there, or the power level of the deck might be pushed out of the meta and make it significantly weaker.
The best way to see if you want to play a deck is to play a budget version beforehand if possible. While the deck will be weaker, you can still see how the deck will play out before dedicating your wildcards to it as once you spend a wildcard, it is gone forever. If you spend all your wildcards on a deck you don’t like, there is nothing you can do but keep playing it or go back to the drawing board and start grinding again.
If you do like the budget version, it is better to wait to craft the full power version until you have all the wildcards to do so. While you can upgrade one card at a time, there is a chance new cards might get released that replaces one of the cards you just crafted and you’re back to playing a weaker version of a strong deck.
There are some decks that simply don’t have budget versions of them since the number of rare and mythics the deck runs is too plentiful. In cases like this, it is best to look online for other people playing the deck to see how it plays. Watching videos of it in action can see the general game plan of a deck and how it plays versus the rest of the metagame. This is another way to see if a deck will fit your playstyle before dedicating the wildcards to craft it.
It is generally safer to invest in decks in the non-rotating formats, as you do not have to worry about the deck becoming unusable once rotation hits. Decks in non-rotating formats tend to have longer longevity due to not changing nearly as often as Standard and Alchemy do.
Those are all the best ways to get wildcards in Magic: The Gathering: Arena. The more you play, the easier it is to amass wildcards (especially common and uncommon ones where it’s not uncommon to have hundreds of them). Magic: The Gathering: Arena is a game that rewards consistent play as you will quickly amass gold which you can turn into packs to help get more wildcards. Due to how much harder it is to acquire rare and mythic wildcards, budget decks tend to be used until you have access to enough wildcards to craft full-powered meta decks.
The more you play, the less you have to rely on wildcards as your collection will get larger over time as more packs are being opened and you get more cards from a specific set so you will already have the cards you need and not need to craft them. Wildcards are a great shortcut to getting the cards you want, and let you build the decks you want with ease without having to worry about the randomness that comes with opening a booster pack.
Be sure to check out the best MTG Arena budget standard decks. You can also check out the best MTG Arena Historic Decks.
MTG Arena Wildcards – FAQ
What are Wildcard in MTG Arena?
Wildcards in Magic: The Gathering: Arena are the backbone of the game. A wildcard can be used to craft a card of the same rarity (so a rare wildcard can craft a rare card, a common can craft a common card, etc).
How do you redeem Wildcards in MTG Arena?
To redeem any of your wildcards, you will need to go to your collection in the “Decks” tab. You can type in the search bar for the card you want to craft.
