The 9 Best Ways to Get Cards in MTG Arena

Last updated on March 12, 2025

Animate Library | Illustration by Raymond Swanland

As soon as you play on the client for a little while, you inevitably notice the MTGA economy at some point. That includes both how complicated and how expensive it is to master. One element of this is discovering all the different ways to get your hands on cards, gems, gold, and Arena packs.

There are many different ways to get your hands on cards in MTGA. Finding the best way to get them for you can be a bit confusing, though. That’s why I’m gonna give you the lowdown on all your options to get cards in MTGA, right here! I’ll also give you the pros and cons of each method. And all of it for free! Remember one of the alternatives to MTGA is Magic Online where you do buy cards, but that comparison is its own discussion.

All right, let’s get crackin’!

What is the Fastest Way to Get Cards in MTG Arena?

The fastest way to get cards in Arena is to purchase them with gems through a bundle, deck in the store or straight packs and wildcards. If you can stand to do an event, Sealed gets you six packs at a time, and Jump In! adds about 22 cards per sign up.

How to Get Free Cards

Of all the ways to get your hands on cards in MTGA, getting them for free is definitely the most enticing. If there’s a way to get your hands on some free cards, you’d want to know about it, right? Right!

Color Challenge

Tricks of the Trade | Illustration by Steven Belledin

If you’re a new player starting out on MTGA, you have to go through something called the “Color Challenge.” Essentially, this is a fun way to wrap your head around the game. In the challenges, you battle your way through games against each of the five colors of MTG. As you get further into the color-web, more decks and more cards will become available to you. All of them for free!

In total, you can get 10 dual-colored decks and five mono-colored decks. These Arena Starter decks are balanced and primed for upgrades.

Claim Your Cards and MTGA Codes

With each set released for Standard, Wizards used to release a promo code to give you a taste of that set on MTGA. You'd get three free packs to crack and give you a sense of the cards in the set. They converted this “free code” system to an automatic in-game bonus and toss in basic lands. You just have to check your player inbox inside MTG Arena after the set comes out.

There are codes in various real-life MTG products as well. You can redeem those MTGA codes in the game to get the digital form of the same paper product you bought. If you buy the Planeswalker or Starter Decks, you can get a free copy for your Arena account. Likewise with Secret Lairs.

Finally, you can also straight up buy codes from MTGAcodes.com — but more on that later.

Which Is the Best Way to Get Free Cards?

Definitely redeeming free codes inside MTGA is the best way to get free cards. It’s easy and gives you less hassle. No winning or hoops required. The only problem is that you run out of codes very quickly. New codes are hard to come by, so you need to be patient.

Opening Packs

Packsong Pup | Illustration by April Prime

Time to spend a little money or collect gold to expand your collection. How, you ask? By opening packs, of course!

How to Get Packs

You can get packs in the MTGA store in exchange for gems or gold. You can buy gems in Arena’s store for actual cash (or cash alternatives), earn them through draft rewards, or occasionally through events. Gold can be earned solely through completing challenges and events. When you’re ready, head on over to the store and score some packs. If you’re wondering which packs to buy on Arena, we’ve got you covered.

When you compete in events and complete challenges, you also get various packs as rewards. If you combine this with the Mastery Pass, you get more packs when you battle through those challenges and events. The pass is a great buy if you’re an MTGA grinder.

When to Open Packs

When you open your packs depends on what you’re trying to do:

Do You Want to Just Have Fun and Enjoy Yourself?

Open the packs right as you get them.

Are You Dead Set on Collecting an Entire Set?

Save your packs. Do as many drafts as you can afford first, pick all the rares and mythic rares you come across, and then open your packs. MTG Arena’s duplicate protection avoids any rares or mythic rares you’ve already collected four of, and gives you a better chance of filling out the set’s missing cards. This way you get more value out of your packs.

Pros and Cons

The obvious pro to buying packs rather than using codes is that you can get as many as your wallet (or schedule) allows. The con is that you have to spend your hard-earned money.

The choice you have to make is whether you think it’s worth it, how much time you spend on MTGA, and to what purpose.

Are you a pro? Do you want to become one? If you said yes to either question, then investing is probably something worth doing.

Are you a casual player in it for the fun? If this is the case for you, then buying a ton of packs is probably not the way.

Wildcards and Crafting

Wild Evocation | Illustration by Chippy

How you craft wildcards is another discussion, so I want to focus on how to get and use wildcards. This is another great way to get cards, and we have handy rankings for the best mythics to craft in MTG Arena.

If you want to build a particular deck, all you have to do is upload or import the decklist into Arena's deck builder or put the deck together yourself. Once you’re done, Arena will show you which cards you’re missing, if any. All you have to do is select ”Craft” and all the missing cards will be added to your collection in exchange for the associated wildcards.

There’s no hassle in opening packs and hoping for that one card you’re gunning for. Spending wildcards to craft cards is almost too easy. All you need to do is have the required wildcards in the appropriate rarities.

Pros and Cons

The big pro is that you get to pick which cards you want instead of rolling the dice. You can technically do this without spending any money/gold/gems and just open packs you get for free while playing the game. This does limit the number of wildcards you get, but it can be done if you’re on a budget. On the note of budget, each wildcard costs the same and is earned the same way in their given rarities, thus, if you spend a wildcard on a super expensive common or mythic, you can play with cards that would cost a fortune IRL.

The biggest con is that you need to open packs to collect wildcards for use in crafting. This keeps you from using them indefinitely, so make sure you’re certain about the deck and cards you want before spending wildcards. You can’t undo crafting once you’ve pushed that “Craft” button. Oh and while this is the easiest way to get cards you want, it is expensive because you have to open (read: buy) all those packs.

Drafting

Bureaucracy | Illustration by Mark Zug

I lightly touched on this already, but drafting is another great way to get cards in Arena. If you’re not in the market for collecting entire sets, then you can just pick the cards you like or want and build a fun deck at the same time.

If you’re an accomplished drafter, or want to improve at Draft and Sealed, you can use the drafts to win more packs, gold, or gems.

Both methods are great and, above all, fun. Pick your poison, as they say.

Pros and Cons

The pros to drafting are pretty straightforward. You get a bunch of new cards to add to your collection and, as you win more games, the rewards grow as well. Plus it's very fun. Check out your collection on your profile tab.

The con is that you have to like drafting and there’s definitely some skill involved in getting the most out of your drafts. If this is new to you, get ready for a learning curve. Thankfully Draftsim has a ton of resources to help you.

Jump In!

The Jump In! limited event costs the same as an Arena booster at 200 gems or 1,000 gold. Win a daily game or two and you can afford this one. You get to pick from 4 first packets, to combine with a second pack. These form a 40-card deck, and you keep the cards (about 22 non-basics) as a reward.

Pros and Cons

The Jump In! event is always available, inexpensive, and offers you some choice in the types of cards you get, plus it adds far more total cards to your collection than a booster.

The drawbacks are the limited choices of packets, the cards from Wizards-selected recent sets and the only reward for this event is a randomized individual card.

Individual Card Rewards

ICRs, or individual card rewards, are the rewards you reap from daily rewards, events, and the Mastery Pass. I’ve already mentioned ICRs as secondary perks for some other card-earning methods, but it’s a definite path on its own, too.

Pros and Cons

If you enter a lot of events and complete your daily bonuses, your amount of free loot will soar for sure. There’s a high upside in participating in the different events Arena has to offer.

The downside is that these events aren’t (always) free. You usually have to fork over some gold or gems to enter, so you have to spend coin before you can earn ICRs a lot of the time.

The Vault

The Key to the Vault | Illustration by Leon Tukker

It’s a bit fringe, but once you’ve collected the right amount of duplicate commons and uncommons, your vault will activate, and if opened, can reward you with six wildcards: one mythic rare, two rares, and three uncommons.

These allow you to craft more cards you might desire, thus converting into more cards for your collection. Best of all, it’s completely free! Just a small gift from the people behind MTGA.

Pros and Cons

The best perk is that this is absolutely free and all you have to do is play. Duplicates automatically go towards your vault and it keeps track when it’s full to burst and shower you in wildcard goodness.

The con is that six wildcards is a pretty small number and can only help you get just a few cards for your deck. Plus it takes a long time for the vault to open unless you buy packs like crazy.

Preconstructed Decks

The store occasionally features a handful of decks for a format or two. Remember, the number of cards depends on the format of the deck, so a preconstructed Brawl deck will have 100 singleton cards. The decklists are well known and have a bit of a department store markup only to give you a bunch discounted if you already have the cards in your collection. These decks can only be purchased with gems so you really need to weigh if you want to play the deck or not.

Pros and Cons

The good part is these decks are almost like directly buying cards with gems and that is a great capability in MTGA. For anyone with a young collection on Arena, a preconstructed deck can be a huge leap up from Arena's provided decks. 

The worst part about this is the cost of the deck, unless you've already collected nearly the whole deck, the gem expense is pretty steep.

Can't I Just Buy Cards Directly?

No, you can't buy singles on Arena, but the closest method is to buy a wildcard bundle, then craft away. We've come up with a very interesting workaround for you. You can directly buy codes that will net you cards in MTGA. Immediately.

So this means, to some extent, you can buy:

• Packs
• Preoconstructed Decks

The way to do this is through MTGACodes.com. You just go to the store, add a bunch of packs to your cart, click purchase, and you get codes you can type into MTGA and redeem immediately for more cards. Note that you can only buy one of each max:

Packs occasionally go up for sale on MTGACodes.com – about a buck per pack.

It's a similar process to use MTGACodes for decks:

The best thing about these is that you can browse the decklists on the site to see exactly what you're getting.

If for some reason you can't find what you need on MTGACodes, Gray Viking Games is another option to check out. We've also written up a pretty comprehensive review for GVG, which I highly recommend you take a look at; same with how to redeem your MTG Arena codes in-game.

If you have more money than time, or just some budget allocated for MTGA, this route might be the best bang for your buck.

So What's the Best Way to Get Cards?

The best way is to craft cards directly with wildcards. But that can get really expensive really fast.

It all comes down to you and what you’re looking to get out of playing on MTGA. Is it fun? Experience? A lot of loot? A way of spending excess cash? All these variables influence which method is best. So, instead, I’ll give you the best way to go based on your goal:

• For fun: The free methods are your friend, my friend.
• For experience: Combine drafting and crafting to get your desired cards.
• For loot: Board the ICR train to loot station, my friend.
• For spending cash: Run to the MTGA store or Gray Viking Games and spend, spend, spend to your heart’s content.

Win More

Many of these ways to get cards, like extra packs and wildcards, correlate strongly with the more tips and tricks you know to win more in Arena. And if you want to do that, I recommend you use an MTG Arena deck tracker like Arena Tutor.

The app is free and helps you track your matches, learn about new winning meta decks, and gives you advice during your drafts. Hire the Arena Tutor for free!

Open Your Packs

Opening Ceremony | Illustration by Greg Bobrowski

With that, we’ve come to the end of another chat! As always, feel free to head on over to our blog if you want to read more awesome articles. There is a ton about how to navigate Arena, the events and formats that are specific to the client and I'm confident you'll like what you learn.

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