The thing is a logical player would see that they would likely get lesser rewards due to the much fiercer competition by moving up a tier. If you were getting top 5 consistently in Gold, to get the same ranking rewards in Platinum requires you to attain top 25 which is a tall order for someone who just moved up a tier. Progression is only 5 Crystals and hence makes a negligible difference on overall rewards unlike pre-nerf Progression Rewards.
So unless a player is assured (whether rightly or wrongly) that they will gain more rewards by moving up, they will decide to sandbag. Yes, having more rewards at their current tier would cause them to open more new cards which might induce them to want to use some of them, which might then cause them to move up a tier if they have mastered enough cards.
Or if their current cards are already strong enough to get them top spots, they could (and usually would) just sandbag until the new expansion causes them to master new cards that cause their Mastery to increase to the next tier. There is no incentive to move up a tier if the rewards are not greater for where you expect to rank in the next tier. It is this relative reward scale that matters more than absolute reward levels.
Ideally the top rankings for each event should add a few mastery points to all your colours such that players who consistently perform well will be forced to move onto the next tier.
@Irgy
It’s a valid point that you brought up and which @tygray24 also talked about in the other Trial of the Planes topic, which is about the time needed to play Trial. And by any measure (even if I don’t agree with the way tygray24 did the comparison) Trial of the Planes does not give good rewards for the time invested relative to the other events.
But we have to bear in mind that the purpose of Trial of the Planes is as a conversion event for players who want to earn Jewels more quickly and are willing to spend Crystals for it (with a little more bonus stuff on the side). If Trial of the Planes had a similar reward-to-time ratio as the other events, it would no longer be an optional event. People would feel obliged to play Trial to gain the rewards.
So yeah, I would agree that if you’re time-strapped then Trial of the Planes is the first to forgo.
I would agree that the Elite Packs should not be giving duplicates, otherwise the whole process just comes off as a waste of time if you draw a duplicate.
Yes! This is a point that I think many people are missing when they talk about the value of rewards of TotP. (I myself didn’t really get it when they first announced the event.) You can’t compare rewards in this event to rewards in other events when evaluating the design. As I understand it, it’s an event designed to top-tier players to play when they’ve run out of other stuff to play. The problem with the original reward payout was that -even if- I were platinum, had great decks, and wanted to play lots of MtGPQ, it wasn’t clear that TotP was a worthwhile use of crystals.