I have played more since they were introduced, but there are problems.

With the release of Aetherdrift, achievements were added to Arena. There’s 113 of them, with 10 for each color and 63 generic ones, which usually involve playing a lot of games. At this point I have done a little over half of them and I’m pretty close to achieving two more.

The positive is that they present a puzzle. How do you attack with a creature with power 21 or more? How do you deal 20 noncombat damage to your opponent in one turn? How do you win the game with 1 life? How do you sacrifice six or more permanents and win on the same turn?

Well, it’s all complicated and that’s the fun. How did I deal 20 noncombat damage on a single turn? You could use Goblin Charbelcher, but I hate that kind of games, where you don’t really care what the opponent does. You just flip a coin to see whether you win or not, with the odds not being exactly 50/50. I thought about doing it with something like Arcane Bombardment, but there’s a risk that the opponent dies before we can deal 20 as they might have lost life to other things. So, I decided to use Zenith Flare. I don’t know how many games I played with it, but I only managed to pull the 20 damage on my 15th game.

And there’s the problem: I would have been able to do it on three previous games, but my opponent conceded before the damage was dealt. I only pulled it off by waiting for my opponent to be completely tapped out, so they couldn’t get priority.

That’s not the only time I’ve been foiled by my opponents scooping to me being close to getting an achievemeent. Put 25 counters on permanents during one game is pretty easy, but when you start to accumulate them, you are in a winning position, so the opponent is often incentivized to scoop before you get it done.

Right now I’m trying to figure out how to do the aforementioned “attack with a creature with power 21 or more”. There’s a combo deck that uses Grinning Ignus with various effects to bounce it back and play it again multiple timees in a turn to pump a Devilish Valet. Will the opponents sit through it? I doubt it, but I’m going to try.

The ones I find especially insidious are the ones regarding being able to draft enough certain kinds of cards in a single draft. There’s two of these: have 5 of the same card in your pool or 9 rares and/or mythics. If people are really trying to get to these, theat’s going to be discruptive or if you try to go for them, you can self-sabotage in a format you are paying to play.

So, essentially, a fun idea, but people ruin everything. It just happens that you can’t blame the players for this one. They are just looking out for themselves here (although I’ve seen streamers not concede on a couple of occasions saying that let’s just let them get the achivement).