I agree that the lack of “universality” of the old shard system was perhaps its one weakness, but there was a reason EA didn’t make shards universal and that’s because they obviously felt they could generate more revenue if users couldn’t carry over “progress” from one event to the next.
So the fact that EA are now allowing value/progress to be carried over from one event to the next by offering “Phase 2 tokens” as a “universal” currency is a pretty obvious “tell” that they MUST be seeking to compensate for the associated lost revenue in other ways — namely, by reducing the odds of drawing/drafting top cards in the first place AND by making the exchanges poorer across the board. Implicitly, they’re wagering that we’ll “chase” the player card value we’d previously become accustomed to (like those 117s that are now near impossible to obtain) by spending more at the draft voucher “slot machine.”
So, while they’ve seemingly given us this new ability to carry over value accrued in one event to the next via the Phase 2 tokens, they've simultaneously massively reduced the amount of actual value available for a given amount of time (in the case of F2Pers) or money (in the case of P2Pers). In other words, it’s still a net loss of value for us and what EA has given with one hand (a new universal currency that’s fungible across events) it has taken away with the other (poorer rewards and even worse exchanges).
I will always come back to this… Ask yourself: Why else was the draft system introduced if it wasn’t explicitly designed to generate more revenue for EA by delivering users less value for their time/money??? It’s not like the community was asking for the change. EA obviously cooked it up to try and generate more revenue and if they were willing to give us a universal currency to carry across events then they obviously had/have no intent of delivering the same value for time/money as we got under the shard system. Put simply, we’re going to need to carry over those “Phase 2 tokens” because it’s the only way some of us (by which I mean F2Pers) will ever be able to obtain meta cards again. Only now, instead of winning one or two per event, we’ll have to scrounge “Phase 2 tokens” for months at a time to claim a single top player.
That’s all a long-winded way of saying that I wouldn’t get too fixated on the Phase 2 token/universal currency as a big “plus” of the draft system, because it comes at a cost that, at least at present, imposes a net loss on all FCM users.
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