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Am I missing something here?
Kabam decided to make a monthly recurring payment subscription feature that is better to buy intermittently? Let me explain, the only way to squeeze the most juice out of this new Sigil is if you have gathered everything to trade in the Black ISO store and manage to get the items within their reset timers. For example if you are at 50k 6* shards that trade for 1 7* crystal at 150k shards is worthless unless you manage to get 100k more within the month. And that goes for every single item that has better value in trade.

If you're thinking in terms of relative to the usual purchases, it's more value than the Star Lord Loot Bag for example.
Now, in terms of the 6* Featured leaving, I'm not sure why that was removed, or the Shard trade-in. That would make more sense to keep and just gate the 7* Crystals if the concern was choices. That much I'm not sure of.
I think the overall idea is to have some higher-end value that Players can save towards and some smaller value on an ongoing basis. Which this certainly achieves.
It's only 10 dollars USD a month, after all.

I am not thinking on unit value. I am comparing old sigil to this one. This is a monthly renewed subscription that is better to buy whenever you have the most items to trade and cancel when you don't. This is completely backwards.

I'm talking the total value. The previous Sigil didn't even have anything to appeal to Valiant besides the 7* Crystal and the usual building lower Items up.

This one doesn't have much either....

It has a Titan, an extra 7* to trade in for, and a T4A.

Yes, so it has crapshoots on a 1 month timer, except for the t4a that is the only certain item.
Would have made more sense to be able to buy everything in shards for instead of full crystal.

What do you expect? Access to a Titan and another 7* every month for $10?

So you just omit the part where it says access to shards instead of full crystals?
I mean you also say 1 titan and an extra 7* as if earning those was easy to buy together, its more of 1 or the other. And if you are talking about the trade you gotta have the 150k 6* shards to actually do the trade, They could have made it 10k 6* shards for 1k 7* shards.

Having Shards and a one-stop trade-off is counterintuitive to promoting a subscription. Of course people can cancel at any time, but I suspect they want to encourage people to maintain a subscription over time with the biggest Rewards being cumulative, rather than a few Shards here and there.

Counterintuitive, interesting. So it takes what to grab a Titan crystal? Like 9 months or so? I mean you get 75 credits if you do it by the webstore on renewal. 700 credits for a Titan crystal.
What you might call counterintuitive, actually has better value. I much rather top off the shards I already have in a monthly bases than wait a whole bunch of months looking at a store of things I can't buy yet. The sigil looks good right now cause we got the marks to spend. Next month it will be just a store of items you can't buy or trade until the 3rd month or so.

You do know how incentivizing works, don't you?

Actually, I'm going to have to side with Popcorn on this one. I'm fine with the price of the Titan, but I believe the devs erred in making the trades so "chunky." 700 credits for a Titan and, say, 150k 6* shards for a 7* shard are in my opinion reasonable costs, but there's the separate matter to consider about how frequently you can make that trade.

It shouldn't matter, and it wouldn't matter to a robot, but most humans would see more value from more engagement. A thing you can only do once per year is not a psychologically satisfying return for something you have to pay for every month. No one more than I constantly tries to remind people that the devs aren't about trying to sell as much stuff as possible, it is to sell as little as possible. But it is precisely because of this that they should try to make the things they sell as psychologically appealing as possible. 700 credits for a Titan is economically identical to 70 credits for 2000 Titan shards. But I suspect the latter would be perceived as having higher value, because a) you end up using the trade more often, providing engagement activity on a more frequent timescale, and b) there's the separate psychological impact of being able to "top off" your shards. 2000 shards is 2000 shards and on a spreadsheet 2000 shards is always worth 2000 shards, but the value to a player who has 18000 shards is far different than one who has 1800 shards.

Incentivizing is not just about value. It is about perceived value, and smaller trade options have more perceived value, because they are perceived to be more engaging (we just plain do them more often) and they offer more time sensitive use options (even if those average out in the end). The game must obey the economic realities of design balance, but it must also remember it is designed for humans to play, not economic androids.

This is really about agency. People value agency more than they value actual things. A smaller trade provides more agency - more things to ponder, more options to consider, more events to look forward to. And when you are trying to sell as little as possible, you have to wrap those things up in the best possible way. In my opinion, the Sigil doesn't do that in these cases.

Ever since I read Crashed recap of banquet where he acknowledges that “it didn’t feel good” to open the crystals, I’ve been thinking how much the economy team would benefit from a shot in the arm of behavioral economic theory. Who knows, maybe that’s actually how the economy team is trained, but it doesn’t feel like it these days. Things like banquet and Sigil appear to have been engineered with an economic outcome in mind and not much consideration for the player experience.

Let's be honest, though, R4s may be tough as BG defenders, but in nodeless Arena, a person should be able to handle them the one or two times they face them without feeling the need to claim that the whole Arena system needs to change...

The occasional R4 mixed into a team of R3s verses your R3s? Just pay attention and fight normally rather than watching the Office while grinding.

The more serious threat is when an R4 changes the infinite streak cap in your match bucket, and suddenly that team you thought was safe draws a deathmatch. That's when the R4 becomes a real threat, because the first time you see that R4 you might be using R1s.

But that's just the arena working as intended. It is infinite streak itself that was never intended; the devs just decided to let us keep it rather than rewrite the arena to fix it.

As far as I am aware, the algorithm for how the arena chooses match ups has never been officially released, but based on testing and conversations with the devs during things like the arena refactor and the "oopsie we accidentally gave everyone deathmatches forever" moment when the devs tried to make the arena easier I can say this is pretty close to how the arena chooses teams:

1. The arena keeps track of what teams the players use, and stores that somewhere.
2. When a player is in the arena, they have an invisible difficulty multiplier that scales with the length of their win streak. This multiplier starts at 0.8, and increases steadily until it caps out around 3.9 at about win streak 19 or 20, and then stays there for all higher streak lengths.
3. When a player forms a team and enters the arena, the game calculates something sometimes referred to as "naked PI." This is the PI of your team without boosts, masteries, or sig levels. It then multiplies this by your current difficulty multiplier to get a match target. So if your (naked) PI of your total team is 10,000 and your current streak difficulty multipler is 2.0, your match target is 20,000 PI.
4. Every player is assigned a subset list of all arena participants. How the game does this is not known, but it is known it is fairly random but probably tends to pick players roughly near the player's strength and is reset every time the arenas themselves reset. Because these lists start empty, players who jump into the arenas immediately right as they start can sometimes see weird match results, as these tables are not yet full.
5. From this subset, the game looks at every team used by all the players in the set, looking for a reasonably close match to your target match in (naked) PI. The matching system always finds three matches, a match slightly lower, more or less on the dot, and somewhat higher. These margins are also, to the best of my knowledge, not perfectly known, but we all see them.
6. If the game cannot find reasonable matches, there are two possibilities. For reasons probably are most likely due to an implementation bug, if your current streak length is of a certain size (somewhere around 8-15) and the nearest match falls outside the reasonable range but within certain limits, you will get Kang or Thanos teams that are constructed by the arena system. Outside of these ranges, the game resorts to default teams that are at or near default matches (i.e. with the initial difficulty multipler of 0.8).

Because the game chooses matches from the teams players use, which teams players use ultimately determines the difficulty of the arena. This is by design, as the intent was to make the arena get harder as the players grow stronger automatically. And since matches come not from all of the hundreds of thousands of players who play arena but just a subset of them (probably for efficiency reasons) it is possible to see the same people over and over again in any one particular run. But this can then shift when the arenas reset and players' rosters change.

What players call 'Infinite streak" is possibly the longest surviving bug in the game. If the absolute strongest possible team that can ever enter the arena as a PI of, say, 90,000 (naked PI), then anyone who assembles a team of about 24,000 or more can never find a match, ever, at high streak. Because the game will never find a match for such teams, it is forced to default to low difficulty teams as a last resort. As long as you keep your teams above that critical limit, the arena stays "broken" and never sends actual difficulty-scaled matches. That's infinite streak in a nutshell, and that's why there's no set formula for it. The minimum team required changes based on the highest team the game has ever seen within each players' opponent match basket. There are R4s in the game right now, but if those players are not in your subset opponent basket in this arena, you will never see those teams and the infinite streak requirement for you personally is lower than it might be for the unlucky shmuck that happens to get those guys in their match basket. But even ignoring them, since everyone's match basket is different, and changes with new arenas, and those players rosters also change over time, everyone's infinite streak minimum fluctuates slightly over time, and slowly drifts upward in the long run.