I love MTG. It's unlike any other card game. Nothing even comes close to just how tactile it feels tapping lands and cards, or building a deck that fits your identity as a player.
However, WotC/Hasbro is a pile of flaming dog shit company. I don't condone or support any of their horrendous business practices. Every year that goes by, MTG becomes more and more a cash grab, and pushes people out of being able to play it. It's already an insane game where pieces of cardboard cost thousands of dollars. But they keep wanting to make their shareholders more money so it keeps becoming even worse, to the point where it's a fortnite IP crossover hell hole.

I long ago sold my magic collection. I've been playing since the early days. Now I proxy everything.

So why do I play MTG Arena? It's actually a half decent client. There are some precon deck modes and other formats where you can ignore the gacha hell of the game and play for fun.

I still love the game itself, it's just the company managing it that deserves 0 praise at this point.

All that said, Arena is a good way to learn for new players, and can be a somewhat okay way to experience the game without having to break your bank.

I will probably always come back and forth to the game, but I cannot in good conscience ever recommend anyone spend a single dime on it.

Screw the company. Proxy your cards. Don't spend a single cent on these people. Play the game for free any way you can. Table top simulator, cockatrice, or ever arena are viable options.

TL;DR - good game run by evil corporation

I'm marking this complete as I finally did all the color challenges in the game and successfully won them, alongside some random matches and experimental deck builds. I'm not the best at strategizing for cards and get way overwhelmed at the options and trying to think how they'd stack against other decks.

The core nature of the game is neat, especially when it rolls into new theming and mechanics to work with, even if I don't have the firmest grasp on it.

I was a brief magic player around high school, but I do hate the inherent gambling and legwork needed for a TCG, no matter how fun it is. Frankly the only thing motivating me to get back into it at all is bloomburrow, and I was trying to farm packs or resources for when that releases.

But to know I'm going to invest in a game that's largely obsolete in 2 years when I don't like to devote permanent attention to any one game for very long, preferring to bounce around sours my mood on it somewhat, even as I'm enjoying getting back into it some.

Hopefully I'll hit a groove and it'll make it all a bit worth it. I love some of the recent sets themes, like southwestern and wild west, though I dislike the IP crossover sets. Let magic be magic, I don't need fallout or lotr in there. Frankly there's too many crossovers lately and having something exist in its own space is more special I'd say. Or have these be it's own collectors offshoot without gameplay maybe. Or only compatible in-series. Idk I don't make the rules, just kinda lame if you ask me.

It's difficult to rate Arena because, well, are you reviewing Magic the Gathering, the card game that's been going on for nearly 30 years, or Arena's specific technical implementation of it, or the Standard meta that the game exists in?

Briefly: MTG is great. If you've played it you probably know how you feel about it. If you've only played Hearthstone or other digital CCGs, I can't recommend it enough. The depth, variety and reinvention in MTG far outstrip any other CCG I've played.

As for Arena's implementation, it gets so much so right. Before I played it I thought the game would be unbearable with endless back-and-forths for priority, but the implementation is smooth. Maybe a little complex- the subtleties of holding 'full control' take a while to grasp, and even hundreds of hours in I've made mistakes. But from launch you've been able to play games at a blistering pace, and I personally enjoy not having to manually shuffle my deck or maintain a collection of thousands of tiny pieces of cardboard.

... but Arena is not without issues. Since launch, innovations have been paltry. Much requested features like spectator mode, true pod drafting, FFA, Commander, or custom formats remain unsupported, while features nobody asked for like Arena exclusive cards or even more cosmetics continue to be rolled out. "Historic", the game's unique eternal format, has been a mess since the jump and the developers are apparently reluctant to support Pioneer or Modern. Despite the game making money hand over fist for WotC, they seem reluctant to invest in expanding its features. Only after the game being out for 2 years, and the format of all professional play during the pandemic, did WotC figure out a way to execute true pod drafting for a single tournament.

The card crafting and monetization model also leaves something to be desired- a long term player will typically be left with hundreds of uncommon wildcards, dozens of mythics, and no rares. Fun decks are ruinously expensive to assemble - trash rares that sell for pennies IRL will eat up the same wildcards that craft into dual lands and meta staples. There's also some wonky stuff going on with the competitive ladder if you look deep enough into it, but it's a little beyond me.

I continue to play the odd game every other day, a good way to kill 10 or 20 minutes at a time, and will likely continue to do so for some time to come. With no major new features on the horizon though my enjoyment of the game will be wholly dictated by what's released into Standard. How much I enjoy that particular turbulent meta is sort of out of Arena's hands.

This app is everything that's bad about Magic rolled into one enormously expensive and frustrating package. I've loved and casually played the game since I was a wee lad in the 90s, and trying to play this version of it leaves me hating it. This is not how you should play Magic. Don't do it. Just buy a cheap pre-constructed deck - or hell, even buy yourself some cheap fakes because fuck Hasbro - and play with your friends in your living room.

In this version of the game, you have to spend enormous piles of money to build a decent deck, because the app offers zero ways to buy individual cards. If you're new and think I'm wrong because of what you've seen in the shop; those are card SKINS and you do NOT get the actual card if you buy them. And that's another thing that sucks about this app; it asks you to spend money on every screen imaginable, but no one thought it was worth the development time to actually add a tooltip that tells you what you're buying, at least not in the mobile version. You have to google what each bundle contains because the app makes no effort to tell you what you're spending $50 on. (Update: You actually can buy individual cards, it's just cumbersome and not really explained at all within the app itself. What you have to do is build a deck with cards you don't have, which I only know how to do by pasting a decklist from the internet, and once you have cards you don't own in a deck, you can use your wildcards to make them. However, you still have to buy boosters to obtain enough wildcards for the hot new deck from the latest set; it's just mildly less greedy than I initially thought.)

Because, according to the recent Dungeons & Dragons drama, customers are "obstacles in the way of our money", according to the decision-makers at Wizards of the Coast. That's exactly how this app feels and behaves, like we're meant to just shut up and spend money because fuck us.

That also ties into how this app offers no way to play the currently most popular way to play the game, which is the Commander format, and the reason they don't want us playing that, and also the reason why it's popular, is because that format allows you to play with 100 cards you like and you basically never have to update your deck if you don't want to. We can't have that in our money-printing app. Let's not even get started on how every event, except the occasional exception, costs money, and the price is absurd. Last week, there was a mid-week tournament that cost 30 fucking dollars. And you did not get to keep the cards afterwards. An entry fee of $30 for a real-life tournament makes sense because then they have to pay for the space used and the people running it, but why exactly are we expected to pay $30 to play a pretend tournament in a virtual space? Because fuck us for being obstacles to their money, that's why.

This is all made worse by the fact that the only starter freebies you get are for Standard, the game mode where you have to update all of your cards at least once a year in order to stand a chance, and they've made Standard completely unplayable with absurd power creep in the past five or so years. Games are no longer strategic and satisfying, they're just a dice roll to see who had the better deck filled with more rare cards and who pulled the better starting hand. Drew a mediocre starting hand with your freebie pre-constructed? Might as well concede because you've already lost. Standard sucks and there's a reason why Wizards had to tweet out a question about why their data shows that no one likes Standard anymore. I won't even write a full paragraph about how lame it is that Standard unranked, which should be the kiddie pool for newbies, is jam-packed with sharks with expensive decks who are looking to pubstomp their way to the daily 15 win challenge.

No, wait, I will rant for a full paragraph because this app makes it way too easy to be an asshole since there's no social regulation of gameplay or deck-building at all. What I mean by that is that if someone shows up with a so-called stax deck (which is generally considered the most annoying and self-absorbed way to play the game) to your game night or your local game store, they will get to play one game with their asshole deck before everyone says no thanks and refuses to play with them. That doesn't happen in this game, so asshole decks run completely rampant. Wizards claims that they offer no chat "because toxicity", but anyone with half a brain understands that it's because they've always been incompetent at software and because they didn't want to spend the extra money to offer chat. You can be far more toxic with your asshole Tolarian Terror counterspell deck than you can with any words. Really, that card needed ward 2 on top of essentially being a 1-mana 5/5? Did it really, though? Speaking of toxic, have fun trying to find satisfaction in that your plan worked and you got to deal that spectacular killing blow, because that will never happen in this game. EVERYONE will concede right before you make your big move, taking the satisfaction away from you. Literally every single player does this and matches almost never end in actually dealing a killing blow, unless the opponent didn't expect it. If they know it's coming, they will "scoop", as it's called in the Magic world, every single time. You will not get to feel good about playing a clever combo because they will always, always take that away from you by conceding.

Even putting the extreme greed and the currently insufferable meta aside, this just isn't a good version of the game since it's fundamentally misdesigned. Previous versions of digital Magic worked in such a way that the game just went along until you paused it because you wanted to play a card and you could pause at any moment to play "Instant" cards, which are cards you can play even when it's not your turn, but Arena doesn't do this. It does the opposite and constantly pauses for you, with only an option to skip everything, which makes it harder to time your instants perfectly. For example, I am allowed by the game rules to play an instant at the end of opponent's upkeep, before main phase triggers happen, but Arena doesn't allow that unless the opponent plays a card, and the auto-resolve function is too fast and makes it too difficult to miss the exact moment, so everyone plays with auto-resolve off, which means that both players have to basically click OK on every single action taken by both parties. This is the most annoying way they could've designed this app, and newbies and/or rusty players you run into will ALWAYS forget that they need to click OK on everything that happens. On top of that, there's other sloppiness in how the game always asks if you want to cast a Ninja card using the ninjutsu ability even if that isn't a legal move at the time, and the app is generally miserable at understanding that maybe it shouldn't tap ALL of your blue mana for a card that only requires one and when you have plenty of other-color mana available, so you have to disable auto-tapping if you don't want the app to make dumb mana mistakes for you.

Finally, don't forget that this is like the 10th digital version of Magic in as many years. Do not be surprised if you wake up one day to hear that Arena was cancelled in order to make room for yet another new version and that they "unfortunately" aren't "able to" transfer your cards and decks to the new game.

Nah. I will probably keep suffering through these unenjoyable Standard matches in the hopes that I eventually get enough cards to build a deck that actually stands a chance at competing (which requires real money or many, many days of free gold from challenges) and maybe find some fun and fair matches that way, just because I've stuck with the game for so long, but no one should do that and you especially shouldn't do it right now, as Wizards and Hasbro are currently doing their damndest to ruin their most profitable franchises. Just buy cheap cards or fakes and have fun with your friends, because the game design is there and there is much to love about Magic and its community, just not on your computer or phone against random strangers.

While in-game, this is an excellent adaptation of one of the greatest games out there. It got me back into Magic, and for that I appreciate it. However the limited number of formats (not even pioneer?), bugginess of the client, and lock-in not even allowing trading your cards really drag down what could be the definitive way to play Magic on the internet. Their decision to wreck Historic with the release of Alchemy was the last straw, so I quit.

All my Magic playing will now be done on Cockatrice (a FOSS client) or hopefully in paper on SpellTable.

Played on Linux through WINE.

Ratings for this are inevitably going to be skewed negatively by jaded long-term players, but as somebody who was brand new to MTG this was a great introduction.

The game is incredibly stingy with in-game currency and rewards, but what it gives you for free is more than enough to entertain me.

My biggest complaint is the lack of singleplayer content. Obviously the PvP is the main draw, but it still seems like a missed opportunity.

Having played Magic The Gathering in my college days, I have to say the game still remains tried and true to what I remember it being. The overall card game is still as strong and interesting as ever, and it even has more robust art now then it ever did when I played it.
Arena, however, is not the card game and certainly doesn't take up it's place, but it does a stellar job at bringing it to the digital world. For card games, a good understanding of how the game works is important for both players to understand in order to enjoy it to it's fullest, and Arena makes sure to do it's best by providing a ton of helpful tools and UI that readily tells the user what is happening on the board. The game also boosts a little training tutorial that explains the game in sort of mock battles which give players the ability to play through a per-determined game to see if they can win it with the cards given. Anyone mildly familiar with how to play card games will have an easy enough time with this, but new players may struggle a little before being able to access the rest of the game. As well, the game won't let you play Player vs. Player matches till you finish one of the color challenges, and for people that know how to play the game already, this can be a major hassle.
The shop in Arena certainly feels a bit predatory akin to most gacha game formats. It even has a bunch of skins and nik naks that players can invest in that makes me kinda cringe at the thought of recommending it to anyone that as mild gambling addictions, but the nature of card games kinda already lend themselves to such behavior. At the least, Arena proves to be a nice digital replacement for the table top game, and for spacing purposes, may be better for the average person.

WHY DO I SPEND SO MUCH TIME PLAYING DIGITAL MTG?

The good news is that I've gotten a ton of play time and have quite a few pretty cool decks and haven't paid a cent.

Animations are weighty and satisfying. Deck building is straightforward. Wildcards allow for easy customization. A good digitization of a good card game.