I absolutely adore Magic: The Gathering. However, I can't bring myself to show the same amount of love for MTG: Arena. It obviously provides some of the same joy, but it's pretty clear that WotC has shifted focus and resources away from their digital platform over the past few years. The platform is still missing key features (ahem… Commander), and constantly turns into a buggy mess whenever there are any significant updates. Unfortunately, MTG: Arena has essentially turned into a giant money grab.

Aside from my general issues with the game, however, I still think it provides one of the best ways to get new players into Magic. I always recommend new players play through the MTG: Arena tutorial when they want to get into the game because it provides a decent and easy-to-digest explanation of the complicated game mechanics. Despite the lackluster experience as of late, the card animations are exciting and the way the game presents itself is very clean and enticing.

White mages: "I cast this life gain aura on my life gain token so that when I tap my life gain land I gain life from my life gain artifact every time I cast a life gain sorcery targeting my life gain battle so that I gain life when I gain life oops I forgot to put creatures in my deck"

Blue mages: "It's MY game and you can't play unless *I* say so!"

Black mages: "I have the most cards in my graveyard, making me the victor" (but actually)

Red mages: "Welp it's turn 5 and I don't have a clear path to victory, time to scoop"

Green mages: "A 2/2 creature that DOESN'T tap for mana OR let you dig for land? Trash."

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.

For a bit of history, Magic the Gathering has always had a string of terrible PC games with poor customization, poor optimization, no match making, very limited format and deck options, terrible monetization, and negative support post-launch, and it's usually a combination of all these issues.

I bring all this up because Arena circumvents nearly all of these problems, and is arguably the best digital CCG that WotC has put out. Of course outside of a few weeks at launch I put off actually putting time into the game, as its release meant the death of their previous live service title, Duels. Unlike Duels though, it seems like Arena is here for the long term. (Hopefully) And unlike at launch, it's a much more packed game.

For comparison, the game launched with just standard. Anyone that knows anything about standard will tell you it's a hellscape. Luckily there are a ton of fairly active game modes available. You have brawl which is basically mini commander, you have alchemy which uses digital only cards as opposed to just the physical equivalents, you have historic which is the game's legacy lite, and a bunch of events, drafts and rotating experimental game modes. There's certainly a lot to do here, and similar to other CCG's like Hearthstone, the cards and board are well crafted and animated. There's a lot more polish here compared to what we were dealt with in the past 2 decades.

Of course it's not all rainbows and sunshine. Despite having the most polish of any MtG title, the PC version is optimized poorly. Even on mid and low settings the game will lag and stutter, something I've never seen with any other card game on my computer. And it's not just isolated issues there, as even on my phone I'll get occasional crashes. Despite me gassing it up, it's not doing anything real technical. You don't have Elspeth or Liliana standing on cardboard with 3D renders. I can only theorize it being a server issue, but it really adds to a mixed experience during long sessions.

And that brings to whats my opinion the main issue; the monetization. And it's real messy. A pack is 1000 gold. You get about 300 gold a day, and about 2k gold a week. That's about 4 packs a week if you're choosing to be f2p, which really isn't good. To compare, Hearthstone you can get a pack a day at worst. That's really not good, and to boot the cash shop has the usual flood of cosmetics, overpriced pack bundles, random (pretty) uncommons sold at some few thousand gold each, it's a mess. The 1 upside is you can obtain wild cards as you open packs, which you can trade in for cards you want, ie a rare wild card let's you get any rare card you want. I would say it's more generous than your average dust system, until you realize you probably need or want 4 of the same rare or mythic in your list to stay competitively, which can really jack costs up.

Now that's not to necessarily say the game is p2w (well in some formats it will be p2w) but say we have climbing the standard ladder as the benchmark, you can make a relatively cheap mono red or mono black deck and climb to mythic (the game's top rank) without too much trouble. Paying is if you want variety in deck building and other game modes, which I imagine is most of the fun for most deck builders.

I mentioned how much gold you could make a day, and yeah that's another issue which creates a real monotonous gameplay loop. Each win nets you 25 gold, sometimes a random uncommon card. You get 15 wins a day for earning gold. Meaning you'll be playing about 15-40 games depending daily. Most of those games will either be with a very linear deck like mono red or mono black, or with a constructed starter deck. You get your dailies done, and that's about it. There's nothing here to keep playing and work towards. You can grind out ladder rank for end of month rewards, and you can gamble and try to go infinite through drafts, but it's not consistent. So for months, this will be MTG Arena, until MAYBE you get a somewhat sizeable card pool.

As such, this makes Arena an incredibly difficult game to recommend for the long term. If you never played Magic then I couldn't recommend this game more solely to introduce you to the franchise, but as far as spending goes? Your money is better spent either on MTG Online or the physical game itself. And if you want to goof around with friends, you have much cheaper alternatives like Tabletop Simulator or Untap.

Great way to play draft without being harassed by LGS regulars for being transgender.

Jokes aside, the strength of magic comes from the freedom. Play cube, play commander, play on the hard concrete. Play with proxies instead of supporting the insane secondary market. Arena doesn't allow for any of this. It's convenient and accessible but it's also rigid. Taking out the social element can be a positive or a negative (my opening statement wasn't exactly a joke), but it kills the soul of the game in the end. The game as a system is incredible, but Arena is very enclosed. They want you to play all the worst configurations because those are the most profitable ones.

So yeah the monetization sucks really hard, but the same of true of the game overall. The cards come in Booster Packs™ for fucks sake. I've heard people say they don't like Arena because you can't resell cards like you can in real life. I've seen people buy entire display boxes of packs because it's "good average value". I like the game as a game, but as a product I've always thought it's a bit of a nightmare. I don't like what it does to people. Arena isn't really any better or worse, just different.

When the stars align and you end up playing a good format without feeling like you've been robbed, it's really incredible. That is also true of Arena. A lot of recent sets have been incredible for drafting, and I had a stretch some years ago where I was really enjoying Historic. Even so, without a group of friends to mutually enable each other, it's hard to continue to justify. Arena doesn't have that sense of community. Those stars won't align consistently.

Over the course of life I've lost the community that used to support this game that I love, so Arena feels like the only option left. It's a good adaptation of the paper game from a business perspective, but not beyond that. It captures fleeting moments of that enjoyment but they feel hollow. I wish I didn't feel so cynical about it all, because I really do love playing Magic. The "playing" part is the only part that doesn't leave a bad taste in my mouth.

This game features predatory microtransactions, and there's far less you can do than when playing Magic: the Gathering physically. I don't blame the lack of features or the smaller card pool on the developers or anyone else. Coding in all those cards, creating all the new animations, and creating all of the new formats would be a monumental task, so I understand why it wasn't done. That being said, it's still another reason I'd prefer to play physically.

It is still Magic: the Gathering, which I will almost always enjoy, but part of the joy of the game for me is playing it in person with friends, which Arena just can't match. On the positive side, the animations and sound effects are pretty sick.

My biggest gripe is the microtransactions. There are two separate currencies with different values that make it harder to gauge just how much you are spending, which is predatory. I've already spent a ridiculous amount on real cardboard, I'm not about to spend more on fake cardboard, and not on fake sleeves.

I have two more minor complaints before I finish this haphazard review.
1) The game asks how much experience you have with Magic, and then forces you to complete a lengthy tutorial regardless of your answer. That's kinda dumb.
2) The game freezes every time I try to close it. I'm not sure if that's an issue on my end, so I'm not going to factor it into my rating, but it's something to keep in mind.

It is the game that never ends.....

Interface and gameplay is quite good. Monetization is terrible. Somehow worse than I remember the physical game even being...

[I have been playing since 1997, and still not good enough to fight against the 'META.']