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.
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.