Magic: The Gathering Arena

For casual play and games with friends, Arena is a solid experience. The UI is generally well designed, automated game mechanics keep matches moving (i.e. your mono-green buddy doesn't need to bring 60 D20s just to make it through a turn), and matchmaking is fast. It's also one of the best ways to introduce someone to Magic: The Gathering for free. Most of the negative reviews, myself included, are coming from experienced players with hundreds or even thousands of hours in the game, sometimes decades of experience with Magic as a whole. Even for those players, Arena has something worthwhile to offer. If you're willing to spend money on gems for drafts and competitive events, it's a polished platform, and some events even let you compete for physical booster boxes as prizes. Arena is also reasonably generous with free cards each time a new set releases. If your goal is simply to build some dog water decks from whatever you've opened and mess around in casual queues, that's absolutely doable. Even the preconstructed decks are fun to play against friends, since everyone starts from a roughly standardized power level. Unfortunately, ranked play starts to feel stale around Platinum and above, where you'll spend an endless parade of games facing the same handful of optimized meta decks. You can either spend money to accelerate your wildcard collection or accept that climbing becomes significantly slower while you wait to craft the cards you actually need. That's admittedly true of competitive Magic in general, but unlike paper Magic, your digital collection has no resale or trade value, making the investment much harder to justify. I'd recommend saving your money, buying physical cards instead, and heading to your local game store for some four-player Commander, which Arena has inexplicably never added despite it being the most popular format by a country mile. When you eventually get bored or your favorite Standard deck rotates, those physical cards still have value. You can trade them, sell them, or put them toward your next deck instead of watching your digital collection slowly become obsolete. Plus, you can actually make friends in real life. Strange concept, I know. Arena replaces that experience with someone spamming "Good Game" twelve times while another Otter with prowess gets dropped down your gullet. Granted, paper Magic has its own hazards, but at least this way you don't have to smell them. **Overall (as Magic): 6/10** Magic is still one of the best games ever made, and Arena makes it incredibly easy to jump into a match whenever you want. **As a digital platform: 3/10** Aggressive monetization, a limited selection of formats (seriously, where is four-player Commander?), and an economy designed to discourage experimentation keep Arena from becoming the version of Magic it could have been.

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good to learn the rules and get into the game. At a higher level, matchmaking is awful and often you will play against decks with similar theme or be (seemingly) set up to lose once you've hit a certain number of wins in sequence. All in all a solid 8/10 compared to paper.

I love MTG, but since it's release Arena keeps rising prices and cutting rewards for f2p players. This IP is already making tons of money, they don't NEED to do this. F* hasbro.

I Hate Pacifism

i like this game because i love to play the card game in person with friends and when i found out about this ive been using it ever since

It's MTG online, it's what you'd expect