Magic The Gathering Arena Gets A Thumbs-Up
Over the past few months I’ve written quite a few critical things of Hasbro regarding the Open Game License situation, but it’s important to be fair.
Magic The Gathering: Arena is an excellent free-to-play game and I’ve enjoyed it a lot over the last six weeks or so.
Back in the 90s and the early 2000s I played a bit of Magic The Gathering (for ease of typing I’ll refer to it as MTG for the rest of this post), but I eventually stopped for three reasons. 1.) I was really busy all the time for the rest of the 2000s, 2.) those cards get expensive, and 3.) finding people with whom to play was hassle. I still have about a shoebox’s worth of MTG cards sitting in my closet, but I don’t think I’ve opened that box for like 15 years.
Anyway, while I was reading about the OGL problems, I also came across a few posts referencing that MTG had become a billion-dollar brand for Hasbro. A billion dollars? I hadn’t expected that. I recalled vaguely that there was a MTG computer game in the 90s, so I wondered if anything like that existed now.
After some research, I came across Magic The Gathering: Arena, discovered it was free-to-play, learned that it would run on my tablet, and gave it ago.
It’s a very well-designed and slick app. The onboarding tutorials are excellent – it starts with a “color challenge” where you play against the computer using a deck of each of the game’s five colors, and when you win, you get a bunch of free (virtual) card decks you can use to play against actual humans. It also does an excellent job of resolving all the various insane rule combinations you can get in an MTG match.
The game really has the “hedonic loop” (the effort/reward) cycle down pat. Every day there’s a challenge where if you play 20 cards of a certain type you get a bonus in gold and experience. If you win matches, you get gold and experience, and if you get enough experience and you get rewarded with more (virtual, of course) cards. Of course, microtransactions are liberally laden throughout – you can buy custom card sleeves, custom avatars, and “gems” that permit entry to various tournament-style events. Despite that, you can enjoy yourself thoroughly without spending a single actual penny. And the app is great for casual play – you can pop in quick, play a quick match while waiting for the bus or the doctor or something, and then be done in a way that is impossible with physical cards. One of the great strengths of MTG as a game is that the matches can be over really quickly (depending on how the cards are drawn, as quickly as two minutes in some cases), so the app is good for casual play.
It automates out the most annoying part of playing MTG – finding other players, and then dealing with their personality “quirks” which may or may not make for a pleasant gaming experience. The game can usually pair you with a player in under a minute, often less, and interaction is severely limited during the game – basically a few words like “Hello” and “Good Move”, and if someone’s annoying, you can simply mute them. That way you don’t have to deal with someone ragequitting and flipping the table, or endless argumentation over some fine point or another of the rules.
So, I’ve enjoyed the MTG Arena app quite a bit, and it makes playing the game so frictionless that in the past six weeks I’ve probably played more actual matches of MTG than I did in all the 90s and the 2000s.
And I can now say that I’ve won several MTG matches on my tablet while using the restroom.
In the 90s, if you said you had won MTG games while in the restroom, people would have been gravely concerned. 🙂 Less so in 2023.
-JM