Simple Review - Magic The Gathering Arena

The Magic the Gathering Arena sandwich has nice meat, three strips of bacon, a slab of tomato, but can never be served without hot, chewy, mushy lettuce.

The greatest user of cardboard in the world has decided to bring Magic the Gathering into a more casual Arena - OH MY GOD I GET IT NOW!

Cards are a lot like puddles on a sidewalk. They are skinny, elegant, and much better when shiny. One would not buy a digital puddle, however. No one that I know certainly. Maybe someone you know. Someone like…Dave, your sister’s husband that is “in on the groundfloor” with NFTs?

Step down off your high-horse, Dave, and listen well: digitizing the pretty pieces of cardboard many people love makes them more accessible. But not too accessible, as I will blather about later.

Magic the Gathering Arena is my first taste of this brand of strategic narcotic, and it has taken my pleasure center like a bank robber. The early game feels positively grandmother-ian in how giving in advice, decks, and packs to crack Wizards of the Coasts are. A guided tutorial pushes you to learn all about bulls*it like First Strike and ass fungus like Menace.

More important to your terrible personality’s representation is the archetype for each of the five main colors. This old news for old players is useful for those of us that chose to be virgins later in life. I quickly found my constant need for control and death in a blue/black deck type. I then quickly found out how bad I am at making decks.

Advice warning: Run with the premade decks for a good while. Rush not to run through this field of brick walls lest you find yourself hovering over the uninstall option within an hour.

Where Magic The Gathering Arena has glistening six-pack abs is the instructional aspects while in-game. A mouse hover at all times helps you understand what fresh hell the latest card has unleashed, and the counter management is all automated. Throw away that mathematics degree at last.

​Modes of play from real cardboard are mostly ignored in Arena. In the budding metaverse, you have Brawl (Commander with only one of each card), Historic (Modern), and Standard (Standard).

Oh, and Alchemy.

Alchemy is Wizards of the Coast attempting to “live service” this bad boy. Magic the Gathering Arena with broken cards wrapped in bubble wrap, if you will. If you will not, then do as I do and ignore this mode as the financial blackhole that it appears to be.

The microtransactional burden of Arena is great for those looking for new wildcards to spend for specific grabs, and nearly hostile for those looking for the prettiest of pretties. Alchemy is a special corner of morally-grey hell where you can tip over a wheelbarrow of greenbacks for cards that can be changed or removed in their isolation at any time.

Why is the world like this? Because Magic the Gathering Arena is better than the others out there, and I…am still addicted.

Magic the Gathering Arena receives forty-three weeks of allowance money for packs out of seventy-two. If I had any money left to spend, I would use it betting on snail races.

You…are welcome.