Magic: The Gathering Arena 12+

I have to say there is so much content here, it’s tough to take it all in. This is not going to be a game you pick up and figure out in an hour or two…or even a week. But saying all that, there are a ton of tutorials and practice games and stuff to introduce you to it. And also, you don’t need to spend a cent to get a lot of content. I have just started to scratch the surface of the game and I already have a lot of gold and wildcards and such. I plan to save it until I have a better handle on what I want to do. There are just so many options it’s a bit overwhelming.

Find an online guide, ideally one that will give you some codes for free stuff, and ease into it through that. Without a guide or a friend who can tell you what to do, you’re probably going to bail. And that’s a shame, as this is probably one of the most played and well crafted games in existence. When a card or series of cards breaks the game, they fix it. The documentation is so detailed that it kind of has its own language - you’ll pick it up eventually.

I give it 4 stars because you are going to have to devote a lot of time to get to where you can feel competitive…and I haven’t gotten there yet. I hope that will happen eventually. But I also have a life that I enjoy and I refuse to get pulled into an obsession. That might be a challenge, but I’m willing to risk it.

Let me start by saying I love magic the gathering m, it is by far the best game ever made it is an incredible game of skill and one of the most fun things ive ever found period. But arena is such an incredibly broken app it simply doesnt function most of the time. about 50% of the time it just crashes for no reason, I always only get half of the gold from my rewards actually put into my account, there are always issues with sending direct challenges (if you cancel a challenge it just greys out the challenge button) and sometimes you can’t send challenges in certain formats for no discernable reason. The game freezes constantly requiring a restart which loses games all the time. And if you leave the app for more than ten seconds it says “connecting to the server” until you restart the app. Overall this is one of the worst made apps of all time, just compare it to league on mobile which is a much much more graphically complex game which runs perfectly every time. also the fact that the cards in gane are rendered in 3d was a horrible decision, as it leads to a lot of the issues i described above. Lastly there needs to be a penalty for leaving the game without conceding, almost half my games end with someone simply leaving the game and you have to wait for like three minutes for their time to run out. This app is Garbage!!!

Sooo, I used to have a pretty nasty Magic habit, and a pretty poor executed habit at that. I was working at GameStop when I first started playing again for the first time (x4). I was buying in small doses and Fatpacks because I loved the experience of playing a scratch off and still having something to show for it even if I didn’t get a decent win. I loved building decks, but sooner or later I would dread reorganizing, fall out of playing with friends, or decide not to spend an hour driving to come to work sleep deprived for Midnight releases, plus let’s be honest sometimes the smell at Magic events can be very strong and oh my god I’ve had people cheat, flip tables and steal cards. Enter Arena, organization? Meh. Cheaters? Nope. Flipping tables? Maybe theirs but mine isn’t flipping unless I chuck my phone or manhandle my monitor. Stealing cards? Yeah, okay. Smell? Maybe if I’m on public transit or it’s the day after chili night at my house. My only gripe is multiplayer. I want to play two-headed giant, Wizard’s Tower, Commander, but this is a great one on one experience, and the season pass is so worth the cash, it’s also (as has been mentioned) a great learning and experimentation tool for the formats provided. If you love strategy and deck building this is, in my opinion, one of the best games you can download to your phone.