Trying Out MTG Arena on a Phone

 Back almost ten years ago when Hearthstone was new, I tried it out - it was a sort of similar game to Magic, with familiar Warcraft lore, and best of all, it worked on Macs. But also, it seemed poised to work well on a mobile platform, even the rather simple-by-necessity phone platform. I think MTG Arena was likely WotC's response to Hearthstone. While MTG Online had been a kind of direct translation of the game to a computerized medium, including the ability to trade cards with other players, Arena ditched the traditional form of acquisition, giving us things like Wildcards, and then awarding tons of free packs simply for playing. Indeed, you can actually build some pretty serious decks without paying a cent, though if you want to have a bunch of competitive decks, you'll probably want to drop some cash.

The thing is, Magic is a more complicated game than Hearthstone. There's far more interactivity and complexity to its cards. Arena manages to streamline some of the things that made MTGO slow, like its pretty smart auto-tapping for lands, but how does it play on an iPhone screen?

Kinda ok? I guess?

To be fair, I have a relatively ancient phone, an iPhone 6S, which is six years old. Therefore, some of the graphical flair causes the game to drag a little (my Macbook Air, which is only a few months old and has the M1 chip, has no problems with it.)

So it's possible some of the awkwardness of the game is due to my phone being slow. I think I'm just kind of amazed that it works at all. I could certainly see the game running fine on an iPad, where I imagine you could have just the same UI as the PC version (I say PC including Macs here). The phone version squashes things a bit, so my impulse-purchased Davriel avatar is in a tiny rectangle rather than being at the lower center of the screen.

Still, it's exciting to see that I can now play Magic while away from my computer. This does probably put a final nail in the coffin of any interest I have in playing more Hearthstone (I'm not boycotting Blizzard, given what I've been hearing from developers working there, but MTG is a much earlier love of mine, and I generally like the game better anyway.)