First Impressions of MTG Arena

Finally, after I believe years, Magic the Gathering Arena is now available on Macs. So how is it?

Well, this morning, having downloaded it just about as soon as the Mac client was available, it was painfully slow, buggy, and kept verifying files - a process that interrupted the game and forced you to wait for half an hour or so.

Thankfully, whether it was server instability or just the kinks of trying to get into a system that was still downloading things in the background, by this evening the game has become far better - running smoothly and working fine.

The primary challenge, now, is that I haven't played Magic in, like, a really long time. Not only do I have to build up a new collection of cards (with the real stuff and MTGO, this makes my third) but I also don't have a great sense for the metagame.

So I've defaulted to my favorite style of deck - a kind of Blue/Black aggro/control, primarily focusing on black creatures (vampires, primarily, which used to be way rarer) and using blue for a bit of control and card draw to keep things up.

I've had pretty decent success rates - I don't know the exact numbers, but I'd say I'm winning roughly every other game, and possibly even more.

One thing I don't love so much is how they obscure how much you're paying for cards by forcing all transactions to be through a Disney Dollar-like Gem currency. It makes me retroactively appreciate how Hearthstone just puts it in dollars if you're not buying a pack of cards at a time with gold. There is also a gold currency here, but I think, like Hearthstone, you can only earn so much in a day.

The UI and UX is an immense step up from what I remember of the MTGO days, with streamlined gameplay that figures out the optimal lands to tap for mana and speeds through phases you don't need to worry about unless you put a stop there for devious purposes.

The deck builder, I think I just need to get to know it better. To be frank, I think I'm way better at playing the game itself than building decks, but I try to do a sort of iterative design where I look out for cards that always seem to sit in my hand, unusued, and try to replace them with ones that I have a use for.

The game also gives you infinite basic lands to work with, which is just rational, but I'm trying to figure out how to set my favorites rather than just manually selecting them.

Anyway, I feel a bit like I'm 8 again, so that's fun. And given the current... everything, I'm glad that I have something to do with the time.