Sinking Deep Into MTGA

Oh boy, have I played a lot of Magic in the past... 30 hours or so.

Now that the game is running smoothly (though it always seems to need to clean up after restarting, which takes a while) I've been playing around in the game.

As you play, you can (limited to a certain number of games a day, presumably for sanity's sake) earn Xp which then gives you various rewards, including cards. After finishing the five "color challenges" that start with 4 bouts against AI with a predetermined card order to teach you various concepts and then tossing you against a real foe for the last (though giving you credit, win-or-lose) you seem to then unlock a daily quest to get two-color card sets. I first got a Gruul Clans set (my least favorite color-combination, actually! Except maybe Green/White) and today I earned an Azorius deck - these are full decks that are added to your collection, including the rare... what are they called, pain lands? The ones like Watery Grave where they're actually two land types and you can either let them come in tapped or pay 2 life.

I've been amazed at how effective the Azorius set is right out of the box, though its initial successes have hit a bit of a dip lately.

I'm still a hardcore Dimir fan, and have a deck that now has two Thiefs of Sanity - and will probably get more if I feel ready to spend my Rare cards.

Oh, here's how targeting specific cards works:

You can't actually trade with other people (probably to tamp down on scams) and so, instead, as you open packs, you'll get little tokens that allow you to craft new cards. I believe that once you surpass four copies of any given card (specific to a set/artwork) you'll start getting these tokens instead, and it might be that each pack comes with some automatically. I believe you need to get multiple tokens to earn a full Mythic or Rare card - I haven't gotten super into it.

The point is, as your collection fills out, you can start going after specific cards, and I'm finding myself very tempted to make an old-school Dimir mill deck - especially given that they've finally keyworded "mill."

I've been playing in casual, unranked matches for now - want to iron out my decks a bit before I step into those waters. So most people I play have relatively simple decks - largely built out of the starter decks you earn early on by playing the tutorials. Occasionally, you come across some insanely powerful deck that looks like it's built for tournaments, and while that usually means you're screwed, if you manage to outmaneuver it, it makes it that much sweeter.

Just some metagame things I'm surprised by, as someone who hasn't really played much since 2006 or so:

Healing seems like a huge thing - lifelink creatures and health-gaining cards are way more prevalent than they were in my day. Healing used to be kind of scoffed at as a waste of a card, though it seems like you get so much additional value out of these cards that it's a pretty big bonus.

Despite the prevalence of healing, the games go fast - it might just be that Arena is way more streamlined than MTGO, but it seems like it's faster than a game of Hearthstone - which is kind of shocking, given how much easier it is to play a defensive game in MTG than Hearthstone.

At least at the casual level, there's a decent degree of diversity among the playstyles, which is very nice. I remember playing during the Kamigawa block, and it was like every opponent was using Sensei's Divining Top, Umezawa's Jitte, and maybe those Black spirit dragons that would life-drain for 5 when they died. And that was in "casual" games.

I still have a ton to learn about the metagame - I can wrap my head around the Ravnica guilds because, well, that's what I most recently played. But when people show up with these Ikoria triome decks and all the crazy mutation stuff, I really feel out of my league (especially as a creature that's got all those mutations has about three billion abilities.)

In terms of flavor, I really hope they're planning a return to Innistrad, as I missed the boat for that both times and would love to be able to check that setting out from a card-playing perspective (I've already made a level 16 adventure for my Ravnica D&D game - currently at level 10 - that will take them through all four provinces of Innistrad and probably take a long time to finish. But we've got a lot of plot to get through before we get there.)

Anyway, despite long ago passing my daily rewards, I've been having a blast just playing.

Again, I really dislike how the Crystal currency makes it hard to remember exactly how many actual dollars (or euros or whatever) you're pumping into the game. I spent 25 bucks yesterday and I'm sticking to for about a month - thankfully, it's not like I can't win without rare-encrusted decks, so I don't feel that compelled to spend more.