MTG Arena Is Great... When It Doesn't Crash

Magic the Gathering Arena is the... two year old, I think, online digital client for playing Magic the Gathering. You get a digital card collection from which you can build decks and battle other people. Much as Blizzard took a lot of inspiration from Magic in building Hearthstone, you can see how Wizards took some ideas from Hearthstone in terms of monetization and online features here with this second run at an online version of their groundbreaking card game.

Now that Arena is on Macs, I've finally been able to jump into the ring, and I've got to say that the game runs wonderfully smoothly, even on my old-ass computer (which I got in fall of 2014). Or rather, I should say that it runs smoothly when it runs at all. When it's rolling, the game is responsive and quick, and one of the things that has made this such a better experience than MTG Online is how smooth it is.

There are some tricks they've taken to make it go faster. For one, there's a rather smart AI system that will automatically tap lands for mana when you want to cast a spell. It almost always taps them in a manner to leave as much open for you to cast other spells you have in hand - if you have dual lands, for instance, it'll prioritize tapping basic lands if you can cast the spell with them.

So while the play experience tends to be great once I get into a match, it has its problems.

Every time I boot the game up, it claims there was some problem with the assets when it previously shut down, and it needs to verify them. Then, the game will often crash if I try to queue up for a match or, rarely, right as a game starts.

Generally, I never have these issues in the middle of a game. But every time I try to open up the client is a coin toss whether it'll just immediately crash and quit, and the odds of it crashing when I try to queue for a match are about 5-10%

It's more of an inconvenience than a game-breaking problem - only rarely have I found myself desperately trying to get back online while my timer runs out and I fail to mulligan on a hand with a single off-color basic land - but it's definitely annoying.

My hope is that this is just early kinks in the system that will be worked out after the Mac client has been out for a while. I don't recall there being a beta for the Mac client, which is annoying, but also potentially a reason to believe that these issues will be addressed in new builds later down the road.

What I worry about is that there's some problem with my computer in particular.