Individual interactions are also a little more fun with animations, like when a fairy swoops in and scoops up a card, throwing it back into an owner’s hand. I also can’t tell you how much I appreciate not having to bust out 25 paper tokens when playing a Selesnya deck, and having them populate almost instantly (or using a helpful interface for a “put any card you own from outside of the game into your hand” cast instead of leafing through a binder). It really is a 1:1 version of the game, with the ability to hold a button and completely stop to take in every single card interaction. The game is in a great place, whether you’re favoring the meta or creating crazy jank, and up through the last rotation I had 25 viable decks ready to go in Arena for the cost of roughly one or two paper decks. The world really is your oyster, and Arena, which supports just about every standard card in the game currently (99.9%, outside of bans here and there), is ready to facilitate your dream deck.īefore I dig into all of the shortcomings of this digital iteration (of which there have been many failures and small successes), I have to really drive home how much fun I’ve had in both paper Magic and Arena this past year. Deckbuilding contains a lot of Magic‘s appeal, as you can opt for super competitive builds that create new metas, go for accepted-upon “net decks” and just focus on playing the game, or craft “jank,” some of which contain crazy instant-win combos when the stars align perfectly.
Red generally is aggressive and aims for damage, white generally is defensive and favors healing, blue generally counters spells, but you can slot just about any archetype into any color combo. After acquiring cards in packs - or singles, which is possible through turning in “wild cards” in Arena - you can create a deck to your heart’s content, featuring any number of the game’s core colors: white, blue, black, red, and green (and colorless, if you want to get technical). There are hundreds of different styles of play, but most official forms center around “standard,” or, about a year-and-a-half’s cycle of current cards (which is what Arena favors, and I’ll speak to later). So not only does what you cast matter, but when you cast it.
Much of the nuance of Magic relies on “the stack,” wherein players are allowed to directly “respond” to spells, with the last-casted spell acting first. If you’ve never played Magic before, players take turns laying down lands (mana to pay for spells), and “casting” spells, which range from creatures that stay on the board to inflict damage or defend, to instant or sorcery speed spells that deal direct damage or manipulate the board state. So when I say that Arena is basically a 1:1 re-creation of the base game, you can see why it would be so appealing. It really speaks to how powerful Magic‘s core design is, thanks to Dr. Richard Garfield, its still-active creator. The key thing is that at any point I could pick it up, and outside of learning a few keywords here and there - and the concept of Planeswalkers, powerful summon-like cards with their own spells - I could play without much fuss. My history with Magic started when it really took off, and periodically over the years, various itches flared back up (I think it’s a permanent rash now), calling me to play.
Magic is one of the most popular games in the world for a reason: it’s still good after all this time. Magic: Arena is basically a recreation of that strong base, with its own set of monetization problems to boot.
That was the power of Magic, and in the two decades plus since its release, that spark has endured. The idea of building decks (made easier when groups of friends donated a ton of cards to a cube) was something completely foreign to me, like choosing party members in a JRPG had been years before, or picking which Mega Man level to tackle next.
The first time I touched a Magic card was 1996, and within moments I was entranced.