N00b or O.G. MTGA is🔥

I am an o.g. gamer girl, & cardshop holdout from the 1900s (started playing at age 14, & am now 32 aka Im old now lol🤭); so I have been playing this card game for most of my life, & have been happily playing it on this app (almost exclusively due to parental time constraints) for at least 3 if not 4years now, & Wow! I barely have anything bad to say at all! In fact, the only critique I can even think of is that sometimes when dealing with customer service; they can be a bit slow at times in getting you a response. Otherwise there are all sorts of perks from: being able to earn your mastery pass from skill & gameplay instead of only being able to buy it, to the online events that allow you a chance to win IRL booster boxes &/or other irl & online prizes, that will be REALLY be sent to you (my kids father just recently won one of the edges of eternity boxes; so I can 💯 personally attest that it is NOT a rip off); to the beginner friendly stopgaps they put in-between each turn-phases, or the awesome animated card sleeves & card styles (that can also be earned or purchased!), and even more TBH!! (no SERIOUSLY, there are so many sweet perks!!) This online adaptation of a classic card game…dare, I say it?…Yeah I dare. Might even have the 1-up on real life!! can’t recommend enough if you love this game at all download this app now!! I doubt you will be sorry.🤓👾Keep it up wizards of the coast! You guys are indeed real ones!!🫶👏👏👏

Good for learning, trash for sustained play.

This app is so well made and has a great tutorial that is super helpful for learning the game. Beyond that the actual game itself is ruined by over the top algorithms. They have taken every ounce of randomness out of a card game (I understand true randomness is not plausible on an operating system) to the point you can tell from starting hands if you are supposed to win the match or if you are supposed to lose. Granted there are plenty of good close games. But the game decides who wins and loses and it is very clear when you are supposed to lose. I play paper magic weekly so I’m well aware of mana floods, droughts, bad hands etc. but this app is very different. If you have a card that maybe isn’t the best for your deck, you are going to have that card in your starting hand almost every time. You’re on a winning streak? The game will decide it’s time for you to lose to get that win/loss ratio back down to 50% by giving you impossible hands, even on a well built deck. It’s a hopeless feeling and I’m not one to concede 5 times in a row just so I can possibly have a good match. This is especially frustrating when you pay gold or gems for an event only to find that even after a mulligan or two you are given impossible hands because it is simply not your turn to win. This game needs more randomness in the draws and WAY less algorithms deciding who wins and who loses.

So much to take in

I have to say there is so much content here, it’s tough to take it all in. This is not going to be a game you pick up and figure out in an hour or two…or even a week. But saying all that, there are a ton of tutorials and practice games and stuff to introduce you to it. And also, you don’t need to spend a cent to get a lot of content. I have just started to scratch the surface of the game and I already have a lot of gold and wildcards and such. I plan to save it until I have a better handle on what I want to do. There are just so many options it’s a bit overwhelming. Find an online guide, ideally one that will give you some codes for free stuff, and ease into it through that. Without a guide or a friend who can tell you what to do, you’re probably going to bail. And that’s a shame, as this is probably one of the most played and well crafted games in existence. When a card or series of cards breaks the game, they fix it. The documentation is so detailed that it kind of has its own language - you’ll pick it up eventually. I give it 4 stars because you are going to have to devote a lot of time to get to where you can feel competitive…and I haven’t gotten there yet. I hope that will happen eventually. But I also have a life that I enjoy and I refuse to get pulled into an obsession. That might be a challenge, but I’m willing to risk it.

Magic is Dope, Arena is not

Let me start by saying I love magic the gathering m, it is by far the best game ever made it is an incredible game of skill and one of the most fun things ive ever found period. But arena is such an incredibly broken app it simply doesnt function most of the time. about 50% of the time it just crashes for no reason, I always only get half of the gold from my rewards actually put into my account, there are always issues with sending direct challenges (if you cancel a challenge it just greys out the challenge button) and sometimes you can’t send challenges in certain formats for no discernable reason. The game freezes constantly requiring a restart which loses games all the time. And if you leave the app for more than ten seconds it says “connecting to the server” until you restart the app. Overall this is one of the worst made apps of all time, just compare it to league on mobile which is a much much more graphically complex game which runs perfectly every time. also the fact that the cards in gane are rendered in 3d was a horrible decision, as it leads to a lot of the issues i described above. Lastly there needs to be a penalty for leaving the game without conceding, almost half my games end with someone simply leaving the game and you have to wait for like three minutes for their time to run out. This app is Garbage!!!

Old school to new

Have played magic from the mid 90s off and on till today and have loved it magic arena is a decent version of magic but it’s missing a massive part of what makes magic so versatile and that’s the big game modes for many players and that’s multi player game types every thing from 4 way free for alls too two headed giant/dragon and game types like commander and emperor and I ever so much enjoy playing stuff like plane chasers I’ve played magic on so many different game systems and as of late I’ve played every thing from magic 2012 to magic duels on Xbox with an insanely amount of my friends for hours on end against non other then AI computers in 2 headed giant just to kill hours of time and see what kinda crazy stuff we can come up with an I feel like arena missed that mark completely plus with the insanity behind the new cards every like 2 months it fees like now keeping up with the card base and strategy behind decks is getting ridiculous and impossible too keep up with think you guys need to take a step back and reevaluate what magic was in the last 20 years and refocus your efforts too bring back the basics of magic which was too bring players from all aspects together and enjoy the creativity of building decks from what’s available in a game type such as everything from legacy to standard and everything in between we don’t need 100 new play sets a year when we are missing out on the foundation of team based game styles and the casual game experience

Constant Crashes and Unplayable

My friend got me into magic and has pointed me towards this game to help further learn and understand how to play magic in general. I’m playing on an iOS device that’s up to date. The magic application itself is also up to date update wise. Once I completed the tutorial the game force closed itself. I clicked the game and it got to the loading screen and just stayed there. I did some research and tried a few different things, clearing cache, clearing app data, offloading/ unloading the app itself, restarting my device. Nothing fixed the issue it set at the loading screen for 15-20 minutes and I’d had enough so I just uninstalled and reinstalled. This time it let me get past the initial loading screen so great. I clicked the color battles and started them. Once it started it got to the screen where it showed my opponent then it immediately force closes the app. Once I click the app to load back up it loads fine. No issues. I go to start any type of battle and it gets to the screen showing me my opponent then immediately it force closes the app itself again. Nothing I’ve tried is fixing this issue… I’ve played the game a total of maybe 20ish minutes and have had nothing but issues making it essentially unplayable. I’d love some feedback or what to do as I really want to play the game.

How I survived Covid-19 in retail.

Sooo, I used to have a pretty nasty Magic habit, and a pretty poor executed habit at that. I was working at GameStop when I first started playing again for the first time (x4). I was buying in small doses and Fatpacks because I loved the experience of playing a scratch off and still having something to show for it even if I didn’t get a decent win. I loved building decks, but sooner or later I would dread reorganizing, fall out of playing with friends, or decide not to spend an hour driving to come to work sleep deprived for Midnight releases, plus let’s be honest sometimes the smell at Magic events can be very strong and oh my god I’ve had people cheat, flip tables and steal cards. Enter Arena, organization? Meh. Cheaters? Nope. Flipping tables? Maybe theirs but mine isn’t flipping unless I chuck my phone or manhandle my monitor. Stealing cards? Yeah, okay. Smell? Maybe if I’m on public transit or it’s the day after chili night at my house. My only gripe is multiplayer. I want to play two-headed giant, Wizard’s Tower, Commander, but this is a great one on one experience, and the season pass is so worth the cash, it’s also (as has been mentioned) a great learning and experimentation tool for the formats provided. If you love strategy and deck building this is, in my opinion, one of the best games you can download to your phone.

Ignore the Haters

I’ve been a paper fan for years before getting into Arena. My biggest concern joining the game was a lack of standard play experience - I’ve managed to draft over 100 games without ever spending any money in the last year alone. I can relate to the frustrations of RNG but ultimately, this game is as good as the paper version aside from the occasional bug. Weekly updates and even more frequent patches keep this from becoming an issue for me. There is a ton of support, and the only things people dislike seem to be related to the cards themselves, not the app. If I was going to make one request to the developer, I think it would help casual players if there was a better matchmaking algorithm for who you get paired against in non-ranked matches. I’m a little more competitive than some folks, but I like to test-play deck changes without affecting my rank and will enter the “casual” queue. Sometimes in doing so I run into folks just goofing off with their decks, and when they lose immediately it is fun for neither of us. Maybe if there was a way to select “casual play only” to avoid mixing the competitive testers and the “I just built a fish tribal deck for fun” people. And I know I said one request, but I should be able to add friends from recent players. That is my only other grievance lol

Keep up to date with next year's Magic: The Gathering release dates - our guide has everything you need on all the sets in 2025 and 2026.

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