Just like playing Magic: The Gathering in real-life, without the body odor!

The Strongest card in this game is the Credit card.

This game is great! 10/10! (please don't send the Pinkertons to my house WOTC... please) Seriously though, one of the greatest games, just horribly managed by the parent company.

The pinkertons are currently raiding my house and making my wife cry

Most OP card is the credit card

A pretty bizarre knock-off where some random people have the same names as Lord of the Rings characters for some reason.

Free 2 Play but Pay 2 win

Look, would I recommend you play this game? Absolutely not. It's economy is anti-player and practically predatory. At every opportunity when choosing between making a better game and short term profits, they have chosen the latter, and they have shown that they will not change their practices because it keeps working. Am I going to keep playing? Absolutely. I have sold my soul. I will continue to buy the mastery pass every month because they have capitalized on my fear of missing out, and I have an addictive personality. But you? You still have time. Turn back now while you still can. Don't be like me. If not, abandon all hope ye who enter here.

My wife said if this review gets 50 likes I can go buy 2 collector booster boxes. Update: got 2 CMM, luckily no jeweled lotus. :)

It's like paper magic except you have no friends and your expensive cards have no resale value

pros: more magic. cons: double dipping into the players wallets everything else: there's mastercard

Magic: The Suffering

After over 1000 hours in Hell the Game, I have compiled a useful list of tips for new players.

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The Power Nein!:

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1. Don't Spend ANY Real Money on This Game

There are several daily quests that reward you with gold, which you can use to buy booster packs and other in-game items. However, I strongly recommend that you ONLY use your gold for booster packs. Tempted by special bundles or premium cosmetics? Resist the urge. The economy is designed to drain your wallet, not improve your experience. It's a slot machine with extra steps.

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2. Get Used to Seeing the Message "Waiting for the Server..."

This message will haunt you. It appears for almost every single click you make, so you might as well accept it as part of the experience. If you're particularly lucky you may even wait over a minute to enter a match, only for the game to reward your patience with a Draw (also known as "a waste of your time").

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3. Speaking of Time, Get Used to Watching the Opponent’s Timeouts Burn Out Every Game

The MTG Arena community is a festering pit of bitterness and salt, and many players have one simple goal: waste your time. Some will deliberately wait until the last possible second before making a move, hoping you'll rage-quit in frustration. Stay strong, and know that for every timeout they burn, you’ll receive one in return. However, if your opponent has an instant or any other sneaky trick, you’ll also get to enjoy timeouts in your own turn. Every. Single. Phase. It’s like sharing a dinner table with someone chewing with their mouth open, forever.

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4. Don't Expect to Be Rewarded for Making a Good Deck

Skill? Strategy? Careful deck-building? Irrelevant. Matchmaking in MTG Arena operates on a sinister set of rules. When completing your daily quest, you must win 15 matches to claim maximum rewards. Sounds fair? It is.. until you hit the 7th win, at which point you'll start facing opponents built in a lab to break your will. Push through to 11 wins, and the game will actively try to ruin your life. Opponents will miraculously draw the perfect counter to your deck at the exact right moment. Every. Single. Time. It’s not RNG. It’s psychological warfare.

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5. Speaking of Tougher Decks, Instantly Concede if Your Opponent Plays a Red/Blue/Black Mana Combo

See red, blue, and black mana on the board? Run. This color combination almost always means you’re up against a "heist" deck; a Frankenstein abomination made of stolen cards and mangled strategies. Heist decks specialize in using your deck against you, so ironically, the better your cards, the faster you’ll lose. These decks are engineered for players who want wins without dignity, creativity, or a working soul. Save your sanity. Hit Concede and pretend that match never happened.

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6. Remember the Rule of Anonymity

As with all things on the internet, anonymity breeds toxicity. In MTG Arena, this principle has reached its final form. Since players have zero accountability, many behave like cartoon villains. Expect spammed emotes, rope-burning trolls, and sociopaths who’ll drag a match out just to hear you scream internally. My advice? Concede immediately when faced with toxic behavior. Just start a new game and take comfort knowing that whoever’s on the other side of the screen is already losing at life.

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7. Forget About Basic Mathematics

The game claims, through various cards and mechanics, that your deck gets shuffled. This is a lie. A bold, brazen, mathematically illiterate lie. In a 60-card deck with 24 lands, it is common to draw 7+ lands in a row; a statistical anomaly so insulting that even a drunk dice roller would call it rigged. After recording my gameplay and showing it to a class of advanced mathematics students, their reaction was catastrophic. Some began crying. Others reconsidered their field. One now lives in a hill-side cabin and studies moss.

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8. There Is No Escape

Tired of specific players ruining your games? No worries! You’ll be seeing them again. And again. And again. There is no way to block or avoid players. Once the algorithm has selected your "special someone," expect them to appear at your wedding, your funeral, and every casual match in between.

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9. You’re Not the Main Character; The Cards Are

Think you're the hero of this digital journey? Wrong. You’re an unpaid intern in the story of your own deck. Sometimes the cards align and you feel like a god. Other times you’ll top-deck a land six turns in a row while staring down lethal damage. You didn’t lose because your strategy failed, you lost because your cardboard overlords demanded a blood sacrifice. The sooner you accept that you’re just a glorified card-flipping bystander, the more peace you’ll find. Not fun, mind you, just peace.

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Hope this helps, and good luck! You're gonna need it! :)

I only play this because I'm addicted to the gameplay. I am almost never having actual fun when I play, it just "scratches an itch" nothing else can. I long for the day MTG ends so I can be free of my shackles

My gambling addict friend said if I post a review on Magic: The Gathering Arena and it gets 350 likes and 150 Awards that he will buy me a case of beer and some vodka.. So I'm just gonna leave this here.

sometimes you draw lands and spells. but watch out! sometimes you do not

Infuriating to the extreme as a new player. 1. Build a deck. 2. Win a few games. 3. Then get matched against decks that counter yours. 4. Or decks that don't counter yours, but you'll draw no lands. 5. Or decks that don't counter yours but you'll draw only lands. 6. Every now and again win a game, but your opponent just makes you wait 2 minutes until they timeout. 7. Get sick of the situation and look to build another deck. 8. You don't have the required cards for the deck that looks interesting. 9. SPEND AN UNHOLY AMOUNT OF MONEY ON PACKS 10. Goto 1 It's too late for me now, I'm addicted to the frustration and pain. Save yourselves!

Some poor developer had to code Emrakul, the Promised End into this game.

Mom left me at a card shop one day when I was 11, I'm now $20000 in debt and can't afford to eat.

If you want to have fun building decks and trying new things, you'll have to take out life insurance on a loved one and beat them to death. Remember, this "free to play" game is also free to uninstall.

Horribly balanced game with a predatory system designed for 40 y/o MTG addicts and consoomers. There's no reason why this game should be as expensive as paper Magic, you either spend $100+ on a deck or treat the game like a job so you can have a deck remotely meta after months of grinding, all that work just to face 50 IQ auto piloting mono-red players in 90% of your ranked games.

My gambling addict friend said if I post a review and it gets 250 likes and 100 Awards that he will buy me a case of beer, some vodka and 1 kg of lemon So im just gonna leave this here.

Blackrock Gaming

I have THOUSANDS of hours on the main client, and hundreds of thousands in paper Magic. I was an L1 Judge. Played competitively in paper, grinded the leaderboards in Arena. I'm a Mythic 250 player in Constructed, peak Mythic 76, and Diamond in Limited. I only installed this garbage on Steam so I could leave a review for it. Run away. Run so very, very far away from this game. Predatory microtransactions, shameless cash grabs, FOMO and other manipulative tactics to target people with impulse control and predilections for developing addictions, bugs bugs bugs BUGS, a rigged shuffler and matchmaking system (yes, it's true, this shit is so flagrantly rigged and it's painfully obvious if you've spent any time at all playing MTG thru any medium OTHER than Arena. Or really card games in general. Cope harder, you fucking neckbeards. And feel free to drown me in Jester awards, that shit is great for my hair ♥ ) and beneath it all is a bland, unrewarding game that's completely lost its identity and a disgrace to the game it used to be. The heart and soul of MTG disappeared a long, long time ago. Even beneath the garbage client, the horrible value for your dollar when spending money, the blatant disregard for the integrity of the game and everything else wrong with it, underneath it all Magic the Gathering is just a shit game now. If this game were to release in its current state today it would be DOA. The only thing propping its bloated, maggot-riddled corpse up today is the legacy the game had before COVID. MTG's, and by extension, Arena's, existence is no longer about the game. It's about printing money for Hasbro, and watching Mark Rosewater tailor the game to HIS specific preferences and playstyle. Which he's always tried to do, but up until the last few years had had colleagues in R&D that would keep his dumb ass in check when he tried to do stupid shit -- we don't have that anymore, which is now why all the formats in the game feel and play exactly the same (low-cost, overpowered cards on curve that your opponent probably can't interact with, or if they can interact with they have to have an immediate answer to or they lose the game) and any ingenuity or enjoyment that you could have from this game is pretty much gone. I swear you could flood WOTC's offices and probably only get one or two people wet that have ever even HEARD of the term "power creep." I also love how a booster of paper MTG will have 15 cards in it, and the ones in Arena only have 8. Because -- and this was WOTC that said this, btw, google it -- they didn't want new players to "feel overwhelmed with too many cards" upon opening a booster pack. So they're just gonna give you half as many cards in each pack. FOR YOUR OWN GOOD. LOL. Not because they want to strangle your collection progression so you're forced to play more or spend more money, no. They're trying to make the game more accessible to new players. Right. Not because they want new players to be a part of this game or (absolutely HORRIBLE) community, but because they want to create a new generation of addicts. Because this game only exists to print money for Hasbro. Period. Plus you have WOTC's INSISTENCE on trying the Hearthstone method of "balance," which is to say they shit out cards and just say that they'll patch them later if they're a problem. So now you have cards that function in certain ways that are exclusive to Arena (take The One Ring, for example, among many many others) on top of cards that exist ONLY in Arena (Alchemy cards). One of the main appeals of MTG was that WOTC had a long track record of very very carefully crafting cards and sets with a great deal of care to make sure that these cards weren't going to be damaging to the enjoyment or vitality of the game overall, or certain formats. Sometimes things would slip thru the cracks (Cawblade, for example -- or, just, y'know, ALL of Jace, the Mind Sculptor, which btw you have Mark Rosewater to thank for both of those c: ), sure, but overall there was a great deal of attention to detail that went into making these sets because it was a paper card game. You COULDN'T "just patch it." Nowadays they just shit out cards as they please under the justification that it can be nerfed/buffed later, but they don't really do that aside from cards that THEY deem to be "problematic" (again, The One Ring, or for some reason The Meathook Massacre? Which was banned in a Standard format in which monoblack at the time wasn't even the best or most oppressive archetype, and Meathook got banned over at least a half-dozen black cards that I could see maybe being a problem (GY Trespasser, Gix, Sheoldred, Misery's Shadow??? PHYREXIAN FLESHGORGER??), BUT EVEN AT THAT, MONOBLACK WASN'T EVEN DOMINATING THE FORMAT AT THE TIME!! Meathook Massacre was one of very, very few, if not the ONLY, viable boardwipes available to Black at the time, in a Standard format dominated by UW Soldiers making insanely wide boards of small-ish creatures without lifting a finger. UW had a consistently higher winrate over any other deck in the format, primarily because aside from Meathook Massacre, the only other boardwipes in the format were in White. Smile. They didn't find anything in Blue or White to be problematic, just the one boardwipe in the format keeping UW in check. Got it. But UW was untouched! Thanks again, MaRo! You pinheaded donkey fucker). So they hit the ground running by abusing the "we'll just patch it later" mentality, released set after set with horribly designed cards that are a detriment to every format they touch and thus the game as a whole, and then never followed up by changing any of these cards that turned out to be problematic anyway. This may be more of a personal gripe, but I also REALLY despise all of the "Hearthstoneesque" gimmicks they've been adding, like Seek for example. Shit that hands you a random card, or generates some kind of random effect, etc. Card effects that are entirely RNG. That shit doesn't, and shouldn't, exist in MTG. Every card has -- HAD, a clear and understandable effect that could be performed by a normal human being. Conjuring fake cards, grabbing random cards out of your or your opponent's library and other effects are NOT MTG, and have only cost the game more of what made it unique and fun and special and has turned it into another soulless, money-grubbing CCG just like any other. And that's a really depressing thought. The fact that MTG didn't have that Hearthstonian garbage in it was, imo, the bulk of its appeal, and now it's gone. And why bother releasing Modern Horizons on Arena when you can't even PLAY MODERN? Just give us a fucking platform to play MTG on, goddammit. It's not that hard. Stop rigging the shuffler and the matchmaking to try and preserve players' 50% winrates to keep them coming back. JUST LET US PLAY THE FUCKING GAME. PLAYERS KEPT COMING BACK TO MTG FOR YEARS BECAUSE IT WAS FUN, ENGAGING, CREATIVE, TOOK A BIT OF SKILL TO BE GOOD AT, AND OFFERED AN ENJOYABLE EXPERIENCE PEOPLE COULD HAVE WITH THEIR FRIENDS. If you didn't resort to these underhanded, slimy, despicable manipulative tactics to try and TRICK players into sticking with the game, and instead just made a good game for them to play and STAYED OUT OF IT PAST THE DESIGN AND PUBLICATION, YOU WOULD HAVE MORE PLAYERS COMING BACK TO THE GAME. YES, sometimes (IRL MTG) you get 0 lands in your opening seven. Sometimes you get six. Sometimes you mulligan to four and still only see one land. Sometimes you can't draw that fifth land and have to sit there and do nothing for eight turns. We've all been there. It happens. That's MTG. But when the GAME, THE SHUFFLER, THE MATCHMAKING, are stepping in first to determine whether or not you get to play and the outcome has already been decided, who the fuck in their right mind is going to want to come back to that? Just let us. Play. The fucking. Game. Holy fucking shit. Fuck MTG, fuck WOTC.

It's like watching your beloved child slowly grow into a drug addict with no future :(

if you hate yourself, play magic the gathering