Magic: The Gathering Arena

Pitiful! MTG Arena is a polished-looking dumpster fire that somehow manages to make Magic less fun, less social, and less creative. Magic: The Gathering was built around interaction. Arena strips that away and replaces it with a handful of childish preset phrases, as if players are too fragile to handle normal communication. No real chat, no real social element, no personality. Just silent games against people spamming the same lifeless decks. The so-called “trading card” element is barely recognizable. Wildcards make it easy for players to skip creativity and grab whatever cards they need to copy the latest leaderboard deck. Rarity loses meaning, originality disappears, and the ladder becomes a parade of the same predictable net-deck nonsense over and over again. The timeout system is one of the worst parts of the app. It gives sore losers an easy way to waste time when they know they are beaten. Instead of fixing the pacing, Arena lets petty players drag matches out like children throwing a tantrum. The RNG and matchmaking feel laughably bad. One game gives you no mana. The next gives you nothing but mana. Then, after several losses, the game conveniently hands you a weak opponent or a match that feels rigged in your favor. It does not feel competitive. It feels manipulated, repetitive, and dull. Arena takes a brilliant card game and turns it into a soulless grind full of copied decks, fake interaction, bad pacing, and matches that too often feel decided before they even get interesting. Magic deserves better than this app

Terrible matchmaking! INCREDIBLY EXPENSIVE! Prepare to get constantly curb stomped! If you are new to the game you will be crushed. Want to try and build a deck? Forget it!Starter decks are god awful unbalanced trash. They are used to farm wins by experienced players who will only play the top decks. You have to win with a deck so you can get the trash cards. Good luck. This game is incredibly stingy with wild cards keeping any experimentation with cards to a bare minimum. It will take you months to get decent cards so you can compete. Be prepared to spend obscene amounts of money on packs if you wish to pay to play. Losing gives very little reward. There is no meaningful solo play to test your decks strength or god forbid give you packs. When you finally get some decent cards you get to play the same deck over and over and over against the same top decks. Playing draft sounds like a good idea but if you don’t know how to pick winning cards well sorry jack you just blew all your hard earned coin. This game is truly ruining any fun I’ve had playing the small amounts of paper magic. I detest this overpriced frustration! Buy some paper cards make some fun decks, play with friends and avoid this like the plague! Editing after more play. God this game is SO EXPENSIVE. Dropping 50 bucks? Expecting some wild cards to craft a top tier standard deck? FORGET IT! 50 bucks buying packs MIGHT get you 10 rares and a few mythics ( based on gambling). You will need 30 plus rares to build a top tier competitive deck. This games economy is ABYSMAL. ABSOLUTE GREED! You can literally spend THOUSANDS on this game and not have all the cards. I highly recommend looking elsewhere for TCG fun. I just can not overstate how OBSCENELY expensive this is. It’s just too bad as Magic can be fun but good lord this company is taking absolute advantage of players and their wallets. The people determining pricing on this game are absolute SCUM.

Seasoned MTG Player Overall the development team has committed to giving people access to one of the most complex games ever created. Mobile support is great for newer phones and there is legitimately good access to multiple different format on the client. As someone who mostly plays the oldest/ eternal formats having access to timeless is a boon. However it is also where most of my issues with the game take place. It is a great way to enjoy the standard and pioneer format. Timeless is having issues with wizards cherry picking what should and should not be allowed while simultaneously refusing to rebalance digital only cards like hydrophonics architect. And despited timeless being a format allegedly "protected by force of will" they have not introduced the necessary counter play cards like Aether Vial to combat a free counter spell that was arguably balanced a decade but has since become ambiguous and overall in my opinion unhealthy after 30+ years of game design. If you like eternal formats like legacy and vintage this is not the client for you as there are only 3 engines in the timeless format being black based dark ritual engine decks, blue based denial/ free counter spell engine decks, and a suprising number of creature based energy engine decks. Overall the eternal support for timeless needs a massive injection of support but it is stuck on a drip feed with an alarming number of cards being upshifted in rarity just in an effort to make them harder to access without spending resources or money. I cannot overstate how bad the upscale and rarity is we do have cards that were that are sold at mythic meaning you'll have to spend $20 to get a play set.

Offline mode It would be better if there was an offline mode. I can’t build decks and test them without being online. I am often without internet and would like a way to separate myself and play a game.

Too Expensive I love Magic and I love arena. However, hasbro is one of the greediest companies in history and it shows in the way they monetize this game. There is a 25$ "starter pack" in the store that is literally just 8 guaranteed cards of your choice. Digital "assets" are not worth this much and youll get this same experience with every progression option in the game. Events entry are too expensive and the rewards are terrible, even for high placing players. Leveling is a grind and there are implemented daily and weekly xp caps too prevent you from progressing too fast, explicitly to manufacture forced player retention to make you "get your money's worth" from the battle pass they make you pay real money for. These guys are more scummy than supercell. Unless you have the money to shill out to developers who dont deserve it, be wary of attempting to get into this game thinking youll be able to make the decks you want easily or for free.

Frequent server errors Execution of a good game hampered by server errors

My review Thank you for giving me the magic bug! The marvel set really got me going for magic again the last set that came out when I used to play was ice age

Junk app Junk game, luck based might as well play scratch off tickets. That’s why physical MTG is not popular. You could just face off flipping coins instead

shuffling Needs better shuffling

Super fun but not as accessible for new players I love this game but can you make wild cards a little bit more accessible to new players so we can build decks lick Landfall slick shot fling available to every one