Though it’s top dog among physical
CCGs, previous attempts at bringing
Magic onto screens have always been
second-rate at best, and UI
nightmares at worst. No digital
version has ever really been able to
get the full experience off the table
and onto screens. Arena
is the best attempt yet.
For starters it’s
free-to-play, and
generous with it.
Levelling up rewards a
pleasant amount of free
cards and when you
buy a booster pack,
whether with cash or
gold earned in-game, they contain
extra wildcards which can be traded
for any card of an equivalent rarity.
It’s more generous than tabletop
Magic. You’ll still need to drop money
for whatever deck’s dominating the
meta, or if you can’t be bothered
grinding for gold. But if you climbed
out of the money hole of collecting
cardboard crack back in the day, this
is a safe way of re-experiencing that
without going broke.
If you’re not coming to Magic
from the table, some of Magic’s
assumptions may seem strange.
Despite the similarities to games such
as Hearthstone (spending mana to
play cards, faces with life points that
have to be smacked away by
summoned creatures, etc), a few of
the bumps other games have
smoothed over will catch your feet.
One is that rather than simply
gaining mana every turn you have to
play land cards, then tap them for
their colored mana. Forests give
green mana, swamps give black, etc.
Most cards require at least one mana
of an appropriate color, and some
extra that can be any flavor.
Something about putting down landat the start of my turn and then
tapping it is inherently nostalgic for
me. However, when I have one of
those games where I don’t draw
enough land cards to do anything,
suddenly those warm feelings dry up
and I realize maybe simplifying this
into ‘one more mana
each turn’ was actually
a good idea.HOLD UP
The other thing that’s
always been a part of
Magic is ‘interrupts’.
Spells marked ‘instant’
can be cast with
leftover mana on an opponent’s turn.
At the table this promotes a snappy
back and forth. In a videogame it can
make for a stop-start experience
where you have to click Next or Pass
repeatedly just to let the game know
you don’t want to interrupt during
this phase, and no, not the next one
either. It also gives an opponent who
is mad you’ve taken the lead lots of
opportunities to drag things out.The benefit of this system is the
turnaround it enables—there’s so
much room for clever counterplay at
every stage of a match. Just like
Merlin you can be faced with an
elephant that’s about to crush you
and then turn into a mouse and
frighten it away—metaphorically
speaking, at least. It’s a vital part of a
game with a huge number of combos,
which are fun when you interrupt
them or when you pull one off.
When you play a card that gives
bonus life when you summon
something else, then follow it with a
summon that gets powered up when
you gain life, it feels like a tidy
one-two jab. At the far end of the
possibilities you’re pulling off
interactions that end with eight
monsters on a previously empty
board, or dealing 42 damage at once.
There’s a popular deck based
around Nightpack Ambusher, which
gives you a free wolf if you don’t cast
spells on your turn. The trick is
combining it with a deck full of
instants, so you do your casting on
your opponent’s turn while your
army grows. The first time I saw this,
I was playing a vampire-heavy deck
that bypassed those wolves to drain
my opponent’s life direct, and got
them down to their last three points
before the pack overran me. But
when someone pulls off a combo like
this against you, you’re frequently left
too impressed to be angry—and eager
to try something similar.
Sometimes I get a couple of those
frustrating stop-start matches in a
row, but Arena gives me plenty to
think about during downtime.
There’s always another strategy to
try, and even though I was only a
kitchen-table Magic player, it’s
reactivated parts of my brain I
thought long lost to the cobwebs.NEED TO KNOW
WHAT IS IT?
The first CCG’s latest
and possibly greatest
videogame incarnation
EXPECT TO PAY
Free-to-play
DEVELOPER
Wizards Digital Games
Studio
PUBLISHER
Wizards of the Coast
REVIEWED ON
Windows 10, Intel Core
i7, 16GB RAM, Nvidia
GTX 1060
MULTIPLAYER
1v1
LINK
magic.wizards.com/
en/mtgarena79
Slick and generous,
Magic: The Gathering
Arena is finally an
adaptation worthy of the
grandfather of CCGs.VERDICTLevelling up
rewards a
pleasant
amount of
free cardsT
here are countless online collectible card games inspired by
Magic: The Gathering these days, but there’s one element
almost all of them fail to capture: That feeling of a magical
duel. A good game of MTG is like that scene in The Sword in
the Stone. Merlin plays caterpillar, Madam Mim plays
chicken to eat the caterpillar, Merlin plays walrus to crush the chicken.DIGITAL WIZARDRY
MAGIC: THE GATHERING ARENA is the best adaptation
yet of the classic card game. By Jody Macgregor
BEGINNER SYNERGIES
You can pull these off with the basic cards
BLOOD FOR, WELL, ME
Vindictive Vampire gives a point
of life when one of your
creatures dies, Bloodthirsty
Aerialist gains +1/+1 whenever
you gain life. Sacrifice minions
to heal while bolstering these
vamp acrobats.HEAL TURN
Ajani’s Pridemate gains +1/+1
whenever you heal, Bishop of
Wings gives life when you play
an angel. Stack a deck with
enough winged warriors, and
you’ll finish matches with more
life than you started them with.REVIEW