10 Important Ways Magic: The Gathering Online Is Better Than Magic Arena 

MTG Arena is rigged. The shuffler and match maker is enforcing a winrate % so people spend more money in the game. It is disgusting.

Arena can't still do multi-player. Also the tutorial for Arena interface is practically non existent

How much can you do on Magic Online for no money though?

Watch MTGA implement half of these things in the backend update.

I mean let's be real Brian...If you are a casual player, you don't want to put 2-300 bucks everytime you want to try a new deck. On MTGA the money don't stay yours, true. But its way, way less expensive. I would like some sort of hybrid form these two ideally, like leagues with user driven fromats.

MTGO’s chat and ability to trade cards is a much superior way to get a friend into Magic. I have often lent entire decks to friends to get them to try a format, I could never have done anything similar in Arena. Arena is great to play for free, but if I wanted a friend to try it out, it’d take either a lot of money or a lot of time before we could jam decent games with fully constructed decks.

@@alfyb4512 this is the first time i've ever seen someone say that MTGO is a better way to get someone into magic than Arena

@@Divock I would say that’s because most people don’t really know MTGO, or only contemplate as a competitive platform. Sure, if you are alone and never intend to play Magic with friends, Arena is unbeatable, it’s free and built to fill up your time. But if you intend to play with friends (as in, “the gathering”), it’s utter crap: no chat, no multiplayer, no observer mode, etc. How is the fact you have to pay on MTGO a barrier to introducing the game to anyone? You can build pretty much any of the Card Kingdom Battle Decks for less than a buck on MTGO, and start playing tuned - if casual - Magic right away. You can play them with 2, 3 or 4 players, others can come in and watch your games, you have a chat… it’s fun, it’s easy, it’s friendly, and it’s cheap. On Arena, getting a tuned list, even a janky one, either involves spending way more than one buck or grinding. And how is “grind a bad deck until you get something a bit fun” a good introduction to Magic??

​@@alfyb4512While I agree that MTGO can get you into a far wider selection of decks much quickly to tinker around with, Arena is a vastly superior learning tool for introducing someone completely new into magic the gathering as a whole, the tutorial is great and there is a good reason why you are given "bad decks" in your start of arena and through progression to play with, because these underpowered decks aren't designed to see competitive success, their designed to show the player how playstyles in different color combinations function while making entire decks around a mechanic like mutate or adventure to ease the player into the literal 90+ keywords that currently exist as of today, It's the same reason why MTG even prints "underpowered" cards in the first place, these cards hold more value than just competitive use, they grab the attention of a specific audience and allow that player to know what they would enjoy building, whether it be a fresh combo player moving from open the omenpaths into jeskas will, or a big-stats lover finding joy in opening a drakuseth after having been using loamdragger giant as their pay-off. I would always recommend people to move out of arena and into MTGO (+ paying the upgrade cost) only after they've had at least 10-20+ hours on arena, this is especially true if MTG is the first ever TCG they get into and they don't already grasp a basic understanding of principles such as positive card trading, synergistic deck design, etc.

And that s good BUT arena is a trap. Tecnical issues aside (and there are plenty) it s economy sucks and it s f2p only if you started when it was lunched. Mtgo for life.

Try Cockatrice.

@@chunkylover48 cockatrice is pretty hard to get into. and it's absolutely nothing like arena. arena's interface makes things much easier than MTGO's. and MTGO's interface makes things much easier than cockatrice's or xmage's. obviously the latter two are entirely free and that's a big difference, but first you (as a new player) have to get over the enormous hurdle of the gameplay doing almost nothing to aid you. personally, I hate arena with a passion, but I can totally understand somebody playing arena to avoid spending large amounts of money. aside from pauper, penny dreadful, etc. magic is an expensive game, no two ways around it. one nice thing about arena is it makes it pretty easy to build a modest collection using just time as a resource instead of money. and you actually get the feeling of progressing and building a real collection, even if it is all just virtual data trapped in your account. cockatrice feels more like a magic simulator than a magic client. I mean, that's really what it is in the first place. it doesn't feel real. I think it's great for testing cards that you don't own yet. but I'd never recommend it to someone looking for a similar gameplay experience to arena or MTGO, it's in a whole other category. it is to magic as, like, garry's mod is to counterstrike.

same here, from Colombia. paper magic is crazy.

In Peru is kinda the same, paper Magic is expensive and the local stores run out of bundles and singles very fast due to low stocks that come here. There are people who play and can afford it but that doesn't represent the total amount of magic players, the majority plays in arena and you can often find someone who knows about the game and enjoys it but doesn't have a single paper card.

Yep. I'm fortunate to live in a country where card prices aren't absurd, but even so I can do almost everything I want to do with Magic on Arena for free: I can build all the decks I want, draft multiple times a week, play Standard and a resonable nonrotating format in Historic. I understand why some content creators think the Arena economy is predatory because if you have to craft every T1 deck right away without grinding it must be expensive. But I don't think that's most people's experience.

problem is for people who dont really enjoy only having 1 or 2 "top tier" decks but would rather have 10+ "low tier decks. in paper non top tier cards are extremely cheap, but in arena every deck costs more or less the same, so you cant really brew or play suboptimal decks a lot, which imo is very unfair to those kind of players. you also absolutely need at least one deck that has a decent winrate to ever complete the daily/weekly wins, so you are basically out of luck already as a f2p player who likes to brew and if you look at youtubers who like to brew, they have to spend hundreds every set to craft cards that cost pennies in paper. playing multiple decks in arena is prohibitly expensive, while playing 1 or 2 is basically free. would be more fair if you could get either a lot of bad cards or a few powerful ones

Your collection is also worthless and you are tied to Arena if you want to keep playing for free. It happened to me playing hearthstone, very close to F2P, with the exception of buying some of the adventures. You have to play every day and that doesn’t give you much freedom. My paper collection on the other hand, for every dollar I spend I seem to get 2 or more back. Owing to a few lucky trades and purchased collections I have some reserved list stuff too, which I consider all investment. If I want to leave magic, I will get money back from this collection.

I spend like...90 euro for 90 packs 3 times over the past 3 years (birthday gift to myself) and now i have all the wildcards and just cards i want and i can keep playing those cards in Historik.

@@dudemetslagroom8065 but can you cash out?

@@DrewskiTheLegend No but it does save me from needing to buy sleeves and needing storage and all that jazz...I don't think i can get caught up in ANOTHER real-life card game. (Although i would love to get my hands on some phyrexian or Eldritch Moon stuff...man i wish to get Eldritch moon horror angels...To bad midnight hunt kinda killed off any hope for that since they're all ded)

Wise

Paper magic still the only thing i play

@@MrMosiKing MTGO can be a good way to get more play testing in as well as visually see how some cards interact. And honestly I don't run into that many horrible people in chat. I've actually had alot of fun games and chats.

Same.

Factual

chuckle.

iT's NoT a BuG iT's A fEaTuRe

@@dogdriver70 in college i was making a browser based card client and i somehow introduced a bug that turned cards transparent when you move a stack of them and i have no idea how so i just made it replace the cards with new ones. If i could have figured out what was happening that could totally have been a feature!

Spoken like a true non-developer. Haha

Fix the bug, another 2 turn up because of it...

Amen brother. I love that I can play competitive standard literally for free. Although if MTGO had Arena's interface, I'd probably switch. It's just too awful in 2021. It was crappy when it was released 20 years ago!

Exactly. I think the professor greatly underestimates this: people that can't really afford much.

"You just have to play and win" That's avoiding the issue people bring here. We aren't arguing you can't play and win to build a collection, we're arguing that you need insane amounts of playtime in order to build something competitive because the economy of the game is beyond terrible. For context, I drafted a lot during Ikoria, ended up with 80+ packs to open, over 15k gems, and even with that, I still didn't have enough wildcards and rares to build the decks I wanted to compete in Standard. So, I lost time drafting thinking I would get into standard later, then by the time I was ready to cash out to build a standard deck, I still couldn't so a whole new set came out and I had to do this all over again. This shouldn't happen. And anyone at WOTC trying to go full F2P on Arena for a month would see their own system is fundamentally flawed (or it works perfectly as intended to make you buy packs... but who am I to assume intent...) Some people just want to play Magic casually, and MTGA is fine I guess for that purpose. I vastly prefer using TableTopSimulator that let's me play with every mtg card ever printed. But if you want to play competitively, learn a format, and stay up to date for tournaments and whatnot (especially those that play magic in paper and just want a 1:1 way to train for events or FNM), MTGA is a terrible platform TheProf nails it: MTGA and MTG are two different games at this point, and that sucks for MTG players

@@arenkai I’d actually say Arena is a lot worst to play casually. As you say, it’s great when you play a lot, get a collection and get to play competitively. But if you’re only playing casually, Arena is very restrictive: the card pool is tiny, and you won’t get to build the deck you like without putting in money. That’s the thing about casual play on MTGO, you have to pay, but you can get away with $5 decks and less if just going for fun tabletop with friends. On Arena, you have get to invest time or money, but an expensive deck on paper will cost you the same as a cheap chaff deck. When you build a fun deck out of chaff rares and you realize it’ll “cost” you 20 rare wildcards, you realize the model does not work for casual.

but in practice, who doesn't spend money on the game? even the people who routinely claim to be "f2p players" spend money periodically in most cases. I imagine the only real f2p accounts are those of popular streamers, who aren't actually playing for free, they're just engaging in a special challenge, adjacent to their real account where they spend exorbitant assloads of money on what amounts to account statistics. wizards wouldn't spend money making the client for you to play if they thought you were going to literally play for free. like every other game developer, they know that people cannot resist the impulse to spend whatever they have when it's dangled in front of their face all day. conversely, magic was a trading card game up until very recently. it's about obtaining something of value and owning, playing with, or trading it. I mean, the whole point of the game is to spend money on it. not only is it the point of the business model but it's the core conceit of the game's concept. you're playing with game pieces that have some innate market value. so up until arena came out, the ratio of recurrent players who spent money on the game was just about 100%. it's not some strange minority of people who enjoy spending money on things that should rightly be free. it was all magic players, up until very recently when wizards figured out that you could essentially lure people into a crack house and trick them into thinking they get room and board for free, only for them to ask to buy some crack a few hours into their stay. the point of arena, like any game client, is not to be free, it's to make money. it cost money to make, it better make money to cover those costs. whales are obviously a big part of that formula, but only a tiny, negligible fraction of players truly spend nothing. so even if you only pay them $10 total they're still making money on your stay in the crack house.

They recently improved it to 27, which is not actually an improvement. Sad

Yeah that blew my mind tbh

You can’t even afford to have 75 decks in MTGO

@@kylerunkle4398 nor hearthstone

That's why you have as a file on Evernote for the decks you want to swap out of and in with import and export

Arena is free until the sets come out so quickly that it is impossible to maintain a collection without putting down money or grinding for hours. And even after grinding the rewards become so piddly that you are effectively getting nothing for your time.

I only play historic on arena it is much easier to keep up then.

Just win lmao

You also have rental programs, and can cash out. If you want to play regularly or even slightly competitively (not pro just more than a no stake random bo1.) The cost is cheaper for MODO.

Yeah I haven't spent a cent on Arena. It's really easy to get enough gold to keep up with standard. Historic is a bit harder, just the fact that a lot of your wild cards will be needed to get a good land base.

one client has the edge of being extremely economically exploitative, so it's WOTC's favorite

I wonder how many wildcards I can get for the $800 it costs to purchase a mediocre modern deck on digital objects? Even though nobody would sell me the (not real) cards for less than $2000 because only suckers trade for fair value.

What's disappointing about mtgo

1) Visually, pretty much everything. It hasn't gotten a significant visual update since it was launched. 2) There's no reason digital product should cost the same as physical product. 3) Only works on Windows.

@@jaxxis2910 biggest misconception: "I dONT wANT to BUy cARDs TWicE" yet MOST cards on mtgo cost pennies on the dollor compared to RL

I'm reading back comments and I'm surprised seeing someone with my point of view, instead of arena fanboys (who most likely just heard about MODO and its "outdated" UI and never looked into it). People saying that MODO is expensive also surprise me, I guess if you wanted to build the best deck of your favorite format it does get expensive, but as a casual player who just wants to try out as many cards as possible Arena's economy is just the worst, with loan programs on magic online I can actually try a different deck basically every day, and just change whenever I'm fed up with it (or terminate the loan)

@@StahliCell I'm trying out MTGO right now to see how I like it, bought into the game for $5 and built a standard deck and a commander deck both highly budgeted and low power but fun to play. Don't really love the UI but being able to play with old cards is a lot of fun.

@@StahliCell I am a phone 📱 gamer arena is still better then that last online I played that I could download with out having to use a card to pay for it or that last game you had to pay after the tutorial was finished. Arena is not as bad as poeple say it is. My only issue with arena is the lag to search for spells or lands.

Arwna is trash if you want to build optimal decs, vecause its a gacha game. Its optimized to leech off of hyperinvested players, and it shouldnt be a vessel for high level play. It should be played free at a low level, to learn the basics of play, card interaction and deckbuilding. Its a casual game designed for a casual audence, online is a simulator designed to substitute for the paper game.

Besides bugs or the UI, the issue that MTGO has is solely because of Arena: a small playerbase. In my server, you can sit in standard on a weekday and wait for like an hour for a game. Modern is much more popular, but even then if it isn't peak playing hours, you have to wait.

Exactly same, if it wasn't for Arena I would have probably still been playing Hearthstone. Its interface and approachability is much more important than it's being given credit for here.

@myblindy Sounds like me. I played MTG table top since the 90s but the scene here dried up. Found hearthstone then Arena.

Same here, I was playing hearthstone because I couldn't afford to get back into paper magic. Then I played arena for a few days, found some promo codes online, and I had a solid competitive deck that would've cost me over 100 dollars anywhere else. Arena is extremely budget friendly unless you need to have everything

I would argue that Modo is the old printer on the shelf wating to be unplugged for a couple years now...

@@heliobarbosa3525 More like arena is the new windows update that needs to be uninstalled

@@heliobarbosa3525 is that based off any facts or just your opinion?

@@sjdhrjrjejdhdhsh Gah! you've triggered the IT nerd in me. "la la la la"

I honestly think it would kill the game since it's making them more money than arena and player like Magic Online better

Same, as a limited player and very casual constructed player, Arena works well for me. Admittedly, i did buy the one time beginner pack a while back and thats the only money I have spent. The cost of one paper booster pack basically put me on a free roll from the start, so I cant complain.

Yes! Additionally, if you try to go infinite in limited on MTGO, you have to sell the cards you open. In Arena, you can use them to play Standard at no extra cost. I like the *idea* of MTGO, but I probably won't start it up again until they ban Chatterstorm in Pauper.

Cheap draft is probably the highlight of MTGA for me too. I just wished more limited formats were available: MH2 and other master sets, while more expensive, tend to provide a much more interesting drafting environment.

Magic Arena is insanely more investment friendly than Magic Online. 90 boosters cost less than 100 dollars worth of gems while in Magic Online you only get 36 boosters for 100 dollars, just like with physical cards. But you do not even much have to buy those, as you get so much gold and so many gems for free. Per month just doing quests and winning those weekly games, you get at least 20000 gold which becomes 20 free booster packs and from the mastery stuff you get free booster packs on top of that, free gems and free tickets. I have mostly played Magic Arena without investing money in it, and recently I guess I put 300 dollars into it. Wildcards can be used to craft ANY card of the rank or below and wild cards are pretty cheap compared to most things in Magic Online.

if you play casually then mtg arena is free, the moment you want to play constructed is starts to be a well without a bottom in terms of money...

They even manipulate the drop rates like a gatcha game.

This 'gatcha' game still allows u to fully play the game free with 0 costs. I've played Arena since closed beta and I am able to afford any tier 1 historic decks without paying a cent.

@@anonymousvagrant And all it took you to get there was 3 years of your time.

@@anonymousvagrant drop some dimes and you can have several historic decks in a snap versus time, arts, avatars, pets, and more. Historic Horizons, get ready for jumpstart prices and emptying the coin and gem wallets.

@@obsidianmoon13 Isn't the idea of magic like, playing it? I am not wasting my time if I'm playing something I like, and for free too.

You can't craft "so many" competitive decks unless you give them a bunch of money tho

see ya in 10 years when all cards launch 2 weeks early online and paper no longer gets any prize support.

@@ymmijx6061 I mean we would still have cards as a collector's thing probably

LUL

Don’t know anyone in my area who plays mtg. What’s the advantage of playing irl?

@@dailyrice5092 social interaction, the ability to learn from others how things work, haptic feedback, the smell of new cards.

Free to play games are almost always grinding trash. The graphics of Arena distract and detract from the game and are not needed. We don’t need hand holding, the game is not overly challenging to learn.

At a recent MPL split, 11 MDFC were banned (one of which was played in the best deck in the format) because of a bug that counted devotion when the cards flipped into lands. MTGO has plenty of bugs, but this disrupted the professional circuit with high stakes after weeks of testing

How do you get to draft without paying?

@@Wistbacka you can draft paying gold

@@Wistbacka Get in daily wins and farm up gold. When you get to 10k, draft and get gems+cards. Rinse and repeat, profit. You must be good at drafting for this to work of course.

@@Wistbacka you get a small amount of gold each day from doing missions, like 500 gold for casting 30 green spells or something. As far as I could remember I was able to do a draft pretty much every second day. Not a great advertisement I know, the system is begging the user to pay money to supplement "fun"

@@DankCannon thanks everybody for the replies. Just trying to get better insight to this. I have so far frowned quite a lot at any official online mtg platform. I have spent quite a lot on paper magic, so not about to spend again online. Especially since I only play commander now. I have a friend I tried to get to use spelltable instead as he spends A LOT of money on paper magic. But he thinks spelltable is too complicated and rather pays to play online, and I feel dumbstruck by his choice...

Then you just fix your mana with other stuff, is no good to be always depending on money to play mtg.

You can buy 4 mythic rare wildcards for 25 usd I believe. Probably more expensive than the avrage, but signifocantly less expensive than the top end of real cards.

It's so much better to have a discussion with somebody. I can put up with some jerk once in a while if it means having a real conversation.

I've been playing mtgo for about the last year, almost exclusively modern with the occasional draft/sealed, and I've been pleasantly surprised at how little toxicity there is. I've encountered a total of 2 people who were toxic at all, and even then it wasn't nearly as bad as I've encountered on other games. For the most part, everyone I face on online is either silent or super wholesome

Ditto. Just not getting hate-roped is a huge step up, but I've had some genuinely awesome conversations, which I wasn't expecting.

I've had some really bad experiences with the MTGO chat--people "following" me after a match to heckle me because I got a lucky topdeck, etc. Still, I agree: it's worth the risk to have the chat feature available.

@@pauldyson8098 have you tried blocking annoying people?

This is the question, why not just work with mtgo? Why create arena at all?

@@patrickmcathey7081 mostly because the visual redo is kind of immpossible, you *can't* upgrade the mtgo engine to look like arena, it's strictly immpossible... the problem is that it's also tough as nails to recreate everything in mtgo up to the standard of arena. they give almost all mythics special animations, along with several rares and notable staple commons and uncommons like lightning strike, this becomes absurd stretched out ad-infinitum into magics past. I personally think arena was a good move, and understand why somethings had to be cut to make way for a smoother online way to play standard but at the same time theres a lot of unacceptable cuts made. A digital card game should always have a dusting mechanic, no multiplayer is absurd, the game would be infinitely improved with commander avaliabilty, two-headed giant, kitchen table free for all, etc. and frankly just the fact that you can't buy singles in anyway, your collection if you pay for it is entirely valueless and it takes such an absurd time sink to make a deck

I started an account for $5 and built and bought 3 pauper decks for $15 total. $20 to play on MTGO

@@stevenlawrence192 so I could certainly play somethingon MTGO for only a small investment, but my aim would be EDH mainly or other more expensive formats

@@WoundedDuckify You can build great edh decks cheaply too, certain cards are way cheaper on mtgo than in paper. Like pennies

What if I told you that you don't really need a "monthly fee" for a loan program, because you can get FREE loan programs?

@@StahliCell well that is intriguing

Yep, the skins and rewards are part of what can make it good to some

O that makes sense. I played a lot of videogames about yugioh they feel the same way.

This

Make this happen WotC

Play a brawl deck with a less popular commander. You will play real magic against other less popular decks. Just instant scoop against the heavy control decks. Most fun playing on arena besides draft.

@@sirrzoidberg3771 I did that - I did every possible side event that was availiable at any given moment just so I wouldn't have to play standard queue (at least after Strixhaven was released before I quit). The game still forces you to play something you don't want to to make progress on your daily quests. An argument could be made that I don't have to do that. But you need to somehow get to the wildcards to built the deck you want to play, or to have some for future upgrades or possibly something else that sparks your interest to build around. So you're back at the beggining. Where too much is happening and you just don't have enough resources (time, wildcards, gold for entry fees) to really enjoy the game at a decent level. Certainly not as F2P. Most likely not even as some free time hobby player with a 50 bucks/month budget. Another point to your argument "scoop against opponents you don't want to be playing against". First of all 2021 meta was all of it - maybe like 1 out of 15 games was something interesting and second: it comes back to what Prof said in the video - the game lacks some basic functional socializing system. When playing commander at an LGS you get to quite easily rule 0 a playgroup you're comfortable with. You can't influence the meta on arena - even in more casual formats (for example unranked queue has the exact same Tier 1 decks as ranked). Having to curate my play expirience through some external source like a discord server with people wanting the same, less cutthroat gameplay seems counterproductive. As if I or someone running the discord are doing Wizards job for them.

@@DarthTUK I threw 50 bucks at a couple of expansions, and I still couldn't build the decks I wanted, and I still found myself short on wildcards. Everything you said was on point, and were the reasons I too left after playing around with arena for about 4 to 6 months.

@@DarthTUK what’s funny is I remember complaining on wizards page about how they only match you up with certain decks depending on what you play and they were like there’s no proof of that lol yeah i feel you on that. I don’t really have an issue with brawl you can tell by the commander which ones are straight net decks and what not. You only need one copy of a card.

Best advice i can give is to get good at premiere drafts and youll find yourself playing multiple drafts before running out of gems to enter. If you see a rare take it if the other cards won’t improve your draft deck much.

I have to say. Id like a more robust chat but also adding it in with strangers would 90% of the time make the game worsr and more toxic instead of better. I play magic for fun. Not to get yelled at by internet strangers.

@@jojodelacroix I think a great system would be if you were able to click on someone's name and you would have the option to start a chat. The other player would see the invite to chat and accept or deny. And hey if it goes south, mute again.

@@jojodelacroix You can easily make it voluntary

I would love a little chat like "game is lagging on my side while searching for spells and lands. One moment please while I wait for game to finish loading the search picking card and unloading search."

Heads up since you paid for the account upgrade: you can get free loan programs to try out whatever you want!

Why are you people so opposed to paying for games!? This free to play crap is ruining gaming and people like you are the ones that push it. Games like arena have the same time suck and addiction quality that a slot machine has.

did you find the user interface as jarring as everyone mentions? I did one draft and found that I was roping my opponent by accident because I didn't click end phase or whatever.

@@DankCannon Without a doubt, the interface is the biggest learning curve so far when just getting started (next to getting used to how the economy trading/buying works) but I took the time to watch a couple tutorials beforehand and I have the added benefit of playing a few games on Cockatrice during the pandemic with friends, whose interface also seems VERY outdated and not totally unlike Magic Online. It just takes time, patience, and the willingness to ask Google for guidance along the way

@@Cham_Clowder it is very much a relic of its time, that time being 2002. But I still tell every new player I meet that it's the best way to learn the game.

that exists in Arena, although not as a permanent thing. But every now and then, they have events where you can play with any cards, no matter if you own them or not. They are called All Access events, here is a screenshot: i0.wp.com/mtgazone.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/Midweek-Magic-Standard-All-Acsess.jpg

You should try. You can buy booster packs for some sets for 30 cents.

How much is your time worth? Calculate how much money you'd spend vs grinding, maybe it's more worth it to just pay

@@Suavek69 good point. I'll probably give it a shot.

it's kinda like pokemon go. you ASSUME they'd add missing features over time but... no

oofffff this applies to paper magic so much

I play best of three I win a game or two I found single game more boring.

Magic Arena is insanely more investment friendly than Magic Online. 90 boosters cost less than 100 dollars worth of gems while in Magic Online you only get 36 boosters for 100 dollars, just like with physical cards. But you do not even much have to buy those, as you get so much gold and so many gems for free. Per month just doing quests and winning those weekly games, you get at least 20000 gold which becomes 20 free booster packs and from the mastery stuff you get free booster packs on top of that, free gems and free tickets. I have mostly played Magic Arena without investing money in it, and recently I guess I put 300 dollars into it. Wildcards can be used to craft ANY card of the rank or below and wild cards are pretty cheap compared to most things in Magic Online. Allowing for redemption seems pretty impossible given how cheaply you can complete a set compared to Magic Online and physical Magic cards.

Arena's set up is awesome for drafters! I have 95% of all the rares in every set since war of the spark and more wildcards then i could ever want to spend.

Oh, standard is EASILY better on Arena than MTGO by a long mile. I wanted every format on the client because then it'd be better at a fundamental level over MTGO but Wotc HATES money.

I'm just surprised you genuinely prefer standard over other formats, but I guess "to each their own". I couldn't see myself playing standard even if I had every card legal in the format at any given time!

Arena chat sucks Mid game you can only talk to friends and the iterface Does not allow chat open on same screen at least in mobile playforms

Mean while "(hello),...(your turn),... (nice),...(thinking),...(thanks),...(good game).

Arena was ALWAYS a Freemium game, of course spending money on it is one-way

@@Greg501- Yup, always reminds of the south park episode about freemium games.

It has cards back to Kaladesh.

I agree with this, 100%! It is almost a point of pride that I have spent $0 on Arena and still have pretty good (or at least fun tp play) decks. If I wanted to buy cards, I would rather spend the money at my LGS. The trade-in options on MTGO are really cool, but getting to that point is expensive

Well okay, I may have just gotten overwhelmed by the interface and not found what I wanted. I might give MTGO another chance

@@oldred890 for me personally I find red deck wins enjoyable. Not saying it is my favorite deck but it a fun one for me to play. It didn’t take so much grinding for me to get all the cards I wanted for that deck. Also I personally enjoy the drafts which can get you a decent amount of cards. ( I save up my coins and gems and spend them on the drafts). Also you get back some gems from every draft which helps towards the next one. But I can definitely see for people who want to play 4 or maybe even 3 color decks the struggle with getting all the cards they want. Especially the mana bases. But mana bases have been a problem for about all of Magic’s history. Though it is definitely worse on arena since you can’t buy the cards you want.

There is a lot of merit to what you said. Arena is a huge grind and the potential time cost for that can be comparable to the monetary one of MTGO. And it is an arms race to be able to make the 5 or so metadecks that beat everything else, which gets very annoying very quickly. At the end of the day, though, Arena is just easier for me to do and the fact that I do not have to throw both time AND money into it make it more appealing. Maybe I am not as much of a a fan for not devoting as many resources as others have (or maybe that is the echo of the toxic fans and players on Area social media), but I give what I am able, which more time than money.

Arena isn't free. You pay with your time. Your life.

This. I compare MTGO interface with Windows 3.11. Unreal that they never updated it from the ancient relic it still is. New players are never going to be drawn to play Magic on MTGOs garbage interface . Why is Arena popular? Cause it looks appealing, is easy to use for new players, looks more like something from 2020+ rather than something from 1983+ and it lets players unlock cards at low cost by playing drafts, unlocking mastery level etc. I’m sure MTGO is great for the purists who wants a “proper” Magic but it is way too long in the tooth for being even remotely something that new players would be interested in. It has nicer and more features than Arena but with the clunk UI most will just throw it aside after the first 15 minutes of swearing at the screen wondering “how the F do I do this”?

@@Vograx maybe even Windows ME when they were pushing the Microsoft Media center! 😆 🤣 😂 😹 😆

There's draft with people too, and you don't play with your pod on MO either if I'm not mistaken. Frankly I personally think that too much is made of how much bot drafting corrupts the experience anyway, in most formats it's completely fine, with a few notable exceptions. All this said I still think that MTGA being FREE has got to count for a lot. It does for me, and I have a hard time believing that the opportunity to spend hundreds on virtual legacy cards makes up for it, as much as I would love to play legacy.

Drafts are just completely unfun, imo, and in order to get coins, you need a good constructed deck in many cases, so for me it became a negative feedback loop. Especially as the deck I had was good enough for some basic standard play, but gets destroyed at any higher tier in Historic.

@@johnbuscher If you don't like draft first of all I would encourage you to give it a second, third or twelfth chance, knowing that it's a process, and that you need to learn about it, but other than that, if you only like constructed, you don't want to grind and you don't want to draft, then arena sucks, sure, but those seem to me like a very narrow sets of circumstances

Why not?

So does MTGO. I can do endless practice matches for modern without paying a dime.

@@bobby45825 but you can't compete competitively or make any deck you want.

@@theBestInvertebrate Depends how you define "competitively" and, yes, you actually can, as long as it's modern legal.

@@bobby45825 I mean use whatever deck I want with no restrictions.

Other than legallity of course

Agreed so much. All the useless animations and useless sounds of cards being played actually make me more annoyed than usual.

@Jojoforpres i disagree anyone who doesn't design there own deck is a automaton in my opinion.

@Jojoforpres I play LD so I've pretty much not played for half a year and I had one season LD reached 99.7% in mythic but since then.. like years before ivd been stuck with no cards lol, also I've never queued mill

There's always free casual matches though, I have never entered a league nor I intend to so (never played competitively and would lose badly)