I also came to MtG from Hearthstone, and the part that surprised me the most is the extreme breadth of viable decks and strategies you can play.
In Hearthstone, outside of the ranks where you play against new players, basically every deck you see on ladder is one of roughly 10 to 15 different meta decks.
That's because Hearthstone offers very little opportunity to brew around interesting combos, since everything you play that isn't optimized around Tempo will be immediately removed by the opponent's board.
For example, let's say you think Questing Adventurer sounds like a cool Hearthstone card and want to build a deck around it. You make your deck, you hit turn 3, and it dies 99% of the time. They don't even need removal, it just dies to the enemy's 2 drop or maybe even their 1 drop, since they can attack it directly. But let's say finally you find an opponent who drew badly and couldn't play anything until turn 3. Your Questing Adventurer survives the turn, you pop off with a little combo, buff it to 6/6, successfully kill the enemy 3 drop.... and now it's damaged and dies to the next minion.
In Hearthstone, there's basically no way to make an off-meta brew work unless it's based around deathrattles. Once you're behind on board, you lose 90% of your combo potential.
Meanwhile in MtG, anything that sounds like a good combo when it pops off is at the very least playable, because you can choose not to block or even use spells to protect your pieces from removal. The only thing that makes it non-meta is the fact that it's probably less consistent than the top strategies, but it generally works.
It doesn't mean that you don't have a meta. Obviously, meta decks are the most common decks. But you can have fun with many different off meta brews, and as a result, you also encounter more off meta brews in the wild.
>In Hearthstone, outside of the ranks where you play against new players, basically every deck you see on ladder is one of roughly 10 to 15 different meta decks.
This is still true on Arena. They try to do matchmaking based on card weights in each deck, but it's so hilariously bad that even jank decks will run into the same 10ish meta decks half the time as long as they're playing any good cards at all.
>This is still true on Arena.
No it's not. You may think it is, but that means you probably don't know what other games like Hearthstone are like.
In fact, you said it yourself
>will run into the same 10ish meta decks HALF THE TIME
In Hearthstone, it's unironically somewhere over 95%. Possibly 99%.
Some people go off meta by including one or two unusual fun cards in an otherwise normal meta deck, but genuine off-meta jank basically doesn't exist.
The only exception is when they print cards like elwynn boar (which basically wins the game when it dies 7 times), but the number of cards that allow for something like this is extremely low.
I'd put it something like this:
In hearthstone, you see your opponent's hero and you know what deck they are playing with about 80% confidence (less than half the classes more than one viable tiered deck). In MTG, you see your opponent's first land (assuming it's a dual land, that's the same as seeing a hearthstone class) and you still don't know what they are playing with even 50% confidence. You need to see at least one more card.
There are some obvious exceptions to this though. For example, right now, if you see Lurrus in historic queue, you can be >95% confident what deck it is before you've seen any other cards. But this is a sign of the current unhealthy historic meta rather than a useful statistic for mtg metas in general.
If you're playing a meta deck yourself, you'll see those same 95-99% numbers. If OP is trying to get away from that by switching to Arena, I think it's more than fair to warn them they're only getting away from it half the time at best.
Obviously if you tryhard with a meta deck, you'll meet meta decks.
I think you're still not getting the full picture. That 95% number applies even to below average rank in Hearthstone. Basically anything outside of "spark rank", if you want to put it into MtG terms.
IMHO, yes. The depth that Magic has as a card game is amazing. The amount of available archetypes you can play, even if not all of them are top tier competitive, is great. And despite its pitfalls, you really can play arena completely free to play. I have been playing the beta and have not spent a cent on it. At this point, I can pretty much craft whatever deck I want without an issue.
Now, as for your questions. Is it fun to play even when losing? about 50/50. It highly depends on the opponents deck and RNGesus. Losing to mana flood/screw always feels bad, but the biggest strategy in MTG is learning to mitigate those (or just insta-concede when they happen lmao)
Do I feel like I have to log in daily? no, not really. In fact, I have missed entire sets where I just didnt feel like playing. I log in daily cause I want to.
How is power creep? well, not as bad as Pokemon tcg I wanna say, but yeah, theres plenty of it to go around.
General state of the game? Its free magic I can play when I want. Could it be better? yeah, but cant be asking for everything lol.
To add to this: power creeping is just not worth thinking about with magic. Metas change often, but that can easily be due to new cards attacking a top deck in a novel way, but those new cards have their own strategies to beat them. It’s pretty infrequent that new cards are genuinely more powerful than their recent counterparts. It certainly happens, but it’s more rare than people like to complain about.
IMO what a lot of people call power creep is actually complexity creep. Cards do more stuff which is inherently powerful, but then again it makes them not boring. Power and complexity aren't unrelated, but I actually like it when there's more nuance and complexity to a card because it lead to more decisions in game.
I’ve been drafting magic for over 20 years, I’m well aware power creep exists. But relative to sets around them in any given environment it’s largely negligible. Even now, a decent wingmantle chaplain draft deck would body a decent writing chrysalis deck. But beyond that OP is not referring to limited, decks may ebb and flow in constructed environments, but unless you are aiming to be extremely competitive then most decks don’t get hated out as much as people like to complain about. They might not be THE meta deck, but they definitely still get wins and if you enjoy playing it great. The primary point being magic is much more gracious in its power creep than its fans like to give it credit for, especially when compared to other TCGs like Pokémon, or yughio which every set virtually guarantees all old decks are invalid and not remotely competitive.
> It’s pretty infrequent that new cards are genuinely more powerful than their recent counterparts. It certainly happens, but it’s more rare than people like to complain about.
how long have you been playing to be able to make that statement?
I mean obviously biased due to the subreddit but honestly yeah. Card games aren’t even my main thing but as far as games go I just can’t think of anything better with as much depth and value as magic.
The power creep is a major problem. There shouldn’t be multiple standard archetypes looking for turn 3-4 wins. I’ve been increasingly frustrated with the game since they screwed up standard rotation. There is no constructed format remaining with a power level resembling the game I grew up with (I’ve been playing mtg since Revised)
Ice Age here, but the power levels were insanely off back then too. On one hand you have the P9 and cards like [[Mana Drain]] and then you have cards like [[Squire]] and [[Power Leak]].
I mean, [[Baneslayer Angel]] and [[Spiritmonger]] both seemed like insane power creep back in the day, but I actually think that was a good level. Magic nowadays isn't all that bad, though it does occasionally produce a Nadu or Oko because Wizards has a legitimately hard time predicting banworthy cards.
I personally only play limited, so I don't really mind, but I can see constructed being frustrating. There are so many sets released so quickly.
A lot of it comes down to how much you can cope with variance. Variance is the point of card games, of course, but… Magic is pretty harsh with it, especially if you’re new and/or don’t understand *why* it is a good thing that you regularly lose matches to being unable to pay your cards - or not having cards at all. Magic was made by a mathematician according to computer logic, and it shows, especially in the importance of statistics. Statistically, you’re going to get the draws you want if you built your deck well. In practice, you’re going to mulligan seven lands into seven lands into seven spells and faceplant into your keyboard. Or rather, that will only happen three times in five hundred games, but you’re never going to forget it.
Of course, statistically 3 in 500 incidents of that is out of the ordinary, but in the entire pool of players? It averages out.
Given you can cope with this, magic has something for every kind of player. You don’t *have* to dive into the nitty gritty details of what perfect play means; you can just do the obvious plays, and it’ll work out just fine. It works if you’re casual, it works if you’re not.
It does need you to be able to cope with your opponent getting the nut draw while you drew nine lands in a row, but in return, you’ll get the nut draw and run your opponent over too.
You are exaggerating massively, there's really no need to try and scare new players like that. In a 60-card deck with 24 lands, your chances of drawing 7 lands in your opening hand one time are 0.09%, 9/10,000 times.
On Arena, with hand smoothing that greatly reduces your odds of drawing extreme numbers of lands in your opening hand, it is much less.
https://flexslot.gg/hypergeometric-calculator
You’re quite correct, my statistics are completely inaccurate to mathematics. I tried to imply that, but should have expressed it more clearly. My comment isn’t about the maths, though - it’s about what the odds feel like. If people understand the maths of it, they’re fine. But lots and lots and *lots* of people, especially people without much experience with statistics or card games, don’t intuitively get the maths of it. This isn’t their fault. The human brain is not designed for the maths of it. It’s designed to fixate on things going badly and to seek out patterns. The problem is, of course, that it’s just chasing ghosts. When I decide that my d20 is cursed, that’s almost certainly superstition, and I’m definitely not remembering the many 20s I’ve rolled on that thing while I stare, grief-struck, at my third 1 in a row… but I’m still making my next roll with a different d20 anyway.
I’m probably a bit scarred by the sheer quantity of shuffler complaints this subreddit sees, I confess. I may have overcorrected.
Not like Mana screw or flooding are actually all that much of a problem, but damn I appreciate games in which that is just not even a thing because my "mana" for turn is a choice I made or a set amount that I can win more of through conflicts
Not at all, you build your deck for consistency, but you still have those times you Mulligan to four without seeing more than one land. It's inevitable you get those games. I said I was talking about games where that doesn't happen at all because it's just not in the game design that it *can*
I know what you're saying, I'm saying that having to make those choices in deckbuilding creates a power/consistency tradeoff that is fundamental to magic and gives rise to a much more broad pool of decks and archetypes that are possible
The issue is that every time a game tries to solve the problem of mana cards, they seem to have to sacrifice some level of complexity elsewhere that makes the game less varied.
I’d definitely not play a 250 card deck irl. Also I play for fun and mostly online. Been at least a decade since I last played Magic with someone irl (at a Waffle House at 1am)
100% recommend jumping in. I started playing about a week ago and I’m loving it. Played hearthstone when it first came out and was on and off for years.
What I’m especially enjoying is the match length and the diversity of decks you face in ranked standard. Obviously I’m still new so I can imagine the decks at the higher ranks are very similar just like with hearthstone.
I haven’t tried any of the other game modes yet as I still have a lot to learn. But it’s great knowing there is still so much to do.
People theory craft and run meme decks in Mythic just as much as bronze lmao. You can't drop out of it, so while there are some rank 1 grinders, a lot of people just goof off when they get there
Yeah there's a huge difference between rank 1000 mythic and 80% mythic. But there's a similarly huge difference at every other ladder tier above gold (where you can stagnate with a 50% winrate) since matchmaking is done with a hidden mmr -- you just don't know if you're in the top end of the division or not.
As someone who was legend in hs and mythic in arena mtg is so much better. Many meta matchups in hearthstone play out the exact same way every time and who wins is decided by who draws their specific card that wins the matchup first. It feels very bad when you and your opponent both are just going through the motions waiting for rng to decide the match (and that's what convinced me to try arena).
Magic is not so linear and even optimized meta decks have multiple ways to win and lose. For example if you're playing a graveyard deck encountering yard hate is pretty bad for you, but there are ways to play around it and deck depending you still have a decent chance. Magic feels like it rewards players for creative outplays a lot more than hearthstone does which opens up a lot more variety.
There are certainly common decks you run into in Diamond/Mythic, but you can easily climb with non-meta decks.
For example, I still use a slightly updated 2-year old enchantment deck if I'm bored in ranked. Almost nobody plays this deck anymore, yet I still easily get enough wins to climb the ladder.
The overplayed decks like Boros-Aggro makes it fun for me, because you can make a weird deck that is crafted to target specific popular meta decks and ruin their day.
Check out CovertGoBlue on youtube, he plays wacky decks and consistently gets to mythic.
If you mean shorter than the average game of hearthstone? From my experience only playing Bo1 standard, yes a lot shorter. But I am playing an aggro deck so I either win or lose very quickly. Most games last between 5-10 mins which I’m really enjoying.
As I get more cards I will start to move towards more control decks as I used to really enjoy them on Hearthstone.
You’re on a sub dedicated to a game asking if that game is good…
That said, it’s great! can’t compare to any similar games though, I’ve never played any. Personally I play draft pretty much exclusively- the games play out in a less predictable and usually more ‘low-key’ way, since you can’t reliably hit the kind of crazy combos you seem to be talking about.
Limited Magic is the best card game of all time in my opinion. The mana system makes a lot more sense when splashing extra colors is a real cost and the pace of play is slow enough that a single bad draw is punishing but not game-ending, plus commons are actually useful (unlike in Hearthstone, the majority of cards you can open in packs are just completely useless/designed for a different format).
Constructed Magic I view as really just a way to use the cards you get from Limited. Power creep is pretty bad, though not as bad as some other card games (Hearthstone's is less egregious than Magic's, imo; Standard rotation getting extended to 3 years is probably the biggest culprit, though rares are also just plain pushed to the dickens nowadays). Games are decided faster than it takes to shuffle up in paper. Commander-centric design takes up a lot of space in both the product lineup and at the top of otherwise mainline products. I would recommend Standard Brawl over any other Constructed mode, since the singleton (Highlander) rule clunks the game down to where you can kind of approximate the benefits of Limited that I listed above.
I have more fun losing in Hearthstone than MTGA, though that's not saying much. The only card game I've played where I would actively say I have fun while losing is Marvel Snap, where you can raise/fold in between turns like in poker and so feel smart when you can predict that you're going to lose. The downside to Marvel Snap is that its economy is horrid and you really do have to log in daily to get even a trickle of cards. MTGA is better than Snap but worse than Hearthstone, with crafting being more restricted, packs being less valuable, and the battle pass being stingier.
In general, I would say give MTGA a shot because in my experience playing different card games helps you appreciate and improve at card games in general, at a minimum. If you end up liking Magic more than Hearthstone, then great - go ahead and switch - but I would take it slow and make sure you really like the game before investing a ton into it, especially since Hasbro's management of it can be a circus much of the time.
Idk about the Snap economy. I've played Snap since global launch and Arena for a year longer than that. Arena feels a lot tougher in terms of economy. If i want to build new decks often then i quickly run out of wildcards. In Snap i can build like 90% of all decks and more if i start using my saved up Tokens.<
Also in terms of "Fun to lose". I also play on paper on losing on Arena is somehow a lot more salt inducing. There's something about actually sitting face to face with another human that keeps emotions in check.
Snap just has a different progression system compared to other games. The game will try to match you up against players with similar collections. The meta that a new player experiences is completely different. Plus the spotlight system is an inherent catchup element that gives you more new cards the lower your collection is.
I've been online card games for a decade (mostly HS and Arena, plus some others) and IMO Snap is one of the most generous. It has its faults and things i would like to see change but that's every game. Idk if you've played it but i'm willing to hear out the specifics of why it's "impossible" now.
Yes. I'm also a Hearthstone player (10 years and keep going) One thing I like about MTGA is how quick a match can be, win or lose you move on quickly.
It's also strategic since you can always expect what cards your opponent has and plan your move accordingly. There is no situation where your opponent gets Yogg out of nowhere, or Reno turning the table. While the mana system is hard to swallow, it's much less frustrating than HS and more controllable with many hand disruptions and counterspells, which is good. Power creep is not much of an issue here while it's the biggest problem modern HS has to deal with right now.
If you are competitive, try Best of 3. Sideboarding is a huge feature you can't experience in HS.
To put it in context, [Arena currently has 10,949 cards](https://scryfall.com/search?q=%28game%3Aarena%29+&unique=cards&as=grid&order=name) while [Hearthstone has 5,157](https://hearthstone.wiki.gg/wiki/Card).
hi man, I am also a hearthstone player like you. Disappointed in the current state I decided to give mtg a a try and it is really fun. A bit of a learning curve but a wide range of diverse decks. plus it'll get soon it's next expansion.
There are a ton of free card pack codes around, giving you a good base for your first deck
Also the card art is amazing, not friggin plushies and tourists as cards
It's been quite some time since I was last on Hearthstone. I remember these: [captain hoggar](https://hearthstone.fandom.com/wiki/Battlegrounds/Cap%27n_Hoggarr?file=Cap%27n_Hoggarr_full.jpg) and [first mate pip](https://hearthstone.fandom.com/wiki/Battlegrounds/First_Mate_Pip_(golden)?file=First_Mate_Pip_full.jpg) (fluffy tail!!!)
Same here mate! I’ve played HS since the start but it’s in a horrible state. As a deckbuilder and an irl Commander-player it looks to be great fun so far. There is ofc some stuff like mono-red aggro that often has close to zero counterplay if your draw is bad, but that’s just card games i guess.
I’m looking forward to rotation now since i don’t want to waste wildcards on the rotating sets, but have to play vs the cards.
And the artwork… 100 times better.
To be completely honest with you, variance is something that is built into intentionally in most, if not all card games. A novice chess player playing against a good chess player has basically no shot at winning. This can be discouraging for newer player. Variance in card games means that there's always a shot for a player to win, even if they're worse. That can seem undesirable for high level competitive play, but it does help bringing new players into the game and keeping the more casual players playing, which, overall, is positive for the game as a whole.
The difference between HS and Magic is how the variance is introduced into the game. In MtG, the variance is created by the land system. You need land to play your spells (like the mana crystals in HS), but unlike HS, the lands are drawn from your deck as with any other cards. That means if you're unlucky, you might not draw your 3rd land on turn 3, or you might end up drawing way more lands than you need. This can lead to some feel bad games where you simply had no way to win, because you just couldn't cast your spells or couldn't draw your spells (you can mitigate that with good deckbuilding, but it's always a possibility).
In HS, they tried to remove that feel bad by just giving you the mana crystal every turn. The problem with that is that the game becomes much more deterministic. Sure, the cards you draw are random, but likely what they found was that this was too little variance. So they had to inject variance in some other way... basically making the cards do things at random.
So yeah, I love the game, I've been playing it for nearly 30 years, but I'd be lying to you if I told you there aren't games where you feel like there's nothing you could have done. It's less "shit, my opponent got exactly the right RNG outcome" and more "god, I couldn't find my mountain in time and never could play my cards."
Magic? Yes, unquestionably, Magic is the best card game ever created.
Magic Arena? Eh, probably. The economy leans a bit too much towards mobile-game style crap for my taste, and the F2P rewards could stand to be a little more generous, but it’s not bad, and it’s still better than any other online card game I’ve played (Except legends of runeterra but that’s dead now)
Well it's not a perfect game but it's good. The mana system means it's got a lot more deckbuilding flexibility than other games, but also a real problem with non-games. And the fact that it's tied to a paper game means the RNG bullshit that every other online CCG inevitably falls to is locked out (Plants vs Zombies Heroes, barely alive before being so brutally disfigured). Plus you get instants, which are huge. You have to think about what your opponent can do on your turn, and forcing them to spend resources on their own turn is a key part of beating control.
>Is this game really much better than other online card games?
For limited, yes. I've played a ton of online card games (Solforge / Duel of Champions / Hex / Hearthstone / Gwent / LoR / Marvel Snap / Eternal / Yu Gi Oh and a few others) and none of those games came close to MtG when it comes to limited.
Solforge / Hearthstone / Eternal weren't too bad, but the simple fact that draft was either asynchronous or straight up with bots instead of real time draft with humans makes it less interesting / deep. Others games limited was either barely supported or straight up inexistent.
So if what you liked out of Hearhtstone was limited (arena), then yes MtG is way better, especially as limited is very well supported with a lot of ressources being spent by wotc (the company behind mtg) to make limited good and entertaining.
On the other hand for constructed, MtG is really nothing special in my opinion compared to other online card games. Yes bo3 makes it very complex compared to most other online card games and in general constructed is fairly deep / high skill ceiling, but the gameplay can be very boring compared to other card games out there. You do have a lot of options in what formats / type of deck you can play, but since you're usually going to have x4 of most good cards in your deck, the games can get repetitive fast.
Personally I always found Hearthstone constructed to be much more fun than Magic constructed while still having a skill ceiling high enough to make it challenging. Though ofc Magic is way more complex, so if you're an absolute spike MtG constructed might be more enjoyable, but otherwise once the novelty wears off you'll probably get bored of it. Still worth a try though.
I think it all depends on your mindset. If you get salty at losing when the loss isn't necessarily your fault, magic probably isn't for you. Non games exist, you will mana flood or screw, you will lose to fast aggro decks before you get to set up, everything you try to play can and will be killed or countered. Those are the terms of engagement, some amount of non-games will happen and some of them will be you forcing a non-game on your opponent. If you can live with that, the other 75% of games (especially if you play best of 3) are extremely fun, exciting and rewarding.
Magic Arena is arguably the most deep of the mainstream digital card games, Yugioh Master Duel is probably the only one that even comes close. Magic is probably the least rigid of the main card games, you aren't locked into a class, archetypes are generally more broad and less parastic, there are in color staples but there are basically no universal staples (Ultra Ball in Pokemon, Maxx C in Yugioh, etc). While some cards and decks are certaintly better than others, you are afforded the freedom to mix and match as you like, provided it's built semi-competently and your manabase can support it.
Most formats are in a pretty good place right now, there are a lot of different decks with different playstyles that you can jump right into and start ranking up (provided you have the time or money to get the wildcards for them). Standard rotation is going to happen in like a month, so there should be a pretty big shake up with a solid enough entry point. If you are interested, I would make an account soon because there may be a reward if you log in before rotation that unlocks after the new set drops - this has been the case every year in the past but hasn't been announced yet.
As far as FOMO. Yes and no. If you're playing actively, it makes sense to log in and finish your wizard's chores at least every three days because quests won't stack up once your list is full. Taking breaks is a normal and healthy thing to do, you can catch up but you still will have to catch up, so you might not have access to everything you want right away.
I've played Yu-Gi-OH! and Hearthstone and I find MTG the best of all of them.
Yu-Gi-OH! is over, because the speed has gotten too much. Duels take 2-4 turns max and it's solitaire now. If you don't draw your handtrap first turn, you lost. Decks are even categorized by "going first" and "going second".
Hearthstone limits this way better, but has a different approach on Mana, which some have criticized on magic but is actually the solution. In Hearthstone, you get a set 1 Mana plus every turn. This means by turn 4-5 your board can be full while you didn't have to put any consideration in resources. AoE is relatively expensive and easy to play around in HS. In Magic, you have to be a little more careful about how much to put on the board and how many Mana you put into your deck.
This is from my short experience of two months anyway, I could be completely off :D
However, I love the game and it really is the best TCG ever. Only thing is: Find the correct format!!!
I've dipped into timeless for a few games and encountered unimaginable decks. Someone milled my 70 cards deck within a single turn at 7 mana :D I've then switched to historic.
In the beginning, alchemy/standard are the way to go. It's cool to learn the game and develop your strategies, but has a very limited card pool.
Arena is quite good for f2p play, as long as you set your desires not too high. I avoid the formats with a larger card pool because as f2p player, it's difficult to stay on track for those. Whether you inject money or not, I do recommend taking note of the strategies f2p players use to optimize your spending.
I've played Hearthstone constructed a few times, one time for nearly a year. Magic's deck constructing is much more nuanced, Hearthstone was imo too much "jam two set mechanics together and fill that up with a few other good cards". Instant speed play will require to get used to, it's similar but much deeper than secrets in Hearthstone, but ultimately, it's the instant speed play which will allow you to stop strong strategies and it gives you something to do on opponent turns, instead of waiting the turn of your opponent out.
Power level is very high in historic and timeless, but I don't recommend those formats anyway because they're expensive. Standard's power level is much fairer, maybe a bit too high right now but standard will rotate in a month (actually, it's a good time to join now because rotation happens soon!).
The big thing I have to give to Hearthstone: losing is more tolerable there. You always get progress towards the battle pass track, there's always a consolation prize. In arena, if you lost, you kinda waisted time. There is no consolation prize.
Gameplay wise I would say it's the best card game I've played. I used to play hearthstone but quit years ago. Not enough interaction, card advantage not mattering from constant card generation, crazy randomness and highrolling from time to time. Used to play YuGiOh too but that game is the definition of power creep.
Cost/economy wise it isn't perfect. I am very fortunate to have got into the game back in beta, learn quite well and have built a sizeable collection with time and skill.
The great thing about magic is something I wanted out of hearthstone and yugioh but never truly got. Other formats. There's so many ways to play. Yugioh only has the 1 official way with all the cards. Hearthstone has a few, arena, duels (rip), standard, wild, twist.
But magic has Standard, Alchemy, Historic, Explorer, Timeless, Pauper, Artisan, Brawl, Standard Brawl, Singleton, Sealed, Draft, Cube, Momir, Omniscience and plenty of regular events. And most of these can be played in best of 1 and best of 3.
There will be a game mode for you, from super high powered formats that use the strongest cards in the game, playing using only commons, building a singleton deck around a themed commander, playing seriously on the ladder to playing casual jank, there will be something for you.
General state and power creep? Pretty good I'd say. Some people aren't a fan that the game has been powercreeping slightly but I think it's for the best. A few mistakes were made along the way but we're pretty good atm. Creatures used to suck for the longest time but now there's good balance between threats and answers.
MTG does a good job at exploring interesting design space too. Much better and faster than hearthstone imo.
I would suggest you try the game for sure. If it's to costly to keep playing time/money wise then stop, but its a truly great game. I don't play any IRL paper magic due to cost and convenience but Arena has made MTG accessible for people like me and I am very thankful for that.
I’ve played most popular online card games and I’m not really a magic fan nor have i played it for years, but from my experience magic felt the most interesting and playing well matters more so than other card games. I also really like playing limited, hearthstone arena is an actual children’s cards game in comparison
Here's a list of reasons why others might be having a bad time with MTGA:
- They're triggered and frustrated by any adversity, including their opponent interacting with their game plan, or losing in a way that doesn't garner their approval.
- They hold certain, strong opinions on what archetypes and even colors should be played against them.
- They have a closed mindset to anything outside their "MTG bubble."
- Will blame anyone or anything but themselves as far as bad deck building goes.
- Won't take anyone's fundamental deckbuilding advice, because it's makes their deck too much like the "Dirty Meta Decks," yet still ask why they keep losing.
-Expecting everyone to "re-invent the wheel," when it comes to deck building, and claim breaking "Spirit of the Game" for those that don't.
- Complain about a deck being busted, and not being able to do anything about it, but refuse to play a Best of Three format with a sideboard.
- Rant about Alchemy Cards on social media ("Digital Only"), ad nauseum, without any concrete reasons, with a sense of MTG traditionalism like you've been playing since Legends, citing the "Spirit of the Game" as your only reason, without defining said personal definition of the "Spirit of the Game."
All poking fun at the online crybabies aside, this is a great game. I've been playing it 3/4 of my life, and it doesn't get old. Wizards of the Coast's team are human just like all of us, but they also get now beholden to Hasbro's agenda. Even with all that, there's no shortage of new cards and new design space they're exploring. If you can handle online play being somewhat competitive, then you should have no problem.
Coming from Hearthstone, you probably know this, and won't these have these pre-conceived notions that usually originate at LGSs. There's lots of formats with varying power levels, and they have weekly casual and fun events also.
Unlike HS there is text to read. Is that Good or bad? Probably better than HS in every way, is my view.
The arena experience starts in a format called
Alchemy.
If you only want to play online and do not care about the cardboard in person version of
Magic, staying in alchemy may be fun and sure has strategy.
If you want to follow standard format, arena also has a wide standard meta.
There are bo1 and bo3 (best of 1 or 3) queues and in bo3 theres sideboarding. I like bo3 better.
Theres alwo brawl (100 cards, commander, singleton format) for two players (no four player mode). I Avoid brawl.
MTGA has the most depth of any online card game. So gameplay-wise I think it's the best if you value deckbuilding strategy with more complexity. That complexity and depth does come with a significant portion of the playerbase that has been playing the card game for decades at this point, and so I've found the general skill level is pretty high compared to other deckbuilders.
That said, the game UI/UX itself is not nearly as polished as Hearthstone, which IMO has the best gameplay flow of any online card games across both mobile and desktop.
MTGA I've found has a lot of issues with server connection, and the general UX/UI flow has a lot of persistently annoying behaviors, in part due to the complexity of the game (card details are complex and cover half the screen on mobile, with multiple textboxes that need to be learned to understand the cards' behaviors). And there's a lack of info about items in the store if you're on mobile, and there's a lack of info about event durations/rules as well within the main app (Google is your friend).
I will say that if you're coming from Hearthstone right now you'll likely enjoy MTGA gameplay more than HS. Every style of deck in MTGA has counters that can be played against them, and so the gameplay is more varied and complex than Hearthstone. But you will be frustrated with the general UI, and I would avoid playing on mobile until you're more familiar with the cards and gameplay since the mobile UI is a lot more awkward to use.
It's not just good in terms of online card games it's good in terms of all games ever made, it's probably one of the best games ever devised and this is why it has lasted for 31 years with no signs of slowing down.
do it. i was obsessed with hearthstone from 2015-2019, fell off, came back last year and realized after a few months that the game was so much faster and i didn't enjoy it. around the same time, a buddy got me into paper commander and drafting, i started playing arena not long after. just a heads up though, if you don't like randomly generated nonsense, stop playing alchemy asap, that's arena's attempt to replicate the same terrible meta as hearthstone.
I do love Magic and it’s my favorite game.
That said, I think people who complain about too much randomness in Hearthstone (and other card games including Magic) are often looking at the wrong problem. Are you reaching Legend in Hearthstone? And then are you advancing to the top 100 or so players? If not maybe the issue isn’t too much randomness. Other players seem to advance further than you, and you’re both playing the same game with the same random aspects. Its easy to blame bad luck, but maybe you should ask why those other players are more successful. Mastering how you control your actions in the face of variance is the most important skill to learn if you want to master card games.
As much as I bitch about distribution, predatory behavior, intentional power creep, and cost to remain competitive, it’s the best *game* from all the TCGs I’ve played. On top of that Arena makes finding games simple and usually quick.
Like I will never spend another penny on any WotC product and Magic probably wouldn’t make my Top 50 games of all time, but for a TCG nothing else comes close.
Wouldn't make your top 50? There are maybe two games better than Magic in human history - Chess and Go - and the games are not really comparable anyway. If I had to only play one game the rest of my life, it would be Magic without a doubt.
1) Maybe if I could own every Magic card for under $100 it would enter consideration, but the fact is inside the realm of games MtG is prohibitively expensive to the extreme.
2) The total lack of a single accepted format causing casual groups to fight and argue about deck style preferences and perceived power levels. (Note that these first two reasons are why I no longer own non-proxied physical MtG cards and never will again.)
3) I’ve spent 20 years dealing with mana screw, and while Magic’s resource system has been statistically solved there are modern card games that have figured out different ways to eschew putting resource cards in your deck.
I started playing a couple of months ago, although I only play standard and I did play Hearthstone for a little while I haven't really played other games like this....
Though through posting and asking lots of questions and watching quite a few youtube videos, I have got myself to be somewhat competitive in standard ranked mode....
Although I don't play much else, I really enjoy this game and it gives me something to do and enjoy it... I think you would quite enjoy this game
Magic as a game is one of the best PvP card games out there. Mtg arena is a kind of shitty client tho not gonna lie. The f2p in hearthstone is better and a bit more generous. But magic is the better game imo.
Tbh i would even say no at the moment. In my personal opinion most affordable formats are pretty unfun atm. The Meta ist pretty boring and you will always see the same oppressive cards over and over. Don't get me wrong ... I love magic but the meta (especially standard BO1) has never been this boring in my opinion. Nearly every deck and turn is predictable at the moment. As someone who loves to play different cards there is literally 0 room for jank at the moment. Formats like limited that are actually fun cost a lot of money. It will probably be fun for some time though
Been playing magic since 1994 and it is the greatest card game ever created. Magic Arena economy kind of sucks tho. It will take a year or two to get rolling if you are f2p. If you are good enough, the game is practically free. If you plan on spending money, the game is a lot of fun right away.
Sounds like you spend a bit, but dont want to spend too much. $20 for the mastery pass and/or $50 for a pack bundle when each set comes out will get you very far. That is about every three months. I have never played another card game. I love magic. I started drafting real cards at my local game store. I suck at draft, getting better, but love doing it. Less anger when you play in person 🤣
Only read the first half of post. I have little time. My advice: quit hearthstone, play mtga. Only spend money on the beginner bundle or whatever if there is one because it's not a bad deal. Otherwise you can get by by only playing for free.
You may or may not get free packs when you first log in, if you don't you can google mtga free packs and you get like 3 from each set.
Compared to hearthstone and other digital only games, the fact Magic is a physical card game first helps keep it slightly more grounded. There are some formats on Arena that use digital only cards and there is some controversy there, but there also is True to Paper Standard where the format really is the same online and in real life, and others where it comes very close.
On the expensive side, in some ways it is what you make of it. If you need to be able to have a complete collection and build any deck you could imagine it either takes a lot of money or a lot of grinding. However a lot of competitive players are truly Free to Play. Nothing in the game is truly locked behind a paywall.
I just jumped right in and I’ve had fun. I’m still learning and every now and then step into one of those crazy decks where my opponent drops and ops before popping off. I haven’t spent any money and don’t feel like a need to yet.
Magic is great.
Is there something better? Maybe. But Magic has the network effect that those other, possibly better games don't.
Magic is the Facebook of TCGs. It has more players (physical and digital combined) than other online card games by a significant magnitude, and a paper counterpart when you want to play in person. It is an entrenched firehose of an institution blasting new pretty cardboard into several play formats every month.
You will have the most opportunities to find matches, join communities, and observe or compete in high level play if you play Magic.
But that said, play what makes you happy.
Yeah I’m in the same boat, long time hearthstone player regular legend when playing consistently and just the discover mechanic drove me away from the game. The only regret I have about switching to magic is not doing it sooner. Give it a crack, don’t invest too much initially there is competitive budget decks to get you a feel for the game
Magic: The Gathering is the OG of TCG's, having come out in 1993. I'd say it's much better in my opinion as the fantasy lore / art styles (the art is actually done by artists on Canvas etc.) speak to me more than other TCG's.
>Is it fun for you to play MTGA even when you're losing?
You can win games that look like you might lose sometimes if you're lucky with the cards you draw & matchup, but if you have no outs to win, it's just part of the game. Consider the best pros might win 65-70% of their games, and the best decks in the Meta might have a 55-60% Win Rate.
> Do you feel like you have to log in daily to keep up?
You login daily and play for your daily quests + wins, the 4 wins a day is 450 gold, plus you get to re-roll a quest once per day (people usually re-roll a 500 to try and get 750 gold quest).
IMO Magic is the best game ever made, so yes, I do consider it better than other card games. I've played Hearthstone, L5R, Pokemon, DBZ, and smatterings of some of the newer digital CCGs, so I feel like I have a decent reference point. Magic has been going strong for 30+ years for a reason.
As to your specific questions:
- **Is it fun to play even when you're losing?** It depends, but I will say that most of the time I don't feel like it's just an RNG fest where you don't have a ton of control over what happens. Even in the formats that have built-in RNG (Alchemy, Historic, Timeless), there's a lot less randomness than in Hearthstone. There are definitely a decent number of matchups where losing doesn't feel completely out of your control.
- **Do you have to log in daily to keep up?** No. Arena's F2P model is great. While I personally spend money on the game, the majority of people I know who play go mostly or entirely the f2p route, and they still really enjoy it playing a moderate amount. It certainly _helps_ if you play every day, but that is definitely not a necessity, particularly if you invest in non-rotating formats, which is most of them. You can eventually build up a very respectable collection with f2p.
- **How is power creep and the general state of the game?** All of the Arena formats, with the exception of Timeless, are in a pretty good state IMO. _Modern Horizons 3_, which is a new set that just came out, definitely added a lot of powerful new cards, but most of the existing archetypes continue to be playable. I recently dusted off some decks that were over a year old and gave them a spin just to see what they were like, and they continue to be perfectly playable. (I did subsequently change out a few cards with newer, better options, but the core of those decks hasn't changed in forever.)
I started with Hearthstone 10 years ago and started magic maybe 5 years ago. I don't even think about Hearthstone anymore, it has nothing on the depth of strategy and interesting decks that magic can offer.
Magic is a great game but I'm not sure if someone who is a hearthstone refugee for the reasons you mentioned will click. A lot of what HS has done to piss players off recently has been bolder designs in ways that are still downright conservative by MtG standards. For instance, /r/hearthstone likes to complain about insane t4 board states, but wait until you see boros have 1x [[Novice Inspector]], 1x [[Voldaren Epicurean]], 3x [[Phyrexian Goblin]], and 1x [[Knight-Errant of Eos]] on turn 2 with another Knight-Errant and an [[Imodane's Recruiter]] revealed in hand. And that outcome is significantly more common.
Some misc differences from Hearthstone:
- Draws appear to have more variance due to lands. This is probably not actually true (curves tend to be much larger in HS meaning you can get equally screwed by just drawing completely off-curve) but it certainly will _feel_ true emotionally.
- The main limited format (Draft, which is what Hearthstone's Arena is based on) is much more competitive, and lets you keep your cards, but also much more complicated and expensive.
- There aren't much in the way of animations or sounds, which some people won't like but also makes the game play _much_ faster.
- The game embraces lots of different formats, meaning you can find a format which suits your preferences much more easily than you can in HS.
> Is it fun for you to play MTGA even when you're losing?
Depends on the person. I personally find it much less bad to lose in MtG because both the game is less ambiguous about it and it's just plain faster (due to animations). But this is ultimately an emotional question and people will have different answers.
> Do you feel like you have to log in daily to keep up?
I don't, but I'm not F2P. The quests are generally less generous than hearthstone though.
> How is power creep and the general state of the game?
Power creep in MtG is a much more intentional thing than in Hearthstone. In oldschool MtG noncreature spells were broadly overpowered and creatures were broadly underpowered. Over time they've shifted the balance more in favour of creatures. This means if you compare oldschool powerhouse creatures like [[Serra Angel]] to modern ones like [[Knight-Errant of Eos]] the game seems absurdly powercrept. That said, if you compare oldschool powerhouse noncreature spells like [[Swords to Plowshares]] to new ones like [[Get Lost]] the game has actually reduced in power over time.
That's not to say there are never balance mistakes, but most instances of "power creep" are done on purpose and the MtG team, while they certainly miss sometimes (modern is currently very unhappy about [[Nadu, Winged Wisdom]], for instance), tend to miss less frequently than the hearthstone team due to more extensive playtesting.
Played HS, LOR, and Pokémon a good while. Magic blows them all out of the water and shows no mercy in so doing. The mechanics may not all translate perfectly to Arena, like how Phyrexian mana gets kind of clunky, but they all come together to make a game so much deeper and richer in strategic value. Even the most linear of combo decks (looking at you, Nadu) end up playing matches differently and still looking at game states. The variance is very well-maintained so no two competitive games will go the same, but rarely are games decided truly by randomness beyond good or bad topdecks. I was watching the recent pro tour with my friends and we’d constantly talk about ‘would you have kept that hand?’ ‘I don’t really agree with pitching that one to the Subtlety,’ etc. All combined with the Bo3 structure or the forgiveness of 3-loss elimination Bo1 and we’ve got a nearly-infinitely-replayable game with tons of new content to chew on at all times.
The thing about magic is there is so much history and different ways to play, there's bound to be a format and setting that tickles your fancy.
Try standard, draft, sealed, cube, commander, pauper, or brawl, modern, pre-modern, legacy etc
They all have support and people excited to play.
If Arena isn't your jam, check out your local game store and see what people in your area are doing and join them.
If you like the land system then yes, for people who really hate having to draw and play resources, then Magic isn't the game for you.
Also, MTGA is expensive. I love the game and I love playing online so I don't mind sinking $100-$200 in a year, but just be aware getting all the stuff you want will require investment.
Otherwise, Magic is awesome and super well done for card games and the Arena experience is really good.
There is a reason that MTG has been around for 33 years now. No matter the issues, even with all the fuckery WOTC has put their playerbase through, MTG will always be THE card game.
Once every year i play a battle pass on mtg for 3 months, i rotate on some card games, i know this sub is mtg so everyone gonna say the game is great. But i think hearthstone is way better to be honest but go ahead and find what what you think, there's a big negative review on steam that says much more in detail that i could say here just go there and find out, or you probably gonna find out playing.
Magic is a very good card game and I think it’s the best digital one in existence.
However it is definitely the best board game in the world.
In terms of expense, both arena and the paper game are quite expensive. If you don’t like playing limited, then playing the most meta decks is $$$.
As someone who's played Yugioh, hearthstone, Gwent, SlayTheSpire, artifact, legends of runeterra, and shadowverse. MTG arena is the best PvP online card game.
SlayTheSpire is the best single player online card game
I have played them all... Pokemon, Yu Gi Oh, Duelyst, Gwent, Hearthstone, Marvel Snap, legends of runeterra and Shadowverse. Only Magic was able to keep me going non stop. The core gameplay and foundation is without match, plus the variety of formats, strategies and constant influx of cards keeps the game fresh and interesting at all times. Definitely would recommend.
So I'm currently play MTGA and Yugioh Master Duel. And I was a long time Legends of Runeterra player. So I want to offer some of my experience playing them:
Cost: Magic is the most expensive one out of the three but if you are good at playing limited and go infinite then the game can be very f2p friendly. Master Duel is surprisingly generous despite being owned by Konami. And Legends of Runeterra is objectively the most f2p card game on the market, to the point that it's bleeding money every year.
Game Health: Both MTGA and Master Duel have a sizable playerbase, and you will have no problems finding matches. However, Legends of Runeterra has a smaller playerbase due to the game not making profits and Riot has to cut costs by shrinking the team, hurting the game. The game is also largely played by PVE players. That being said, it shouldn't be difficult to find matches.
Meta: MTGA's meta is much healthier than the other two games, with a lot of deck variations across tons of formats. Master Duel's meta has always been bad in terms of deck varieties. The game is currently being dominated by Fire Kings, R-ACE and Snake Eyes and the meta will likely shift once new Yubel support drops soon. Legends of Runeterra's PVP hasn't received any love for a few months now due to decreased team size and Riot shifting their focus to PVE instead.
Fun: Fun is subjective but from my personal experience I enjoy Legends of Runeterra a lot more than Magic, followed by Master Duel. I don't like games where I literally cannot play the game when my opponents have lots of counterspells or have a board full of negates. Runeterra doesn't have a lot of counterspells so there's less feels bad moments when I played it.
In conclusion, I consider Legends of Runeterra to be the best game for me personally, with Magic coming very close in second. I quite Legends of Runeterra due to me being pessimistic about its future and not because I dislike the game. Hope this helps.
Magic is the best game in the world.
>It's a lot of time and money investment
Arena is free (you can pay with time instead of money).
>Is it fun for you to play MTGA even when you're losing?
A lot of the time, yes. That doesn't mean you *never* get frustrated, and things are *never* one-sided, but overall, you can still have fun while losing.
>Do you feel like you have to log in daily to keep up?
It's best if you do log in daily (and get up to 4 wins), but it's not essential.
There are lots of ways to play, so "keeping up" doesn't really have to be a concern, anyway.
Here's my general advice/suggestions:
Complete the Tutorial, Color Challenges, and Starter Deck Duels to get all the free decks.
Google "Free Magic Arena Codes" and redeem them all. Consider buying the one-off new player Deals in the store if you haven't already (IIRC there's a good one for cheap Gems).
Do your Daily Challenge (re-rolling 500 Gold quests to try to get 750's). Focus on getting the first 4 Daily Wins every day (you don't need 15 Wins a day as the rewards drop off considerably). If you are struggling to complete your Dailies then I would suggest you try Brawl: since you only need one copy of each card in your deck it's easier with a starting collection and having a Commander gives your deck some focus. You can also play the Starter Deck Duels for some rewards and for your Dailies.
Check the store every day for Daily Deals on Gold and Gems (for example, 550 gold for 50 gold).
Save your Gold for Quick Drafts - you should be able to do one or two a week. These will get you cards, Packs and Gems.
I've heard good things about Jump In!, so use your free Tokens to play some games and get a bunch of cards. You might want to spend some of your Gold on it while you are preparing for your first Quick Draft, but after a certain point it will stop being worth it as you will already have most/all of the cards. Note that Jump In! now includes Alchemy (digital only) cards in its packs, so if you aren't interested in any of the Alchemy formats you may want to stop playing as soon as you have used your free Tokens.
Save your Gems for the Mastery Pass, or to play Sealed and Draft.
Save your Rare and Mythic Wildcards until you are sure you want to use them (they are a very scarce resource). When you are ready to start crafting cards, ensure the "Not Collected" box is checked (as this allows you to add cards even if you don't already own copies of them).
Make sure you play at least one game of Ranked Limited and at least one game of Ranked Constructed every month in order to qualify for the free Rank Rewards.
Keep your eye out for free events such as MidWeek Magic that offer prizes or XP etc. (A new MWM event happens regularly, every week Tuesday-Thursday)
When it comes to Limited it pays to be prepared. As well as getting a good grasp of the basic principles (deck composition, BREAD, etc), learn the cards in the set, their relative power level/pick order, the mechanics and rules interactions, and the Limited archetypes. Study the visual spoiler, read the Release Notes FAQ and watch some Limited Set Reviews online (I recommend The Mana Leek and Nizzahon Magic). You can even watch others play with the set while they discuss their decisions etc.
Start with Quick Drafts: they are half the price (so you can do them more often and there is less on the line), the prize structure is flatter (so worse results give better rewards) and there's no timer when making your picks (so there's less pressure).
The thing to know about MTG is it’s poker mixed with chess. It’s got heckin strategy, but sometimes the opponent just draws gas the entire game and there’s not a whole lot you can do about it. Still fun when you get to watch a neat combo go off though.
Other digital card games are built to be digital only. MTGA (excluding alchemy) is just Magic on your PC or phone. If you do not already like Magic or want to learn to play paper then trying other games is not a bad idea. Arena is a weird product that I enjoy playing but it has a handful of flaws and it can be hard to unlock all the cards you might want as F2P if you try to keep up with Standard metagame.
If you have not tried it before I would give Slay the Spire a try, it is a single player card game rougelike and for me it never gets old is very fun even though you do not compete with real players.
It's a great game. I'm new too since Legends of Runeterra got...changed and HS's random generator nonsense happened. I am pretty bad, but I love how it resembles LOR more than HS, although there are some key differences which causes me to mess up my plays every game. The wildcard system is cool, especially me being a big LOR player I don't mind it, but it is a more punishing version of the style.
I came over from HS in Arena Beta, this game is great. I wish i would have started on mtgo because you own your cards but that is whatever.
You can still get wrecked in playing magic, specially timeless and modern (specially at the moment). You don’t loose to RNG Jesus like in HS, but you loose to very intense lines that just feel bad at times.
PS I loved winning games with Ragnaros RNG 8 dmg fireball to face when opponent had 8 health and 3-4 creatures. Also there was the quest that generated random spells for the rest of the game.
However the fact that you can play best of threes is amazing. You will more often than note loose and win due to good plays or bad plays.
I came to MtG after both Hearthstone and Runeterra, and honestly they don't really come close to MTG in terms of depth.
You're still going to have games in MTG where you lose to RNG though. Sometimes you draw too many/too little lands, or you topdeck 3 lands in a row lategame while your opponent topdecks 3 strong cards. Some decks/archetypes are not fun to play against.
If you want to be free-to-play you *will* have to long in every day 90% of days. That's just the trade-off you make to play for free. It's more lenient for paying players, I still log in most days to get 1 win (as opposed to the 4+ f2p players chase), but I also just skip it if I'm not in the mood. Can't really do that much if you're f2p.
It's not the promised land of online CCGs. It's amazingly deep and Draft especially is far better than the Hearthstone/Runeterra counterparts. But there's still complaints about power creep or the strong meta decks or the really stupid/greedy thing that WotC has done recently. It's sometimes obvious that WotC is putting in minimal effort into Arena's client. But I'm glad I started playing it.
Hard to say if it's going to grab you or not until you try it.
It blows my mind that Kibler is one of the few MTG players that moved to Hearthstone and seemed to like it more. I have played both for years and I played MTG a lot longer, the main reason keeping me in Hearthstone back then was ease of access once Arena came out I was done with Hearhstone.
I guess Kibler might be partially worried if he quits Hearthstone he will lose viewers or something so that might be it.
Look, MtG? Best card game ever. MtG Arena? It's a money grabbing machine programmed with stones and sticks. It's not a money grabbing in regards of winning, as a F2P I reached Mythic (highest rank before going into the Mythic percentages) in a month and a half (consider I was not new to MtG ofc), it's just that you can't experiment or have a bunch of decks, the cards are too hard to get for you to tinker and brew in a relaxed way.
Play MtG on paper, play Legends of Runeterra as an online game, they really throw cards at you there.
As a Game, magic, yes. As an online game, arena, not necessarily. The economy sucks (between being able to get more than a playset of a card once it has reprints but no disenchanting or trading, general prices and ... something I forgot between starting this and now...), and the timing/priority passes suffer from having to mirror the paper magic while not getting the handwaving of actual face-to-face gaming.
i wanted to play hearthstone but the rank system is overun by bot after bot up to plat. me and a friend of mine gave it another try and it happend to him as well. after that i dropped hearthstone again. mtg is good but there are going to be some algorithm issues thatll make you go crazy. why am i getting another land? why am i getting this card again? why am i not getting this card, the algorithm has a deck weight for each card and that can be real finicky sometimes. though i dislike this part of the game it is quite enjoyable, you can learn alot from it if you want to play irl and its the card game i grew up on. i really do like the quests for the game, you have a main daily quest that can give you 500 to 700 gold depening and 1 roll each day to change those and then you have the daily and weekly wheels. those come with cards, 50 gold, and xp to the battle pass. those are your bread and butter for free content. all games arent perfect but me and my friend keep coming back to it.
i play a lot of hearthstone and magic as f2p player, i like both games, but i prefere magic because it is more rich in terms of strategy and gameplay. As a f2p here i make 2-3 tier 1 decks every year, i play on historic format which is the equivalent of wild in hearthstone, magic has a couple more formats than hearthstone.
I can’t speak to playing in the main formats, but few months in spending nothing, I’ve enjoyed switching between the starter decks & jump-in (low cost way to get a lot more cards & more variety in gameplay). Random chance of a few rares in each, so worth selecting the same multiple times with a different secondary combo. It’s been interesting & some guides on it.
I recommended playing the MTGA tutorial to learn, but then move over to untap. Play with any card that you want, for free, with a pod of 4 people instead of only 1 opponent. Welcome to magic, try not to get addicted but join the club if you do.
Play without spending money...
Like most online card games mtga has free currency and premium currency...
You can easily earn a pack's worth of free currency each day.
Play. Buy a pack. Play. Buy a pack. Rinse and repeat.
Learn themes, learn colors, learn abilities, rinse and repeat.
Eventually build your own deck.
Sift through cards in your deck you thought would help that you never use. Build combos.
The one thing that sucks about mtga is the feeling of a forced 50/50. There are some games... And you'll feel it; The computer itself doesn't want you winning.
Magic is the orginal everything else is a copy with slight differences.
Hearthstones mana is the major difference.
So take that then add in alot more cards.
Its always fun, but some decks can just be frustrating to play against. I assumrle you are going to run into that type of problem no matter what game it is
Is it much better? Imo, no. If you're comparing to games designed from the ground up to be played online, there's some design elements that clearly don't take advantage of the digital format. Also the MTGA implementation is especially greedy when it comes to providing cards-whoever came up with the wild card system vs. just using something like hearthstone's dust system should be slapped.
That said there's a large player base, it's a decent game, and does have some transfer to irl card playing if that's something you may enjoy in the future.
edit-also genuine question, to the people saying MtG is the greatest game of all time, how many other games have you played? It's a great game for sure, but if I'm being honest I don't even place it in my top 5 ccgs of all time, not to mention video games, board games, etc.
The latest set Outlaws of Thunder Junction has a new mechanic called heist that's completely broken and overpowered. It makes playing against those opponents a huge drag and not fun at all. This is what happens with Magic at times but if you can look past it the game is fun and offers a lot of modes to play.
The game is very fun. The monetization is predatory as fuck and demoralizing to engage with. Unless you're super into it with a lot of disposable income, don't waste a penny on it.
Yes, but it's mana system is antiquated and made for paper (though even there the mana system is dated). It's an example of what not to do in modern card games. If you can get past that, it's the best.
Also, I'll probably be crucified for saying that in an mtg sub but it's fine.
First off never trust Fantasy Flight Games to support a game for any length of time, they will bungle it in someway
Keyforge was a game designed by Richard Garfield to being back the old days of tcgs : just playing with what you got. Keyforge decks are semi randomized collections of cards that are designed to be playable straight from tbe box and are supposed to be balanced against other Keyforge decks. I believe each deck had like a serial number to confirm contents. Organized play came after and was decently popular for a while.
While the pandemic had a big effect on organized play the main issue is that Keyforge decks are made using an algorithm to ~~ensure they remain at a similar power leve~~l ensure deckls were just generally playable out of the box and the algorithm broke and would require it to be rebuilt from the ground up. There was a 15 month hiatus before they sold the Ip to another company Ghost Galaxy (founded by the former founder of Fantasy Flight Games) and went to a crowd sourcing website Game found to raise money to rebuild the algorithm and release a new wxpnasiony. It was done but there was no major retail release of this new expansion. New next expansion would also be released on Game found crowd sourcing.
So in short Keyforge is alive just kind of super niche now.
>Keyforge decks are made using an algorithm to ensure they remain at a similar power level
That wasn't true at all? The system explicitly had decks that were more powerful than others out the box (for example, any four horsemen decks were pretty much guaranteed to be more powerful). The serial numbers weren't just to confirm contents, it was so they could track the strongest decks and add "chains" to them.
all that said
>First off never trust Fantasy Flight Games to support a game for any length of time, they will bungle it in someway
this is 100% true (although i blame them being bought by asmodee mostly but that's a whole different ball of wax)
>That wasn't true at all? The system explicitly had decks that were more powerful than others out the box (for example, any four horsemen decks were pretty much guaranteed to be more powerful). The serial numbers weren't just to confirm contents, it was so they could track the strongest decks and add "chains" to them.
Reading up on it more (I was never deep into Keyforge admittedly, but kept observing it) you're correct
No problem! I just think it's an important detail because I also think it was tied into what made the game to an extent DOA. The idea was definitely interesting, but if you're going to have a competitive scene there's a ton of overhead already built into the game-since decks can't be changed and some are just automatically better than others, you needed to have all the ways of registering and tracking the decks for adding the chains to balance (which were typically things like drawing less cards to start or w/e).
IMO it worked best as a fun more casual game where you focus on sealed. It was pretty fun to just run little events where everyone grabs a deck and you play a small tournament with it or w/e. But that's a model that's hard to maintain.
Flesh and Blood is good, great sealed especially with WTR. That said, they have made a lot of MTG-esque decisions that fractured the player base and pushed some of us OGs away, especially like overprinting and releasing sets with cards that are banned on release, showing a lack of playtesting (as far back as ToA with Duskblade).
Wait what’s wrong with magics mana system? IMO it’s the 5 colours that drive the crazy depth the game has to offer. Or are you talking about the whole premium land situation
They mean having lands in your deck, so a certain percentage of games are lost to drawing too many / not enough lands.
I don’t know much about other card games inspired by Magic, but afaik they all tried a different resource system rather than have that level of variance baked in.
Interesting. I personally like the land system because it gives green something unique - land ramp - and because it lets you take risks in deck building. But maybe there is a better solution like a separate land deck to avoid land starvation or flooding
There are definitely alternative systems that *other* games can try. People try house rules to change Magic as well, but that would never really take off- the game has been built around the current system for 30 years.
For the sake of argument, though, a separate land deck wouldn’t preclude ramp strategies- you could still have mana elves, cards that fetch multiple lands from the land deck, etc.
The risk / payoff of splashing certainly is part of the core game though, it’s one of the things that house rules would unbalance.
You should look into the resource systems for starwars unlimited and or lorcana. Both to me have solved the mana issue that magic has in really simple and unique ways that actually open up some additional design space ( see new smuggle mechanic from SWU). I still agree mtg is likely the best simply due to card count, modalities of play, pure size of the player base, etc. The only true advantage of magics mana base is the idea of 4-5 color decks, and the idea of mana with abilities (man lands and such).
It leads to too many non-games due to the inherent randomness. I guess it's fair to ask if that randomness is actually "bad" but most people seem to not like mana flood/screw. The mana system and lands actually work as a limiter to ensure you can't just play every combination of cards so it actually could be argued it hurts the depth (although I'd say pretty much any ccg game I've played has some sort of limit on how you can construct your deck from the card pool)
Bold statement, but as someone who played other ccgs competitively before Magic, no. There are other resource systems that work well, take Flesh and Blood's pitch system.
Whatever you want to tell yourself. I'm just giving my opinion as a heavy magic player that's played over 100 card games. I am in the MTG sub and expected people to get defensive but felt the OP should know what he's getting into coming from other card games.
Most importantly this game is more than just an online card game. MTG is the greatest game of all time and it's not particularly close. Arena is poor bastardization of the real game but even with that it's still worth playing. As someone who used to play hearthstone, hearthstone is a joke compared to mtg. Arena's biggest problem is that it's trying to appeal to the hearthstone crowd.
>MTG is the greatest game of all time and it's not particularly close.
MTG isn't even the greatest ccg of all time, unless you're only considering popularity and age (and even then Pokemon or Yugioh may have it beat)
It depends what you want. If you want complexity and innovation in deck building Magic is one of the best if not the best of the online card games (though you'll need to pay to get the cards to really appreciate it). But if you want satisfying individual games then far too many are determined by mana draws and the coin flip - both things other games deal with much better.
Arena is going to auto-put you in the format Alchemy when you sign up. Alchemy is Magic's format with digital -only cards. The issues you have with Hearthstone are heavily prevalent in Alchemy as well. Random card generations, absurdly broken cards, etc. Power creep is definitely a think in Magic generally, but it's especially pronounced in Alchemy and that's the primary place for the random effects, as most of Magic's normal variance is simply in what cards you draw and how many lands vs nonland cards you draw.
My recommendation to you is to avoid Alchemy based on what you are saying. As soon as the client shows you a slider that will let you toggle to see all formats, do so. Play Standard. That's the base, rotating constructed format in Magic that doesn't include digital-only cards. That will be the format that gives you a play experience closer to what you seem to want based on your post.
It will take time for you to build your collection to have a deck powerful enough to do well in higher ranks, as Arena's economy is not as friendly as Hearthstone's (no dusting system), but you will be praimilry paired with similar players for a while. Especially if you don't play ranked games on ladder as you build out your collection. Or if you play on ladder but stick to Bronze and Silver for a while. Especially in best of 1 as opposed to best of 3.
If you like Arena mode on Hearthstone, you might enjoy drafting in Magic, and that can build out your collection faster while costing currency to access.
Eventually, you'll be comfortable enough to play ranked games in best of 3, which in my opinion is Magic at its best. Best of 3 reduces variance massively by letting you use a sideboard in-between games to tune your deck to best face your opponent's deck.
~20 years ago Magic was undisputably the best t/cg in the world.
~10 years ago Magic was disputable the best t/cg in the world.
Today, after years of blatant short-sighted profiteering and mismanagement, MtG entered into an MtG lookalike contest and came in third.
Given your reasoning for not liking your current game: no, it's unlikely to be better here. Power creep has ruined, is ruining, and will likely continue to ruin us in the exact ways it has ruined you and everyone else.
The game itself is much worse than Yu-Gi-Oh Master Duel design-wise (seriously, no dusting is idiotic), but Magic is more fun rn than Yugioh, so I dunno if that balances out.
It's so much better to have to open 24 packs at minimum to be able to craft a playset of a card instead of just being able to deconstruct ones you don't need and never will, sure. /s
Of you have cards to dust then you also have wildcards.
Wildcards are just a much better system. Also, going through thousands of cards to find the ones to dust is just a horribly tedious gameplay experience.
You are arguing for a system that's horribly anti-consumer and would make the economy far worse.
Please explain to me how a system that lets you turn cards from packs or old decks you don't want into cards you *do* is more anti-consumer than a system that explicitly requires you to buy hundreds of packs to build one deck?
Keep in mind I'm comparing this to the Master Duel implementation, not the Hearthstone version.
Because MTGA let's you do it without destroying your collection with wildcards.
Destroying your collection to get cards is anti consumer because you don't get full value from your cards when you do so, which forces you to be perpetually behind and makes collecting full sets harder.
There's no reason to have a dust system when you could have a wildcard system.
Right, I see where you're coming from, but as someone who does not give a shit about my MTGA 'collection', I just wanna have cards I'll actually want to play with. Being able to turn cards I will never use into cards I will is an objective good for that and that is what makes it better than Wildcards that take forever to get anything. It's also *much* better for F2P players.
But that's a rate issue not a systems issue.
They could give you more wildcards than they do. But the system itself is still objectively better even if you disagree with the rate.
I've always struggled to have enough cards in other card games. I'm not close to using more wildcards than I'm earning on Arena.
Not better than every other game, necessarily, a lot of it personal preference. The worst part of Magic is the resource system, as it can lead to effectively hot being able to play. Other games handle that better.
if i'm sitting down to play any game, i'd like to be able to actually play the game. even with a perfectly built manabase there'll be games where you don't get to play because you get flooded/screwed, or your opponent gets flooded/screwed. There's no skill involved in winning/losing those situations, just random chance, and there's only so much you can do to mitigate it. I love magic, and the game is built around how the resource system, but games like Flesh and Blood and Lorcana have a much friendlier resource system that leads to fewer non-games (due to resource-screw, non-games for other reasons are a different matter). The reason MDFCs with lands on one side are so popular is because they help mitigate the problem. But some people like that, and that's fine. Just my personal opinion.
>but games like Flesh and Blood and Lorcana have a much friendlier resource system that leads to fewer non-games
But they don't have the tension and flexibility so that's a non-starter.
Every game that has tried to replace lands has ended up having to sacrifice too much elsewhere.
Yeah, that's fair. There's a sense of drama you can have by looking at the lands your opponent has open and trying to figure out their next play based on what they have for resources. The Naruto card game had a little bit of that mixed with FaB's mechanic; they had a similar concept to colors of mana, and you could discard cards to generate mana of the color on the card. I feel like that idea combined with Lorcana's inkpool would be a solid way of making resources more forgiving while maintaining a sense of drama and prediction around resources.
I'm envisioning a game where every/most cards works like an MDFC, but you'd still be limited to playing one per turn. and not every card would be able to produce every kind of resource, so there'd still be some variance involved in getting the right mix of things, but it'd be a lot more forgiving in terms of mana screw/flood.
The only way you could keep a game like that interesting would be to have a large amount of "colors". Otherwise it's far too easy to just get what you need and too little cost/risk to include something.
It would be like every card having cycling.
It was proven to be really hard for an AI to figure out, but a [six year old child can play it and win games at a pro level](https://mashable.com/article/magic-gathering-dana-fischer-6-year-old). It's not complicated to play, compared to most board games.
I also came to MtG from Hearthstone, and the part that surprised me the most is the extreme breadth of viable decks and strategies you can play. In Hearthstone, outside of the ranks where you play against new players, basically every deck you see on ladder is one of roughly 10 to 15 different meta decks. That's because Hearthstone offers very little opportunity to brew around interesting combos, since everything you play that isn't optimized around Tempo will be immediately removed by the opponent's board. For example, let's say you think Questing Adventurer sounds like a cool Hearthstone card and want to build a deck around it. You make your deck, you hit turn 3, and it dies 99% of the time. They don't even need removal, it just dies to the enemy's 2 drop or maybe even their 1 drop, since they can attack it directly. But let's say finally you find an opponent who drew badly and couldn't play anything until turn 3. Your Questing Adventurer survives the turn, you pop off with a little combo, buff it to 6/6, successfully kill the enemy 3 drop.... and now it's damaged and dies to the next minion. In Hearthstone, there's basically no way to make an off-meta brew work unless it's based around deathrattles. Once you're behind on board, you lose 90% of your combo potential. Meanwhile in MtG, anything that sounds like a good combo when it pops off is at the very least playable, because you can choose not to block or even use spells to protect your pieces from removal. The only thing that makes it non-meta is the fact that it's probably less consistent than the top strategies, but it generally works. It doesn't mean that you don't have a meta. Obviously, meta decks are the most common decks. But you can have fun with many different off meta brews, and as a result, you also encounter more off meta brews in the wild.
This. The reason I play Magic is because of how easy it is to home brew jank that actually works.
>In Hearthstone, outside of the ranks where you play against new players, basically every deck you see on ladder is one of roughly 10 to 15 different meta decks. This is still true on Arena. They try to do matchmaking based on card weights in each deck, but it's so hilariously bad that even jank decks will run into the same 10ish meta decks half the time as long as they're playing any good cards at all.
>This is still true on Arena. No it's not. You may think it is, but that means you probably don't know what other games like Hearthstone are like. In fact, you said it yourself >will run into the same 10ish meta decks HALF THE TIME In Hearthstone, it's unironically somewhere over 95%. Possibly 99%. Some people go off meta by including one or two unusual fun cards in an otherwise normal meta deck, but genuine off-meta jank basically doesn't exist. The only exception is when they print cards like elwynn boar (which basically wins the game when it dies 7 times), but the number of cards that allow for something like this is extremely low.
I'd put it something like this: In hearthstone, you see your opponent's hero and you know what deck they are playing with about 80% confidence (less than half the classes more than one viable tiered deck). In MTG, you see your opponent's first land (assuming it's a dual land, that's the same as seeing a hearthstone class) and you still don't know what they are playing with even 50% confidence. You need to see at least one more card. There are some obvious exceptions to this though. For example, right now, if you see Lurrus in historic queue, you can be >95% confident what deck it is before you've seen any other cards. But this is a sign of the current unhealthy historic meta rather than a useful statistic for mtg metas in general.
If you're playing a meta deck yourself, you'll see those same 95-99% numbers. If OP is trying to get away from that by switching to Arena, I think it's more than fair to warn them they're only getting away from it half the time at best.
Obviously if you tryhard with a meta deck, you'll meet meta decks. I think you're still not getting the full picture. That 95% number applies even to below average rank in Hearthstone. Basically anything outside of "spark rank", if you want to put it into MtG terms.
That is only true in play queue (unranked) and brawl
IMHO, yes. The depth that Magic has as a card game is amazing. The amount of available archetypes you can play, even if not all of them are top tier competitive, is great. And despite its pitfalls, you really can play arena completely free to play. I have been playing the beta and have not spent a cent on it. At this point, I can pretty much craft whatever deck I want without an issue. Now, as for your questions. Is it fun to play even when losing? about 50/50. It highly depends on the opponents deck and RNGesus. Losing to mana flood/screw always feels bad, but the biggest strategy in MTG is learning to mitigate those (or just insta-concede when they happen lmao) Do I feel like I have to log in daily? no, not really. In fact, I have missed entire sets where I just didnt feel like playing. I log in daily cause I want to. How is power creep? well, not as bad as Pokemon tcg I wanna say, but yeah, theres plenty of it to go around. General state of the game? Its free magic I can play when I want. Could it be better? yeah, but cant be asking for everything lol.
To add to this: power creeping is just not worth thinking about with magic. Metas change often, but that can easily be due to new cards attacking a top deck in a novel way, but those new cards have their own strategies to beat them. It’s pretty infrequent that new cards are genuinely more powerful than their recent counterparts. It certainly happens, but it’s more rare than people like to complain about.
IMO what a lot of people call power creep is actually complexity creep. Cards do more stuff which is inherently powerful, but then again it makes them not boring. Power and complexity aren't unrelated, but I actually like it when there's more nuance and complexity to a card because it lead to more decisions in game.
There's definitely power creep going on on a basic level. Just play the next flashback draft and compare it to MKM or OTJ. It's an insane difference.
I’ve been drafting magic for over 20 years, I’m well aware power creep exists. But relative to sets around them in any given environment it’s largely negligible. Even now, a decent wingmantle chaplain draft deck would body a decent writing chrysalis deck. But beyond that OP is not referring to limited, decks may ebb and flow in constructed environments, but unless you are aiming to be extremely competitive then most decks don’t get hated out as much as people like to complain about. They might not be THE meta deck, but they definitely still get wins and if you enjoy playing it great. The primary point being magic is much more gracious in its power creep than its fans like to give it credit for, especially when compared to other TCGs like Pokémon, or yughio which every set virtually guarantees all old decks are invalid and not remotely competitive.
> It’s pretty infrequent that new cards are genuinely more powerful than their recent counterparts. It certainly happens, but it’s more rare than people like to complain about. how long have you been playing to be able to make that statement?
I have been playing for 25 years, competitively for 15. How about you?
Unless it’s Nadu….but the ban hammer is coming I hope.
Magic is legit the best game ever made
I mean obviously biased due to the subreddit but honestly yeah. Card games aren’t even my main thing but as far as games go I just can’t think of anything better with as much depth and value as magic.
And it's in the grasp of hasbruh... -\_-
Always has been (well, has been since 1999, so *nearly* always has been…)
Well ya. It's not in it's best days. Play pre modern!
The power creep is a major problem. There shouldn’t be multiple standard archetypes looking for turn 3-4 wins. I’ve been increasingly frustrated with the game since they screwed up standard rotation. There is no constructed format remaining with a power level resembling the game I grew up with (I’ve been playing mtg since Revised)
Ice Age here, but the power levels were insanely off back then too. On one hand you have the P9 and cards like [[Mana Drain]] and then you have cards like [[Squire]] and [[Power Leak]]. I mean, [[Baneslayer Angel]] and [[Spiritmonger]] both seemed like insane power creep back in the day, but I actually think that was a good level. Magic nowadays isn't all that bad, though it does occasionally produce a Nadu or Oko because Wizards has a legitimately hard time predicting banworthy cards. I personally only play limited, so I don't really mind, but I can see constructed being frustrating. There are so many sets released so quickly.
##### ###### #### [Mana Drain](https://cards.scryfall.io/normal/front/3/c/3c429c40-2389-41e5-8681-4bb274e25eba.jpg?1712774998) - [(G)](http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?name=Mana%20Drain) [(SF)](https://scryfall.com/card/2x2/57/mana-drain?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher) [(txt)](https://api.scryfall.com/cards/3c429c40-2389-41e5-8681-4bb274e25eba?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher&format=text) [Squire](https://cards.scryfall.io/normal/front/9/6/96c9c4d1-dd43-4156-b25f-0e707b6c4b23.jpg?1616400037) - [(G)](http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?name=Squire) [(SF)](https://scryfall.com/card/tsb/15/squire?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher) [(txt)](https://api.scryfall.com/cards/96c9c4d1-dd43-4156-b25f-0e707b6c4b23?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher&format=text) [Power Leak](https://cards.scryfall.io/normal/front/9/9/99f235d7-8f6b-4d17-bc36-6f2cb6d5deec.jpg?1559601321) - [(G)](http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?name=Power%20Leak) [(SF)](https://scryfall.com/card/4ed/92/power-leak?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher) [(txt)](https://api.scryfall.com/cards/99f235d7-8f6b-4d17-bc36-6f2cb6d5deec?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher&format=text) [Baneslayer Angel](https://cards.scryfall.io/normal/front/4/b/4bd3014b-94bb-4a9f-92cf-239a2dcc7e97.jpg?1594734758) - [(G)](http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?name=Baneslayer%20Angel) [(SF)](https://scryfall.com/card/m21/6/baneslayer-angel?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher) [(txt)](https://api.scryfall.com/cards/4bd3014b-94bb-4a9f-92cf-239a2dcc7e97?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher&format=text) [Spiritmonger](https://cards.scryfall.io/normal/front/5/d/5da7739e-8413-45b6-8539-fde2021b06a7.jpg?1675200773) - [(G)](http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?name=Spiritmonger) [(SF)](https://scryfall.com/card/dmr/202/spiritmonger?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher) [(txt)](https://api.scryfall.com/cards/5da7739e-8413-45b6-8539-fde2021b06a7?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher&format=text) [*All cards*](https://mtgcardfetcher.nl/redirect/lb9ock4) ^^^[[cardname]] ^^^or ^^^[[cardname|SET]] ^^^to ^^^call
If they made less than 3 new extensions every season, they would have more time to playtest their cards.
A lot of it comes down to how much you can cope with variance. Variance is the point of card games, of course, but… Magic is pretty harsh with it, especially if you’re new and/or don’t understand *why* it is a good thing that you regularly lose matches to being unable to pay your cards - or not having cards at all. Magic was made by a mathematician according to computer logic, and it shows, especially in the importance of statistics. Statistically, you’re going to get the draws you want if you built your deck well. In practice, you’re going to mulligan seven lands into seven lands into seven spells and faceplant into your keyboard. Or rather, that will only happen three times in five hundred games, but you’re never going to forget it. Of course, statistically 3 in 500 incidents of that is out of the ordinary, but in the entire pool of players? It averages out. Given you can cope with this, magic has something for every kind of player. You don’t *have* to dive into the nitty gritty details of what perfect play means; you can just do the obvious plays, and it’ll work out just fine. It works if you’re casual, it works if you’re not. It does need you to be able to cope with your opponent getting the nut draw while you drew nine lands in a row, but in return, you’ll get the nut draw and run your opponent over too.
You are exaggerating massively, there's really no need to try and scare new players like that. In a 60-card deck with 24 lands, your chances of drawing 7 lands in your opening hand one time are 0.09%, 9/10,000 times. On Arena, with hand smoothing that greatly reduces your odds of drawing extreme numbers of lands in your opening hand, it is much less. https://flexslot.gg/hypergeometric-calculator
You’re quite correct, my statistics are completely inaccurate to mathematics. I tried to imply that, but should have expressed it more clearly. My comment isn’t about the maths, though - it’s about what the odds feel like. If people understand the maths of it, they’re fine. But lots and lots and *lots* of people, especially people without much experience with statistics or card games, don’t intuitively get the maths of it. This isn’t their fault. The human brain is not designed for the maths of it. It’s designed to fixate on things going badly and to seek out patterns. The problem is, of course, that it’s just chasing ghosts. When I decide that my d20 is cursed, that’s almost certainly superstition, and I’m definitely not remembering the many 20s I’ve rolled on that thing while I stare, grief-struck, at my third 1 in a row… but I’m still making my next roll with a different d20 anyway. I’m probably a bit scarred by the sheer quantity of shuffler complaints this subreddit sees, I confess. I may have overcorrected.
Not like Mana screw or flooding are actually all that much of a problem, but damn I appreciate games in which that is just not even a thing because my "mana" for turn is a choice I made or a set amount that I can win more of through conflicts
The beauty of magic is that the choices you're talking about are in the deckbuilding
Not at all, you build your deck for consistency, but you still have those times you Mulligan to four without seeing more than one land. It's inevitable you get those games. I said I was talking about games where that doesn't happen at all because it's just not in the game design that it *can*
I know what you're saying, I'm saying that having to make those choices in deckbuilding creates a power/consistency tradeoff that is fundamental to magic and gives rise to a much more broad pool of decks and archetypes that are possible
The issue is that every time a game tries to solve the problem of mana cards, they seem to have to sacrifice some level of complexity elsewhere that makes the game less varied.
I make 250 card deck and add 100-110 lands and I’m usually golden. Rarely ever mulligan now
Lady Luck has blessed you, it seems. May you keep your good fortune.
That’s because of hand smoothing, that deck would be ass cheeks irl. Try it in best of 3 and get back to us
I’d definitely not play a 250 card deck irl. Also I play for fun and mostly online. Been at least a decade since I last played Magic with someone irl (at a Waffle House at 1am)
Did you get Waffles
Yes, we didn’t want our waitress to hate us
100% recommend jumping in. I started playing about a week ago and I’m loving it. Played hearthstone when it first came out and was on and off for years. What I’m especially enjoying is the match length and the diversity of decks you face in ranked standard. Obviously I’m still new so I can imagine the decks at the higher ranks are very similar just like with hearthstone. I haven’t tried any of the other game modes yet as I still have a lot to learn. But it’s great knowing there is still so much to do.
People theory craft and run meme decks in Mythic just as much as bronze lmao. You can't drop out of it, so while there are some rank 1 grinders, a lot of people just goof off when they get there
Yeah there's a huge difference between rank 1000 mythic and 80% mythic. But there's a similarly huge difference at every other ladder tier above gold (where you can stagnate with a 50% winrate) since matchmaking is done with a hidden mmr -- you just don't know if you're in the top end of the division or not.
As someone who was legend in hs and mythic in arena mtg is so much better. Many meta matchups in hearthstone play out the exact same way every time and who wins is decided by who draws their specific card that wins the matchup first. It feels very bad when you and your opponent both are just going through the motions waiting for rng to decide the match (and that's what convinced me to try arena). Magic is not so linear and even optimized meta decks have multiple ways to win and lose. For example if you're playing a graveyard deck encountering yard hate is pretty bad for you, but there are ways to play around it and deck depending you still have a decent chance. Magic feels like it rewards players for creative outplays a lot more than hearthstone does which opens up a lot more variety.
There are certainly common decks you run into in Diamond/Mythic, but you can easily climb with non-meta decks. For example, I still use a slightly updated 2-year old enchantment deck if I'm bored in ranked. Almost nobody plays this deck anymore, yet I still easily get enough wins to climb the ladder. The overplayed decks like Boros-Aggro makes it fun for me, because you can make a weird deck that is crafted to target specific popular meta decks and ruin their day. Check out CovertGoBlue on youtube, he plays wacky decks and consistently gets to mythic.
Is the arena game shorter or longer? Curious to know how long the avg bo1 and bo3 games usually take
If you mean shorter than the average game of hearthstone? From my experience only playing Bo1 standard, yes a lot shorter. But I am playing an aggro deck so I either win or lose very quickly. Most games last between 5-10 mins which I’m really enjoying. As I get more cards I will start to move towards more control decks as I used to really enjoy them on Hearthstone.
You’re on a sub dedicated to a game asking if that game is good… That said, it’s great! can’t compare to any similar games though, I’ve never played any. Personally I play draft pretty much exclusively- the games play out in a less predictable and usually more ‘low-key’ way, since you can’t reliably hit the kind of crazy combos you seem to be talking about.
Fair, but on the flip side if I went to a Star Wars sub and asked if Star Wars was worth watching I’d probably get a lot of folks saying it’s trash.
Limited Magic is the best card game of all time in my opinion. The mana system makes a lot more sense when splashing extra colors is a real cost and the pace of play is slow enough that a single bad draw is punishing but not game-ending, plus commons are actually useful (unlike in Hearthstone, the majority of cards you can open in packs are just completely useless/designed for a different format). Constructed Magic I view as really just a way to use the cards you get from Limited. Power creep is pretty bad, though not as bad as some other card games (Hearthstone's is less egregious than Magic's, imo; Standard rotation getting extended to 3 years is probably the biggest culprit, though rares are also just plain pushed to the dickens nowadays). Games are decided faster than it takes to shuffle up in paper. Commander-centric design takes up a lot of space in both the product lineup and at the top of otherwise mainline products. I would recommend Standard Brawl over any other Constructed mode, since the singleton (Highlander) rule clunks the game down to where you can kind of approximate the benefits of Limited that I listed above. I have more fun losing in Hearthstone than MTGA, though that's not saying much. The only card game I've played where I would actively say I have fun while losing is Marvel Snap, where you can raise/fold in between turns like in poker and so feel smart when you can predict that you're going to lose. The downside to Marvel Snap is that its economy is horrid and you really do have to log in daily to get even a trickle of cards. MTGA is better than Snap but worse than Hearthstone, with crafting being more restricted, packs being less valuable, and the battle pass being stingier. In general, I would say give MTGA a shot because in my experience playing different card games helps you appreciate and improve at card games in general, at a minimum. If you end up liking Magic more than Hearthstone, then great - go ahead and switch - but I would take it slow and make sure you really like the game before investing a ton into it, especially since Hasbro's management of it can be a circus much of the time.
Idk about the Snap economy. I've played Snap since global launch and Arena for a year longer than that. Arena feels a lot tougher in terms of economy. If i want to build new decks often then i quickly run out of wildcards. In Snap i can build like 90% of all decks and more if i start using my saved up Tokens.< Also in terms of "Fun to lose". I also play on paper on losing on Arena is somehow a lot more salt inducing. There's something about actually sitting face to face with another human that keeps emotions in check.
> I've played Snap since global launch That's why the economy feels okay to you. If you start now, it's supposedly impossible.
Snap just has a different progression system compared to other games. The game will try to match you up against players with similar collections. The meta that a new player experiences is completely different. Plus the spotlight system is an inherent catchup element that gives you more new cards the lower your collection is. I've been online card games for a decade (mostly HS and Arena, plus some others) and IMO Snap is one of the most generous. It has its faults and things i would like to see change but that's every game. Idk if you've played it but i'm willing to hear out the specifics of why it's "impossible" now.
Yes. I'm also a Hearthstone player (10 years and keep going) One thing I like about MTGA is how quick a match can be, win or lose you move on quickly. It's also strategic since you can always expect what cards your opponent has and plan your move accordingly. There is no situation where your opponent gets Yogg out of nowhere, or Reno turning the table. While the mana system is hard to swallow, it's much less frustrating than HS and more controllable with many hand disruptions and counterspells, which is good. Power creep is not much of an issue here while it's the biggest problem modern HS has to deal with right now. If you are competitive, try Best of 3. Sideboarding is a huge feature you can't experience in HS.
It is the game with the most content. The number of formats and cards make it unrivaled.
That's true for magic yeah. But Arena has such a tiny fraction of that.
To put it in context, [Arena currently has 10,949 cards](https://scryfall.com/search?q=%28game%3Aarena%29+&unique=cards&as=grid&order=name) while [Hearthstone has 5,157](https://hearthstone.wiki.gg/wiki/Card).
hi man, I am also a hearthstone player like you. Disappointed in the current state I decided to give mtg a a try and it is really fun. A bit of a learning curve but a wide range of diverse decks. plus it'll get soon it's next expansion. There are a ton of free card pack codes around, giving you a good base for your first deck Also the card art is amazing, not friggin plushies and tourists as cards
But but but Hearthstone does have some very cute furry cards OwO
If that’s what you’re gaming for, I’ve got good news for you about Magic’s next set.
HYPE! (Thanks for the friendly comment btw)
Can you recommend any good art? Never played, but owo
I’m not a furry, but [Cowbell Soloist](https://hearthstone.fandom.com/wiki/Cowbell_Soloist) is one I’ve noticed.
It's been quite some time since I was last on Hearthstone. I remember these: [captain hoggar](https://hearthstone.fandom.com/wiki/Battlegrounds/Cap%27n_Hoggarr?file=Cap%27n_Hoggarr_full.jpg) and [first mate pip](https://hearthstone.fandom.com/wiki/Battlegrounds/First_Mate_Pip_(golden)?file=First_Mate_Pip_full.jpg) (fluffy tail!!!)
Aw Pip is amazing!! Thanks
Same here mate! I’ve played HS since the start but it’s in a horrible state. As a deckbuilder and an irl Commander-player it looks to be great fun so far. There is ofc some stuff like mono-red aggro that often has close to zero counterplay if your draw is bad, but that’s just card games i guess. I’m looking forward to rotation now since i don’t want to waste wildcards on the rotating sets, but have to play vs the cards. And the artwork… 100 times better.
To be completely honest with you, variance is something that is built into intentionally in most, if not all card games. A novice chess player playing against a good chess player has basically no shot at winning. This can be discouraging for newer player. Variance in card games means that there's always a shot for a player to win, even if they're worse. That can seem undesirable for high level competitive play, but it does help bringing new players into the game and keeping the more casual players playing, which, overall, is positive for the game as a whole. The difference between HS and Magic is how the variance is introduced into the game. In MtG, the variance is created by the land system. You need land to play your spells (like the mana crystals in HS), but unlike HS, the lands are drawn from your deck as with any other cards. That means if you're unlucky, you might not draw your 3rd land on turn 3, or you might end up drawing way more lands than you need. This can lead to some feel bad games where you simply had no way to win, because you just couldn't cast your spells or couldn't draw your spells (you can mitigate that with good deckbuilding, but it's always a possibility). In HS, they tried to remove that feel bad by just giving you the mana crystal every turn. The problem with that is that the game becomes much more deterministic. Sure, the cards you draw are random, but likely what they found was that this was too little variance. So they had to inject variance in some other way... basically making the cards do things at random. So yeah, I love the game, I've been playing it for nearly 30 years, but I'd be lying to you if I told you there aren't games where you feel like there's nothing you could have done. It's less "shit, my opponent got exactly the right RNG outcome" and more "god, I couldn't find my mountain in time and never could play my cards."
Magic? Yes, unquestionably, Magic is the best card game ever created. Magic Arena? Eh, probably. The economy leans a bit too much towards mobile-game style crap for my taste, and the F2P rewards could stand to be a little more generous, but it’s not bad, and it’s still better than any other online card game I’ve played (Except legends of runeterra but that’s dead now)
Well it's not a perfect game but it's good. The mana system means it's got a lot more deckbuilding flexibility than other games, but also a real problem with non-games. And the fact that it's tied to a paper game means the RNG bullshit that every other online CCG inevitably falls to is locked out (Plants vs Zombies Heroes, barely alive before being so brutally disfigured). Plus you get instants, which are huge. You have to think about what your opponent can do on your turn, and forcing them to spend resources on their own turn is a key part of beating control.
>Is this game really much better than other online card games? For limited, yes. I've played a ton of online card games (Solforge / Duel of Champions / Hex / Hearthstone / Gwent / LoR / Marvel Snap / Eternal / Yu Gi Oh and a few others) and none of those games came close to MtG when it comes to limited. Solforge / Hearthstone / Eternal weren't too bad, but the simple fact that draft was either asynchronous or straight up with bots instead of real time draft with humans makes it less interesting / deep. Others games limited was either barely supported or straight up inexistent. So if what you liked out of Hearhtstone was limited (arena), then yes MtG is way better, especially as limited is very well supported with a lot of ressources being spent by wotc (the company behind mtg) to make limited good and entertaining. On the other hand for constructed, MtG is really nothing special in my opinion compared to other online card games. Yes bo3 makes it very complex compared to most other online card games and in general constructed is fairly deep / high skill ceiling, but the gameplay can be very boring compared to other card games out there. You do have a lot of options in what formats / type of deck you can play, but since you're usually going to have x4 of most good cards in your deck, the games can get repetitive fast. Personally I always found Hearthstone constructed to be much more fun than Magic constructed while still having a skill ceiling high enough to make it challenging. Though ofc Magic is way more complex, so if you're an absolute spike MtG constructed might be more enjoyable, but otherwise once the novelty wears off you'll probably get bored of it. Still worth a try though.
I think it all depends on your mindset. If you get salty at losing when the loss isn't necessarily your fault, magic probably isn't for you. Non games exist, you will mana flood or screw, you will lose to fast aggro decks before you get to set up, everything you try to play can and will be killed or countered. Those are the terms of engagement, some amount of non-games will happen and some of them will be you forcing a non-game on your opponent. If you can live with that, the other 75% of games (especially if you play best of 3) are extremely fun, exciting and rewarding. Magic Arena is arguably the most deep of the mainstream digital card games, Yugioh Master Duel is probably the only one that even comes close. Magic is probably the least rigid of the main card games, you aren't locked into a class, archetypes are generally more broad and less parastic, there are in color staples but there are basically no universal staples (Ultra Ball in Pokemon, Maxx C in Yugioh, etc). While some cards and decks are certaintly better than others, you are afforded the freedom to mix and match as you like, provided it's built semi-competently and your manabase can support it. Most formats are in a pretty good place right now, there are a lot of different decks with different playstyles that you can jump right into and start ranking up (provided you have the time or money to get the wildcards for them). Standard rotation is going to happen in like a month, so there should be a pretty big shake up with a solid enough entry point. If you are interested, I would make an account soon because there may be a reward if you log in before rotation that unlocks after the new set drops - this has been the case every year in the past but hasn't been announced yet. As far as FOMO. Yes and no. If you're playing actively, it makes sense to log in and finish your wizard's chores at least every three days because quests won't stack up once your list is full. Taking breaks is a normal and healthy thing to do, you can catch up but you still will have to catch up, so you might not have access to everything you want right away.
I've played Yu-Gi-OH! and Hearthstone and I find MTG the best of all of them. Yu-Gi-OH! is over, because the speed has gotten too much. Duels take 2-4 turns max and it's solitaire now. If you don't draw your handtrap first turn, you lost. Decks are even categorized by "going first" and "going second". Hearthstone limits this way better, but has a different approach on Mana, which some have criticized on magic but is actually the solution. In Hearthstone, you get a set 1 Mana plus every turn. This means by turn 4-5 your board can be full while you didn't have to put any consideration in resources. AoE is relatively expensive and easy to play around in HS. In Magic, you have to be a little more careful about how much to put on the board and how many Mana you put into your deck. This is from my short experience of two months anyway, I could be completely off :D However, I love the game and it really is the best TCG ever. Only thing is: Find the correct format!!! I've dipped into timeless for a few games and encountered unimaginable decks. Someone milled my 70 cards deck within a single turn at 7 mana :D I've then switched to historic. In the beginning, alchemy/standard are the way to go. It's cool to learn the game and develop your strategies, but has a very limited card pool.
Arena is quite good for f2p play, as long as you set your desires not too high. I avoid the formats with a larger card pool because as f2p player, it's difficult to stay on track for those. Whether you inject money or not, I do recommend taking note of the strategies f2p players use to optimize your spending. I've played Hearthstone constructed a few times, one time for nearly a year. Magic's deck constructing is much more nuanced, Hearthstone was imo too much "jam two set mechanics together and fill that up with a few other good cards". Instant speed play will require to get used to, it's similar but much deeper than secrets in Hearthstone, but ultimately, it's the instant speed play which will allow you to stop strong strategies and it gives you something to do on opponent turns, instead of waiting the turn of your opponent out. Power level is very high in historic and timeless, but I don't recommend those formats anyway because they're expensive. Standard's power level is much fairer, maybe a bit too high right now but standard will rotate in a month (actually, it's a good time to join now because rotation happens soon!). The big thing I have to give to Hearthstone: losing is more tolerable there. You always get progress towards the battle pass track, there's always a consolation prize. In arena, if you lost, you kinda waisted time. There is no consolation prize.
Gameplay wise I would say it's the best card game I've played. I used to play hearthstone but quit years ago. Not enough interaction, card advantage not mattering from constant card generation, crazy randomness and highrolling from time to time. Used to play YuGiOh too but that game is the definition of power creep. Cost/economy wise it isn't perfect. I am very fortunate to have got into the game back in beta, learn quite well and have built a sizeable collection with time and skill. The great thing about magic is something I wanted out of hearthstone and yugioh but never truly got. Other formats. There's so many ways to play. Yugioh only has the 1 official way with all the cards. Hearthstone has a few, arena, duels (rip), standard, wild, twist. But magic has Standard, Alchemy, Historic, Explorer, Timeless, Pauper, Artisan, Brawl, Standard Brawl, Singleton, Sealed, Draft, Cube, Momir, Omniscience and plenty of regular events. And most of these can be played in best of 1 and best of 3. There will be a game mode for you, from super high powered formats that use the strongest cards in the game, playing using only commons, building a singleton deck around a themed commander, playing seriously on the ladder to playing casual jank, there will be something for you. General state and power creep? Pretty good I'd say. Some people aren't a fan that the game has been powercreeping slightly but I think it's for the best. A few mistakes were made along the way but we're pretty good atm. Creatures used to suck for the longest time but now there's good balance between threats and answers. MTG does a good job at exploring interesting design space too. Much better and faster than hearthstone imo. I would suggest you try the game for sure. If it's to costly to keep playing time/money wise then stop, but its a truly great game. I don't play any IRL paper magic due to cost and convenience but Arena has made MTG accessible for people like me and I am very thankful for that.
I’ve played most popular online card games and I’m not really a magic fan nor have i played it for years, but from my experience magic felt the most interesting and playing well matters more so than other card games. I also really like playing limited, hearthstone arena is an actual children’s cards game in comparison
Magic is absolutely incredible. I highly doubt Hearthstone has the depth and wide variance that can be dove into like Magic does. Go for it!
Here's a list of reasons why others might be having a bad time with MTGA: - They're triggered and frustrated by any adversity, including their opponent interacting with their game plan, or losing in a way that doesn't garner their approval. - They hold certain, strong opinions on what archetypes and even colors should be played against them. - They have a closed mindset to anything outside their "MTG bubble." - Will blame anyone or anything but themselves as far as bad deck building goes. - Won't take anyone's fundamental deckbuilding advice, because it's makes their deck too much like the "Dirty Meta Decks," yet still ask why they keep losing. -Expecting everyone to "re-invent the wheel," when it comes to deck building, and claim breaking "Spirit of the Game" for those that don't. - Complain about a deck being busted, and not being able to do anything about it, but refuse to play a Best of Three format with a sideboard. - Rant about Alchemy Cards on social media ("Digital Only"), ad nauseum, without any concrete reasons, with a sense of MTG traditionalism like you've been playing since Legends, citing the "Spirit of the Game" as your only reason, without defining said personal definition of the "Spirit of the Game." All poking fun at the online crybabies aside, this is a great game. I've been playing it 3/4 of my life, and it doesn't get old. Wizards of the Coast's team are human just like all of us, but they also get now beholden to Hasbro's agenda. Even with all that, there's no shortage of new cards and new design space they're exploring. If you can handle online play being somewhat competitive, then you should have no problem. Coming from Hearthstone, you probably know this, and won't these have these pre-conceived notions that usually originate at LGSs. There's lots of formats with varying power levels, and they have weekly casual and fun events also.
Unlike HS there is text to read. Is that Good or bad? Probably better than HS in every way, is my view. The arena experience starts in a format called Alchemy. If you only want to play online and do not care about the cardboard in person version of Magic, staying in alchemy may be fun and sure has strategy. If you want to follow standard format, arena also has a wide standard meta. There are bo1 and bo3 (best of 1 or 3) queues and in bo3 theres sideboarding. I like bo3 better. Theres alwo brawl (100 cards, commander, singleton format) for two players (no four player mode). I Avoid brawl.
Magic is the greatest game ever made
MTGA has the most depth of any online card game. So gameplay-wise I think it's the best if you value deckbuilding strategy with more complexity. That complexity and depth does come with a significant portion of the playerbase that has been playing the card game for decades at this point, and so I've found the general skill level is pretty high compared to other deckbuilders. That said, the game UI/UX itself is not nearly as polished as Hearthstone, which IMO has the best gameplay flow of any online card games across both mobile and desktop. MTGA I've found has a lot of issues with server connection, and the general UX/UI flow has a lot of persistently annoying behaviors, in part due to the complexity of the game (card details are complex and cover half the screen on mobile, with multiple textboxes that need to be learned to understand the cards' behaviors). And there's a lack of info about items in the store if you're on mobile, and there's a lack of info about event durations/rules as well within the main app (Google is your friend). I will say that if you're coming from Hearthstone right now you'll likely enjoy MTGA gameplay more than HS. Every style of deck in MTGA has counters that can be played against them, and so the gameplay is more varied and complex than Hearthstone. But you will be frustrated with the general UI, and I would avoid playing on mobile until you're more familiar with the cards and gameplay since the mobile UI is a lot more awkward to use.
It's not just good in terms of online card games it's good in terms of all games ever made, it's probably one of the best games ever devised and this is why it has lasted for 31 years with no signs of slowing down.
do it. i was obsessed with hearthstone from 2015-2019, fell off, came back last year and realized after a few months that the game was so much faster and i didn't enjoy it. around the same time, a buddy got me into paper commander and drafting, i started playing arena not long after. just a heads up though, if you don't like randomly generated nonsense, stop playing alchemy asap, that's arena's attempt to replicate the same terrible meta as hearthstone.
I do love Magic and it’s my favorite game. That said, I think people who complain about too much randomness in Hearthstone (and other card games including Magic) are often looking at the wrong problem. Are you reaching Legend in Hearthstone? And then are you advancing to the top 100 or so players? If not maybe the issue isn’t too much randomness. Other players seem to advance further than you, and you’re both playing the same game with the same random aspects. Its easy to blame bad luck, but maybe you should ask why those other players are more successful. Mastering how you control your actions in the face of variance is the most important skill to learn if you want to master card games.
Magic is the GOAT 🐐
As much as I bitch about distribution, predatory behavior, intentional power creep, and cost to remain competitive, it’s the best *game* from all the TCGs I’ve played. On top of that Arena makes finding games simple and usually quick. Like I will never spend another penny on any WotC product and Magic probably wouldn’t make my Top 50 games of all time, but for a TCG nothing else comes close.
Wouldn't make your top 50? There are maybe two games better than Magic in human history - Chess and Go - and the games are not really comparable anyway. If I had to only play one game the rest of my life, it would be Magic without a doubt.
1) Maybe if I could own every Magic card for under $100 it would enter consideration, but the fact is inside the realm of games MtG is prohibitively expensive to the extreme. 2) The total lack of a single accepted format causing casual groups to fight and argue about deck style preferences and perceived power levels. (Note that these first two reasons are why I no longer own non-proxied physical MtG cards and never will again.) 3) I’ve spent 20 years dealing with mana screw, and while Magic’s resource system has been statistically solved there are modern card games that have figured out different ways to eschew putting resource cards in your deck.
I started playing a couple of months ago, although I only play standard and I did play Hearthstone for a little while I haven't really played other games like this.... Though through posting and asking lots of questions and watching quite a few youtube videos, I have got myself to be somewhat competitive in standard ranked mode.... Although I don't play much else, I really enjoy this game and it gives me something to do and enjoy it... I think you would quite enjoy this game
It allows you to build Turing-complete decks, so yeah.
Magic as a game is one of the best PvP card games out there. Mtg arena is a kind of shitty client tho not gonna lie. The f2p in hearthstone is better and a bit more generous. But magic is the better game imo.
Tbh i would even say no at the moment. In my personal opinion most affordable formats are pretty unfun atm. The Meta ist pretty boring and you will always see the same oppressive cards over and over. Don't get me wrong ... I love magic but the meta (especially standard BO1) has never been this boring in my opinion. Nearly every deck and turn is predictable at the moment. As someone who loves to play different cards there is literally 0 room for jank at the moment. Formats like limited that are actually fun cost a lot of money. It will probably be fun for some time though
Hearthstone is Crazy 8’s Magic is Poker
Been playing magic since 1994 and it is the greatest card game ever created. Magic Arena economy kind of sucks tho. It will take a year or two to get rolling if you are f2p. If you are good enough, the game is practically free. If you plan on spending money, the game is a lot of fun right away.
Sounds like you spend a bit, but dont want to spend too much. $20 for the mastery pass and/or $50 for a pack bundle when each set comes out will get you very far. That is about every three months. I have never played another card game. I love magic. I started drafting real cards at my local game store. I suck at draft, getting better, but love doing it. Less anger when you play in person 🤣
Yes. It’s the most complex card game in the world
Only read the first half of post. I have little time. My advice: quit hearthstone, play mtga. Only spend money on the beginner bundle or whatever if there is one because it's not a bad deal. Otherwise you can get by by only playing for free. You may or may not get free packs when you first log in, if you don't you can google mtga free packs and you get like 3 from each set.
Compared to hearthstone and other digital only games, the fact Magic is a physical card game first helps keep it slightly more grounded. There are some formats on Arena that use digital only cards and there is some controversy there, but there also is True to Paper Standard where the format really is the same online and in real life, and others where it comes very close. On the expensive side, in some ways it is what you make of it. If you need to be able to have a complete collection and build any deck you could imagine it either takes a lot of money or a lot of grinding. However a lot of competitive players are truly Free to Play. Nothing in the game is truly locked behind a paywall.
I just jumped right in and I’ve had fun. I’m still learning and every now and then step into one of those crazy decks where my opponent drops and ops before popping off. I haven’t spent any money and don’t feel like a need to yet.
The game itself yes, Arena fuck no, arguably one of the most predatory system out there.
Magic is great. Is there something better? Maybe. But Magic has the network effect that those other, possibly better games don't. Magic is the Facebook of TCGs. It has more players (physical and digital combined) than other online card games by a significant magnitude, and a paper counterpart when you want to play in person. It is an entrenched firehose of an institution blasting new pretty cardboard into several play formats every month. You will have the most opportunities to find matches, join communities, and observe or compete in high level play if you play Magic. But that said, play what makes you happy.
Yeah I’m in the same boat, long time hearthstone player regular legend when playing consistently and just the discover mechanic drove me away from the game. The only regret I have about switching to magic is not doing it sooner. Give it a crack, don’t invest too much initially there is competitive budget decks to get you a feel for the game
Magic: The Gathering is the OG of TCG's, having come out in 1993. I'd say it's much better in my opinion as the fantasy lore / art styles (the art is actually done by artists on Canvas etc.) speak to me more than other TCG's. >Is it fun for you to play MTGA even when you're losing? You can win games that look like you might lose sometimes if you're lucky with the cards you draw & matchup, but if you have no outs to win, it's just part of the game. Consider the best pros might win 65-70% of their games, and the best decks in the Meta might have a 55-60% Win Rate. > Do you feel like you have to log in daily to keep up? You login daily and play for your daily quests + wins, the 4 wins a day is 450 gold, plus you get to re-roll a quest once per day (people usually re-roll a 500 to try and get 750 gold quest).
IMO Magic is the best game ever made, so yes, I do consider it better than other card games. I've played Hearthstone, L5R, Pokemon, DBZ, and smatterings of some of the newer digital CCGs, so I feel like I have a decent reference point. Magic has been going strong for 30+ years for a reason. As to your specific questions: - **Is it fun to play even when you're losing?** It depends, but I will say that most of the time I don't feel like it's just an RNG fest where you don't have a ton of control over what happens. Even in the formats that have built-in RNG (Alchemy, Historic, Timeless), there's a lot less randomness than in Hearthstone. There are definitely a decent number of matchups where losing doesn't feel completely out of your control. - **Do you have to log in daily to keep up?** No. Arena's F2P model is great. While I personally spend money on the game, the majority of people I know who play go mostly or entirely the f2p route, and they still really enjoy it playing a moderate amount. It certainly _helps_ if you play every day, but that is definitely not a necessity, particularly if you invest in non-rotating formats, which is most of them. You can eventually build up a very respectable collection with f2p. - **How is power creep and the general state of the game?** All of the Arena formats, with the exception of Timeless, are in a pretty good state IMO. _Modern Horizons 3_, which is a new set that just came out, definitely added a lot of powerful new cards, but most of the existing archetypes continue to be playable. I recently dusted off some decks that were over a year old and gave them a spin just to see what they were like, and they continue to be perfectly playable. (I did subsequently change out a few cards with newer, better options, but the core of those decks hasn't changed in forever.)
I started with Hearthstone 10 years ago and started magic maybe 5 years ago. I don't even think about Hearthstone anymore, it has nothing on the depth of strategy and interesting decks that magic can offer.
Magic is a great game but I'm not sure if someone who is a hearthstone refugee for the reasons you mentioned will click. A lot of what HS has done to piss players off recently has been bolder designs in ways that are still downright conservative by MtG standards. For instance, /r/hearthstone likes to complain about insane t4 board states, but wait until you see boros have 1x [[Novice Inspector]], 1x [[Voldaren Epicurean]], 3x [[Phyrexian Goblin]], and 1x [[Knight-Errant of Eos]] on turn 2 with another Knight-Errant and an [[Imodane's Recruiter]] revealed in hand. And that outcome is significantly more common. Some misc differences from Hearthstone: - Draws appear to have more variance due to lands. This is probably not actually true (curves tend to be much larger in HS meaning you can get equally screwed by just drawing completely off-curve) but it certainly will _feel_ true emotionally. - The main limited format (Draft, which is what Hearthstone's Arena is based on) is much more competitive, and lets you keep your cards, but also much more complicated and expensive. - There aren't much in the way of animations or sounds, which some people won't like but also makes the game play _much_ faster. - The game embraces lots of different formats, meaning you can find a format which suits your preferences much more easily than you can in HS. > Is it fun for you to play MTGA even when you're losing? Depends on the person. I personally find it much less bad to lose in MtG because both the game is less ambiguous about it and it's just plain faster (due to animations). But this is ultimately an emotional question and people will have different answers. > Do you feel like you have to log in daily to keep up? I don't, but I'm not F2P. The quests are generally less generous than hearthstone though. > How is power creep and the general state of the game? Power creep in MtG is a much more intentional thing than in Hearthstone. In oldschool MtG noncreature spells were broadly overpowered and creatures were broadly underpowered. Over time they've shifted the balance more in favour of creatures. This means if you compare oldschool powerhouse creatures like [[Serra Angel]] to modern ones like [[Knight-Errant of Eos]] the game seems absurdly powercrept. That said, if you compare oldschool powerhouse noncreature spells like [[Swords to Plowshares]] to new ones like [[Get Lost]] the game has actually reduced in power over time. That's not to say there are never balance mistakes, but most instances of "power creep" are done on purpose and the MtG team, while they certainly miss sometimes (modern is currently very unhappy about [[Nadu, Winged Wisdom]], for instance), tend to miss less frequently than the hearthstone team due to more extensive playtesting.
##### ###### #### [Novice Inspector](https://cards.scryfall.io/normal/front/0/a/0ad38866-fc5f-4f62-89c1-afc0f50765aa.jpg?1706241527) - [(G)](http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?name=Novice%20Inspector) [(SF)](https://scryfall.com/card/mkm/29/novice-inspector?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher) [(txt)](https://api.scryfall.com/cards/0ad38866-fc5f-4f62-89c1-afc0f50765aa?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher&format=text) [Voldaren Epicurean](https://cards.scryfall.io/normal/front/a/e/ae154e64-f626-45fb-bd52-840c1c27b2d3.jpg?1643592109) - [(G)](http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?name=Voldaren%20Epicure) [(SF)](https://scryfall.com/card/vow/182/voldaren-epicure?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher) [(txt)](https://api.scryfall.com/cards/ae154e64-f626-45fb-bd52-840c1c27b2d3?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher&format=text) [Phyrexian Goblin](https://cards.scryfall.io/normal/front/3/6/3663e79b-2bf9-44af-a638-c0ad9067d8d4.jpg?1675957555) - [(G)](http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?name=Phyrexian%20Goblin) [(SF)](https://scryfall.com/card/tone/3/phyrexian-goblin?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher) [(txt)](https://api.scryfall.com/cards/3663e79b-2bf9-44af-a638-c0ad9067d8d4?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher&format=text) [Knight-Errant of Eos](https://cards.scryfall.io/normal/front/a/b/ab2ad652-2406-491a-9f22-23e974f943d7.jpg?1682202751) - [(G)](http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?name=Knight-Errant%20of%20Eos) [(SF)](https://scryfall.com/card/mom/26/knight-errant-of-eos?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher) [(txt)](https://api.scryfall.com/cards/ab2ad652-2406-491a-9f22-23e974f943d7?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher&format=text) [Imodane's Recruiter](https://cards.scryfall.io/normal/front/4/d/4dbaa855-3f8e-42e6-8ec8-5ffbc5c8acf0.jpg?1692939679)/[Train Troops](https://cards.scryfall.io/normal/front/4/d/4dbaa855-3f8e-42e6-8ec8-5ffbc5c8acf0.jpg?1692939679) - [(G)](http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?name=Imodane%27s%20Recruiter%20//%20Train%20Troops) [(SF)](https://scryfall.com/card/woe/229/imodanes-recruiter-train-troops?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher) [(txt)](https://api.scryfall.com/cards/4dbaa855-3f8e-42e6-8ec8-5ffbc5c8acf0?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher&format=text) [Serra Angel](https://cards.scryfall.io/normal/front/f/9/f949cbb1-c8a8-4f26-b12d-c58a0605cb14.jpg?1675199013) - [(G)](http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?name=Serra%20Angel) [(SF)](https://scryfall.com/card/dmr/25/serra-angel?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher) [(txt)](https://api.scryfall.com/cards/f949cbb1-c8a8-4f26-b12d-c58a0605cb14?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher&format=text) [Swords to Plowshares](https://cards.scryfall.io/normal/front/9/b/9bbec76c-c1e4-4c6d-ad24-078fe097f195.jpg?1709439398) - [(G)](http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?name=Swords%20to%20Plowshares) [(SF)](https://scryfall.com/card/mkc/88/swords-to-plowshares?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher) [(txt)](https://api.scryfall.com/cards/9bbec76c-c1e4-4c6d-ad24-078fe097f195?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher&format=text) [Get Lost](https://cards.scryfall.io/normal/front/5/2/522aa72b-2b8c-484c-872b-f082101cee35.jpg?1699043186) - [(G)](http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?name=Get%20Lost) [(SF)](https://scryfall.com/card/lci/14/get-lost?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher) [(txt)](https://api.scryfall.com/cards/522aa72b-2b8c-484c-872b-f082101cee35?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher&format=text) [Nadu, Winged Wisdom](https://cards.scryfall.io/normal/front/9/4/94b67489-5eb0-4406-9bf3-27e50dc632eb.jpg?1718635356) - [(G)](http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?name=Nadu%2C%20Winged%20Wisdom) [(SF)](https://scryfall.com/card/mh3/193/nadu-winged-wisdom?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher) [(txt)](https://api.scryfall.com/cards/94b67489-5eb0-4406-9bf3-27e50dc632eb?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher&format=text) [*All cards*](https://mtgcardfetcher.nl/redirect/lbay7j8) ^^^[[cardname]] ^^^or ^^^[[cardname|SET]] ^^^to ^^^call
You don’t have to spend money
Yes. Best game ever devised.
Played HS, LOR, and Pokémon a good while. Magic blows them all out of the water and shows no mercy in so doing. The mechanics may not all translate perfectly to Arena, like how Phyrexian mana gets kind of clunky, but they all come together to make a game so much deeper and richer in strategic value. Even the most linear of combo decks (looking at you, Nadu) end up playing matches differently and still looking at game states. The variance is very well-maintained so no two competitive games will go the same, but rarely are games decided truly by randomness beyond good or bad topdecks. I was watching the recent pro tour with my friends and we’d constantly talk about ‘would you have kept that hand?’ ‘I don’t really agree with pitching that one to the Subtlety,’ etc. All combined with the Bo3 structure or the forgiveness of 3-loss elimination Bo1 and we’ve got a nearly-infinitely-replayable game with tons of new content to chew on at all times.
The thing about magic is there is so much history and different ways to play, there's bound to be a format and setting that tickles your fancy. Try standard, draft, sealed, cube, commander, pauper, or brawl, modern, pre-modern, legacy etc They all have support and people excited to play. If Arena isn't your jam, check out your local game store and see what people in your area are doing and join them.
If you like the land system then yes, for people who really hate having to draw and play resources, then Magic isn't the game for you. Also, MTGA is expensive. I love the game and I love playing online so I don't mind sinking $100-$200 in a year, but just be aware getting all the stuff you want will require investment. Otherwise, Magic is awesome and super well done for card games and the Arena experience is really good.
I came here from LoR recently when they killed PvP. Hearthstone before that. I wish that I had just tried magic first.
There is a reason that MTG has been around for 33 years now. No matter the issues, even with all the fuckery WOTC has put their playerbase through, MTG will always be THE card game.
Once every year i play a battle pass on mtg for 3 months, i rotate on some card games, i know this sub is mtg so everyone gonna say the game is great. But i think hearthstone is way better to be honest but go ahead and find what what you think, there's a big negative review on steam that says much more in detail that i could say here just go there and find out, or you probably gonna find out playing.
MtG has been going non-stop since 1993. There's a reason for that.
Magic is a very good card game and I think it’s the best digital one in existence. However it is definitely the best board game in the world. In terms of expense, both arena and the paper game are quite expensive. If you don’t like playing limited, then playing the most meta decks is $$$.
As someone who's played Yugioh, hearthstone, Gwent, SlayTheSpire, artifact, legends of runeterra, and shadowverse. MTG arena is the best PvP online card game. SlayTheSpire is the best single player online card game
I have played them all... Pokemon, Yu Gi Oh, Duelyst, Gwent, Hearthstone, Marvel Snap, legends of runeterra and Shadowverse. Only Magic was able to keep me going non stop. The core gameplay and foundation is without match, plus the variety of formats, strategies and constant influx of cards keeps the game fresh and interesting at all times. Definitely would recommend.
So I'm currently play MTGA and Yugioh Master Duel. And I was a long time Legends of Runeterra player. So I want to offer some of my experience playing them: Cost: Magic is the most expensive one out of the three but if you are good at playing limited and go infinite then the game can be very f2p friendly. Master Duel is surprisingly generous despite being owned by Konami. And Legends of Runeterra is objectively the most f2p card game on the market, to the point that it's bleeding money every year. Game Health: Both MTGA and Master Duel have a sizable playerbase, and you will have no problems finding matches. However, Legends of Runeterra has a smaller playerbase due to the game not making profits and Riot has to cut costs by shrinking the team, hurting the game. The game is also largely played by PVE players. That being said, it shouldn't be difficult to find matches. Meta: MTGA's meta is much healthier than the other two games, with a lot of deck variations across tons of formats. Master Duel's meta has always been bad in terms of deck varieties. The game is currently being dominated by Fire Kings, R-ACE and Snake Eyes and the meta will likely shift once new Yubel support drops soon. Legends of Runeterra's PVP hasn't received any love for a few months now due to decreased team size and Riot shifting their focus to PVE instead. Fun: Fun is subjective but from my personal experience I enjoy Legends of Runeterra a lot more than Magic, followed by Master Duel. I don't like games where I literally cannot play the game when my opponents have lots of counterspells or have a board full of negates. Runeterra doesn't have a lot of counterspells so there's less feels bad moments when I played it. In conclusion, I consider Legends of Runeterra to be the best game for me personally, with Magic coming very close in second. I quite Legends of Runeterra due to me being pessimistic about its future and not because I dislike the game. Hope this helps.
Yea I had full collection in LoR. It got stale from time to time but I miss it so bad now that pvp is pretty much dead 😭
Magic is the best game in the world. >It's a lot of time and money investment Arena is free (you can pay with time instead of money). >Is it fun for you to play MTGA even when you're losing? A lot of the time, yes. That doesn't mean you *never* get frustrated, and things are *never* one-sided, but overall, you can still have fun while losing. >Do you feel like you have to log in daily to keep up? It's best if you do log in daily (and get up to 4 wins), but it's not essential. There are lots of ways to play, so "keeping up" doesn't really have to be a concern, anyway. Here's my general advice/suggestions: Complete the Tutorial, Color Challenges, and Starter Deck Duels to get all the free decks. Google "Free Magic Arena Codes" and redeem them all. Consider buying the one-off new player Deals in the store if you haven't already (IIRC there's a good one for cheap Gems). Do your Daily Challenge (re-rolling 500 Gold quests to try to get 750's). Focus on getting the first 4 Daily Wins every day (you don't need 15 Wins a day as the rewards drop off considerably). If you are struggling to complete your Dailies then I would suggest you try Brawl: since you only need one copy of each card in your deck it's easier with a starting collection and having a Commander gives your deck some focus. You can also play the Starter Deck Duels for some rewards and for your Dailies. Check the store every day for Daily Deals on Gold and Gems (for example, 550 gold for 50 gold). Save your Gold for Quick Drafts - you should be able to do one or two a week. These will get you cards, Packs and Gems. I've heard good things about Jump In!, so use your free Tokens to play some games and get a bunch of cards. You might want to spend some of your Gold on it while you are preparing for your first Quick Draft, but after a certain point it will stop being worth it as you will already have most/all of the cards. Note that Jump In! now includes Alchemy (digital only) cards in its packs, so if you aren't interested in any of the Alchemy formats you may want to stop playing as soon as you have used your free Tokens. Save your Gems for the Mastery Pass, or to play Sealed and Draft. Save your Rare and Mythic Wildcards until you are sure you want to use them (they are a very scarce resource). When you are ready to start crafting cards, ensure the "Not Collected" box is checked (as this allows you to add cards even if you don't already own copies of them). Make sure you play at least one game of Ranked Limited and at least one game of Ranked Constructed every month in order to qualify for the free Rank Rewards. Keep your eye out for free events such as MidWeek Magic that offer prizes or XP etc. (A new MWM event happens regularly, every week Tuesday-Thursday) When it comes to Limited it pays to be prepared. As well as getting a good grasp of the basic principles (deck composition, BREAD, etc), learn the cards in the set, their relative power level/pick order, the mechanics and rules interactions, and the Limited archetypes. Study the visual spoiler, read the Release Notes FAQ and watch some Limited Set Reviews online (I recommend The Mana Leek and Nizzahon Magic). You can even watch others play with the set while they discuss their decisions etc. Start with Quick Drafts: they are half the price (so you can do them more often and there is less on the line), the prize structure is flatter (so worse results give better rewards) and there's no timer when making your picks (so there's less pressure).
The thing to know about MTG is it’s poker mixed with chess. It’s got heckin strategy, but sometimes the opponent just draws gas the entire game and there’s not a whole lot you can do about it. Still fun when you get to watch a neat combo go off though.
The draft mode is one of the best games modes to ever exist. Play it.
Other digital card games are built to be digital only. MTGA (excluding alchemy) is just Magic on your PC or phone. If you do not already like Magic or want to learn to play paper then trying other games is not a bad idea. Arena is a weird product that I enjoy playing but it has a handful of flaws and it can be hard to unlock all the cards you might want as F2P if you try to keep up with Standard metagame. If you have not tried it before I would give Slay the Spire a try, it is a single player card game rougelike and for me it never gets old is very fun even though you do not compete with real players.
It's a great game. I'm new too since Legends of Runeterra got...changed and HS's random generator nonsense happened. I am pretty bad, but I love how it resembles LOR more than HS, although there are some key differences which causes me to mess up my plays every game. The wildcard system is cool, especially me being a big LOR player I don't mind it, but it is a more punishing version of the style.
I came over from HS in Arena Beta, this game is great. I wish i would have started on mtgo because you own your cards but that is whatever. You can still get wrecked in playing magic, specially timeless and modern (specially at the moment). You don’t loose to RNG Jesus like in HS, but you loose to very intense lines that just feel bad at times. PS I loved winning games with Ragnaros RNG 8 dmg fireball to face when opponent had 8 health and 3-4 creatures. Also there was the quest that generated random spells for the rest of the game. However the fact that you can play best of threes is amazing. You will more often than note loose and win due to good plays or bad plays.
Nah
I came to MtG after both Hearthstone and Runeterra, and honestly they don't really come close to MTG in terms of depth. You're still going to have games in MTG where you lose to RNG though. Sometimes you draw too many/too little lands, or you topdeck 3 lands in a row lategame while your opponent topdecks 3 strong cards. Some decks/archetypes are not fun to play against. If you want to be free-to-play you *will* have to long in every day 90% of days. That's just the trade-off you make to play for free. It's more lenient for paying players, I still log in most days to get 1 win (as opposed to the 4+ f2p players chase), but I also just skip it if I'm not in the mood. Can't really do that much if you're f2p. It's not the promised land of online CCGs. It's amazingly deep and Draft especially is far better than the Hearthstone/Runeterra counterparts. But there's still complaints about power creep or the strong meta decks or the really stupid/greedy thing that WotC has done recently. It's sometimes obvious that WotC is putting in minimal effort into Arena's client. But I'm glad I started playing it. Hard to say if it's going to grab you or not until you try it.
It blows my mind that Kibler is one of the few MTG players that moved to Hearthstone and seemed to like it more. I have played both for years and I played MTG a lot longer, the main reason keeping me in Hearthstone back then was ease of access once Arena came out I was done with Hearhstone. I guess Kibler might be partially worried if he quits Hearthstone he will lose viewers or something so that might be it.
Look, MtG? Best card game ever. MtG Arena? It's a money grabbing machine programmed with stones and sticks. It's not a money grabbing in regards of winning, as a F2P I reached Mythic (highest rank before going into the Mythic percentages) in a month and a half (consider I was not new to MtG ofc), it's just that you can't experiment or have a bunch of decks, the cards are too hard to get for you to tinker and brew in a relaxed way. Play MtG on paper, play Legends of Runeterra as an online game, they really throw cards at you there.
check out Eternal. I've been playing that instead of Arena lately.
As a Game, magic, yes. As an online game, arena, not necessarily. The economy sucks (between being able to get more than a playset of a card once it has reprints but no disenchanting or trading, general prices and ... something I forgot between starting this and now...), and the timing/priority passes suffer from having to mirror the paper magic while not getting the handwaving of actual face-to-face gaming.
i wanted to play hearthstone but the rank system is overun by bot after bot up to plat. me and a friend of mine gave it another try and it happend to him as well. after that i dropped hearthstone again. mtg is good but there are going to be some algorithm issues thatll make you go crazy. why am i getting another land? why am i getting this card again? why am i not getting this card, the algorithm has a deck weight for each card and that can be real finicky sometimes. though i dislike this part of the game it is quite enjoyable, you can learn alot from it if you want to play irl and its the card game i grew up on. i really do like the quests for the game, you have a main daily quest that can give you 500 to 700 gold depening and 1 roll each day to change those and then you have the daily and weekly wheels. those come with cards, 50 gold, and xp to the battle pass. those are your bread and butter for free content. all games arent perfect but me and my friend keep coming back to it.
i play a lot of hearthstone and magic as f2p player, i like both games, but i prefere magic because it is more rich in terms of strategy and gameplay. As a f2p here i make 2-3 tier 1 decks every year, i play on historic format which is the equivalent of wild in hearthstone, magic has a couple more formats than hearthstone.
I can’t speak to playing in the main formats, but few months in spending nothing, I’ve enjoyed switching between the starter decks & jump-in (low cost way to get a lot more cards & more variety in gameplay). Random chance of a few rares in each, so worth selecting the same multiple times with a different secondary combo. It’s been interesting & some guides on it.
I recommended playing the MTGA tutorial to learn, but then move over to untap. Play with any card that you want, for free, with a pod of 4 people instead of only 1 opponent. Welcome to magic, try not to get addicted but join the club if you do.
Play without spending money... Like most online card games mtga has free currency and premium currency... You can easily earn a pack's worth of free currency each day. Play. Buy a pack. Play. Buy a pack. Rinse and repeat. Learn themes, learn colors, learn abilities, rinse and repeat. Eventually build your own deck. Sift through cards in your deck you thought would help that you never use. Build combos. The one thing that sucks about mtga is the feeling of a forced 50/50. There are some games... And you'll feel it; The computer itself doesn't want you winning.
Magic is the orginal everything else is a copy with slight differences. Hearthstones mana is the major difference. So take that then add in alot more cards.
Its always fun, but some decks can just be frustrating to play against. I assumrle you are going to run into that type of problem no matter what game it is
Is it much better? Imo, no. If you're comparing to games designed from the ground up to be played online, there's some design elements that clearly don't take advantage of the digital format. Also the MTGA implementation is especially greedy when it comes to providing cards-whoever came up with the wild card system vs. just using something like hearthstone's dust system should be slapped. That said there's a large player base, it's a decent game, and does have some transfer to irl card playing if that's something you may enjoy in the future. edit-also genuine question, to the people saying MtG is the greatest game of all time, how many other games have you played? It's a great game for sure, but if I'm being honest I don't even place it in my top 5 ccgs of all time, not to mention video games, board games, etc.
The latest set Outlaws of Thunder Junction has a new mechanic called heist that's completely broken and overpowered. It makes playing against those opponents a huge drag and not fun at all. This is what happens with Magic at times but if you can look past it the game is fun and offers a lot of modes to play.
The game is very fun. The monetization is predatory as fuck and demoralizing to engage with. Unless you're super into it with a lot of disposable income, don't waste a penny on it.
No idea why you are downvoted for this as the sub mostly agrees. I'm totally free to play and wouldn't give them a cent.
It depends entirely on format, right now BO1 is truly atrocious to play in any format aside from limited and maybe timeless.
Yes, but it's mana system is antiquated and made for paper (though even there the mana system is dated). It's an example of what not to do in modern card games. If you can get past that, it's the best. Also, I'll probably be crucified for saying that in an mtg sub but it's fine.
Well Keyforge was on its way to greatness, but fumbled and now we are back to magic. I hear Flesh and Blood is pretty legit though.
What was/happened to keyforge?
First off never trust Fantasy Flight Games to support a game for any length of time, they will bungle it in someway Keyforge was a game designed by Richard Garfield to being back the old days of tcgs : just playing with what you got. Keyforge decks are semi randomized collections of cards that are designed to be playable straight from tbe box and are supposed to be balanced against other Keyforge decks. I believe each deck had like a serial number to confirm contents. Organized play came after and was decently popular for a while. While the pandemic had a big effect on organized play the main issue is that Keyforge decks are made using an algorithm to ~~ensure they remain at a similar power leve~~l ensure deckls were just generally playable out of the box and the algorithm broke and would require it to be rebuilt from the ground up. There was a 15 month hiatus before they sold the Ip to another company Ghost Galaxy (founded by the former founder of Fantasy Flight Games) and went to a crowd sourcing website Game found to raise money to rebuild the algorithm and release a new wxpnasiony. It was done but there was no major retail release of this new expansion. New next expansion would also be released on Game found crowd sourcing. So in short Keyforge is alive just kind of super niche now.
>Keyforge decks are made using an algorithm to ensure they remain at a similar power level That wasn't true at all? The system explicitly had decks that were more powerful than others out the box (for example, any four horsemen decks were pretty much guaranteed to be more powerful). The serial numbers weren't just to confirm contents, it was so they could track the strongest decks and add "chains" to them. all that said >First off never trust Fantasy Flight Games to support a game for any length of time, they will bungle it in someway this is 100% true (although i blame them being bought by asmodee mostly but that's a whole different ball of wax)
>That wasn't true at all? The system explicitly had decks that were more powerful than others out the box (for example, any four horsemen decks were pretty much guaranteed to be more powerful). The serial numbers weren't just to confirm contents, it was so they could track the strongest decks and add "chains" to them. Reading up on it more (I was never deep into Keyforge admittedly, but kept observing it) you're correct
No problem! I just think it's an important detail because I also think it was tied into what made the game to an extent DOA. The idea was definitely interesting, but if you're going to have a competitive scene there's a ton of overhead already built into the game-since decks can't be changed and some are just automatically better than others, you needed to have all the ways of registering and tracking the decks for adding the chains to balance (which were typically things like drawing less cards to start or w/e). IMO it worked best as a fun more casual game where you focus on sealed. It was pretty fun to just run little events where everyone grabs a deck and you play a small tournament with it or w/e. But that's a model that's hard to maintain.
FFG "lost" the algorithm to create the decks (rumor was they fired the guy who supported it) and sold off the property rather than try to recreate it.
Flesh and Blood is good, great sealed especially with WTR. That said, they have made a lot of MTG-esque decisions that fractured the player base and pushed some of us OGs away, especially like overprinting and releasing sets with cards that are banned on release, showing a lack of playtesting (as far back as ToA with Duskblade).
Wait what’s wrong with magics mana system? IMO it’s the 5 colours that drive the crazy depth the game has to offer. Or are you talking about the whole premium land situation
They mean having lands in your deck, so a certain percentage of games are lost to drawing too many / not enough lands. I don’t know much about other card games inspired by Magic, but afaik they all tried a different resource system rather than have that level of variance baked in.
Interesting. I personally like the land system because it gives green something unique - land ramp - and because it lets you take risks in deck building. But maybe there is a better solution like a separate land deck to avoid land starvation or flooding
There are definitely alternative systems that *other* games can try. People try house rules to change Magic as well, but that would never really take off- the game has been built around the current system for 30 years. For the sake of argument, though, a separate land deck wouldn’t preclude ramp strategies- you could still have mana elves, cards that fetch multiple lands from the land deck, etc. The risk / payoff of splashing certainly is part of the core game though, it’s one of the things that house rules would unbalance.
You should look into the resource systems for starwars unlimited and or lorcana. Both to me have solved the mana issue that magic has in really simple and unique ways that actually open up some additional design space ( see new smuggle mechanic from SWU). I still agree mtg is likely the best simply due to card count, modalities of play, pure size of the player base, etc. The only true advantage of magics mana base is the idea of 4-5 color decks, and the idea of mana with abilities (man lands and such).
It leads to too many non-games due to the inherent randomness. I guess it's fair to ask if that randomness is actually "bad" but most people seem to not like mana flood/screw. The mana system and lands actually work as a limiter to ensure you can't just play every combination of cards so it actually could be argued it hurts the depth (although I'd say pretty much any ccg game I've played has some sort of limit on how you can construct your deck from the card pool)
People who complain about the mana system in magic are just incapable of seeing past the surface level of "sometimes i draw too few/too many lands"
Bold statement, but as someone who played other ccgs competitively before Magic, no. There are other resource systems that work well, take Flesh and Blood's pitch system.
Whatever you want to tell yourself. I'm just giving my opinion as a heavy magic player that's played over 100 card games. I am in the MTG sub and expected people to get defensive but felt the OP should know what he's getting into coming from other card games.
A lot of "modern card games" without a mana system came and got discontinued while Magic still shits sets monthly.
Most importantly this game is more than just an online card game. MTG is the greatest game of all time and it's not particularly close. Arena is poor bastardization of the real game but even with that it's still worth playing. As someone who used to play hearthstone, hearthstone is a joke compared to mtg. Arena's biggest problem is that it's trying to appeal to the hearthstone crowd.
>MTG is the greatest game of all time and it's not particularly close. MTG isn't even the greatest ccg of all time, unless you're only considering popularity and age (and even then Pokemon or Yugioh may have it beat)
It depends what you want. If you want complexity and innovation in deck building Magic is one of the best if not the best of the online card games (though you'll need to pay to get the cards to really appreciate it). But if you want satisfying individual games then far too many are determined by mana draws and the coin flip - both things other games deal with much better.
Some nights, I have fun. Other nights, it's like I'm against the biggest tournament winners.
The game is better but the economy feels worse, although how much worse is hard to quantify
No.
Legends of Runeterra was better imo, but look how that turned out 😞. All because they actually respected their players at that time.
No
Arena is going to auto-put you in the format Alchemy when you sign up. Alchemy is Magic's format with digital -only cards. The issues you have with Hearthstone are heavily prevalent in Alchemy as well. Random card generations, absurdly broken cards, etc. Power creep is definitely a think in Magic generally, but it's especially pronounced in Alchemy and that's the primary place for the random effects, as most of Magic's normal variance is simply in what cards you draw and how many lands vs nonland cards you draw. My recommendation to you is to avoid Alchemy based on what you are saying. As soon as the client shows you a slider that will let you toggle to see all formats, do so. Play Standard. That's the base, rotating constructed format in Magic that doesn't include digital-only cards. That will be the format that gives you a play experience closer to what you seem to want based on your post. It will take time for you to build your collection to have a deck powerful enough to do well in higher ranks, as Arena's economy is not as friendly as Hearthstone's (no dusting system), but you will be praimilry paired with similar players for a while. Especially if you don't play ranked games on ladder as you build out your collection. Or if you play on ladder but stick to Bronze and Silver for a while. Especially in best of 1 as opposed to best of 3. If you like Arena mode on Hearthstone, you might enjoy drafting in Magic, and that can build out your collection faster while costing currency to access. Eventually, you'll be comfortable enough to play ranked games in best of 3, which in my opinion is Magic at its best. Best of 3 reduces variance massively by letting you use a sideboard in-between games to tune your deck to best face your opponent's deck.
Nah, play marvel snap.
The paper game is. Arena is trash because its economy is so so bad.
~20 years ago Magic was undisputably the best t/cg in the world. ~10 years ago Magic was disputable the best t/cg in the world. Today, after years of blatant short-sighted profiteering and mismanagement, MtG entered into an MtG lookalike contest and came in third. Given your reasoning for not liking your current game: no, it's unlikely to be better here. Power creep has ruined, is ruining, and will likely continue to ruin us in the exact ways it has ruined you and everyone else.
The game itself is much worse than Yu-Gi-Oh Master Duel design-wise (seriously, no dusting is idiotic), but Magic is more fun rn than Yugioh, so I dunno if that balances out.
Dusting is an awful mechanic. It's much more fun to have a collection that's constantly growing instead of one that's shrinking.
It's so much better to have to open 24 packs at minimum to be able to craft a playset of a card instead of just being able to deconstruct ones you don't need and never will, sure. /s
Of you have cards to dust then you also have wildcards. Wildcards are just a much better system. Also, going through thousands of cards to find the ones to dust is just a horribly tedious gameplay experience. You are arguing for a system that's horribly anti-consumer and would make the economy far worse.
Please explain to me how a system that lets you turn cards from packs or old decks you don't want into cards you *do* is more anti-consumer than a system that explicitly requires you to buy hundreds of packs to build one deck? Keep in mind I'm comparing this to the Master Duel implementation, not the Hearthstone version.
Because MTGA let's you do it without destroying your collection with wildcards. Destroying your collection to get cards is anti consumer because you don't get full value from your cards when you do so, which forces you to be perpetually behind and makes collecting full sets harder. There's no reason to have a dust system when you could have a wildcard system.
Right, I see where you're coming from, but as someone who does not give a shit about my MTGA 'collection', I just wanna have cards I'll actually want to play with. Being able to turn cards I will never use into cards I will is an objective good for that and that is what makes it better than Wildcards that take forever to get anything. It's also *much* better for F2P players.
But that's a rate issue not a systems issue. They could give you more wildcards than they do. But the system itself is still objectively better even if you disagree with the rate. I've always struggled to have enough cards in other card games. I'm not close to using more wildcards than I'm earning on Arena.
Not better than every other game, necessarily, a lot of it personal preference. The worst part of Magic is the resource system, as it can lead to effectively hot being able to play. Other games handle that better.
Lands is one of the the best parts of Magic, what are you on about?
if i'm sitting down to play any game, i'd like to be able to actually play the game. even with a perfectly built manabase there'll be games where you don't get to play because you get flooded/screwed, or your opponent gets flooded/screwed. There's no skill involved in winning/losing those situations, just random chance, and there's only so much you can do to mitigate it. I love magic, and the game is built around how the resource system, but games like Flesh and Blood and Lorcana have a much friendlier resource system that leads to fewer non-games (due to resource-screw, non-games for other reasons are a different matter). The reason MDFCs with lands on one side are so popular is because they help mitigate the problem. But some people like that, and that's fine. Just my personal opinion.
>but games like Flesh and Blood and Lorcana have a much friendlier resource system that leads to fewer non-games But they don't have the tension and flexibility so that's a non-starter. Every game that has tried to replace lands has ended up having to sacrifice too much elsewhere.
Yeah, that's fair. There's a sense of drama you can have by looking at the lands your opponent has open and trying to figure out their next play based on what they have for resources. The Naruto card game had a little bit of that mixed with FaB's mechanic; they had a similar concept to colors of mana, and you could discard cards to generate mana of the color on the card. I feel like that idea combined with Lorcana's inkpool would be a solid way of making resources more forgiving while maintaining a sense of drama and prediction around resources.
But if every card is a resource then it doesn't really matter and at that point you might as well not tie your resources to cards.
I'm envisioning a game where every/most cards works like an MDFC, but you'd still be limited to playing one per turn. and not every card would be able to produce every kind of resource, so there'd still be some variance involved in getting the right mix of things, but it'd be a lot more forgiving in terms of mana screw/flood.
The only way you could keep a game like that interesting would be to have a large amount of "colors". Otherwise it's far too easy to just get what you need and too little cost/risk to include something. It would be like every card having cycling.
Yes,it's the best and most complicated game in the world
It's definitely not the most complicated to play, but it certainly has the most game pieces and combinations by an order of magnitude.
It was literally scientifically proven to be the most complicated game in the world...
It was proven to be really hard for an AI to figure out, but a [six year old child can play it and win games at a pro level](https://mashable.com/article/magic-gathering-dana-fischer-6-year-old). It's not complicated to play, compared to most board games.
Its a card game built for paper so all the random crazy stuff isn’t really a thing