I’ve always strayed away from digital versions of traditionally tabletop experiences. This isn’t a huge revelation or a surprising opinion; most of the time, a person’s original experience with almost any form of entertainment is going to define their preferences and desires. Most people who read the book won’t care for the movie. Many who played Dungeons and Dragons in their garage for years will shy away from the digital counterparts. For me (and I suspect many others) it’s the same with Magic; my experience with Magic tilts the expectations of my enjoyment towards the physical, real-life gameplay.

There’s an elemental experience when reading a pivotal chapter in a book, in capturing the story in words and creating the reality in your own head. The physical turning of the page. The smell of the paper. The imagination and interpretation involved, that fires all sorts of chemicals and reactions in your brain. You’re not just digesting material, but truly molding it as you read, using your own perspective to create a truly unique experience. It is completely and utterly different than the movie experience, where the directors and screenwriters are essentially doing it for you.

The same can be said for games that are traditionally tabletop experiences. I’ve played D&D online a couple times, and the experience was utterly soulless by comparison. All the mechanical parts were there, and technically the communication between players is as good as one could hope. But it’s just not quite there, as it’s much harder to suspend reality and immerse oneself into a story or campaign when you’re still just sitting in your chair, and you probably have Twitter open on another monitor, and so many of the physical interactions and reactions are out of camera view (and certainly not actually sitting next to you).

Magic, to me, is no different. Magic Online has had a storied history in general instability and “clunkiness,” but I’ve never blamed too much of that on its developers. Cramming 25 years of one of the most complex games ever created is really a modern miracle. I’m shocked the program even starts up sometimes, if only because the massive undertaking of getting all of those mechanics and keywords to work properly is simply confounding.

The main reason I never really enjoyed Magic Online is because it boiled the game down to its most inane, transactional bits. Functionally, it does everything you could ever ask it to do. I always felt it was what it was; it’s clunky and unwieldy because it has to be, because Magic is a clunky game when you force it through a digital lens. In real life, you can shortcut all sorts of interactions, but you simply can’t do that in a digital version.

Additionally, I truly missed holding the cards, slamming my critical spell on the table, the often-silent but tense level of interaction one has with their opponent during a game. There was so much of the physical element of the game that is just lost in a digital version; I had largely written it off as “something that wasn’t for me.” Even if it got rid of shuffling and cheating (the two biggest boons of a digital version of Magic), it wasn’t enough to overcome the loss of everything else.

MTG Arena still has some of those problems; they’re inescapable. I still can’t dramatically turn all my creatures sideways when swinging for lethal. I still don’t get the little dopamine rush every time I draw a card, as possibility breeds the anticipation of my next new resource. I still can’t casually interact with my opponent as we push through an known or simple matchup.

But, to me MTG Arena has achieved the impossible: this is a digital Magic experience that I actually enjoy.

I don’t think there’s any single feature that does it, but I think there’s a few that are really important:

Automatic land-tapping. Easily the most finicky part of Magic in general (both physical and digital) is tapping your lands, and it’s made especially so on MTGO. Arena does it all for you, and it just feels right.

Smart UI presentation. MTGO tries to convey a completely pure representation of a game of Magic on a tabletop. This functioned “well enough,” but really just made me miss a physical game of Magic even more. Arena changes everything; all the cards are made a little smaller (relegating text boxes to a hover-zoom) so everything can fit in a pleasant way, it places your basic lands to the bottom left and makes them smaller, it very cleanly projects important information in good spots. It takes full advantage of its digital capabilities, and the result is something very approachable and enjoyable to play.

I’m lucky enough to have a Microsoft Surface Pro 4 tablet, which has allowed me to play the game using only touch controls. It works, really well. Casually playing a few games on my couch while a movie was on was an experience with Magic I don’t think I ever imagined, yet here we are. I don’t think using a phone is going to be great (I could be wrong), but tablet owners will be quite pleased in the future. This is working off of a pretty reasonable assumption that we’ll see Arena on iOS and Android.



These and other factors add up to a version of digital Magic that I will likely be playing for some time. This is despite the fact that Arena doesn’t include my favorite format (Modern), nor does it contain a couple other formats I’d like to play (Legacy, Pauper). It probably won’t in the near future as well, and I’m fine with that. If Arena is just my “Limited and Standard machine” and I just continue with my real-life Magic playing being Modern and Legacy, I’m perfectly happy with that.

Arena has shaped up to be a smooth, accessible, simple version of Magic that I heartily enjoy. The last word there in bold is the real accomplishment here; Magic is anything but simple, but the developers have done an outstanding job in making a functional version of the greatest game ever made that is simply pleasing to play, despite its complexity.