I got my Arena invite about a week back and it’s been a lot of fun. I like the changes so far, but I’m torn on spending my gold on more Dominaria packs vs. starting on my M19 collection.
There’s supposed to be a big stress test event on July 20th, and we’re all supposed to get a bunch of beta codes to give out to friends. If I do get some, anyone here interested?
Yeah, I’d be interested. I never got a beta invite :(
Thanks in advance!
Just got my son down to 4 health because of an early game 1/1 elf equipped with a Quietus Spike (@ShivaX loves these!) but then he managed to exile my creature, put some stuff out, and overwhelm me while I stopped drawing land after turn 4. Haha! It was kind of a crazy game.
Pictured:
I’d love an invite. I too never received anything after applying to join the beta.
I’ll have to learn how to play all over again. Looks like things have changed since the mid-90s.
Been awhile since I fired this up but spent some time with it today. It’s shaping up to be an awesome Magic experience. Even the tutorial was well done. When I get any beta codes I’ll be sure to share them here.
Yeah, it’s practically a new game.
I hope you’re all happy. I ordered physical magic cards under the excuse of my wife wanting to learn the game. Also have enjoyed Arena a lot this week and the new core set is fun.
One of us! One of us!
I hope your wife has a good time learning. I tried to teach my own wife how to play this (I think before we were even married) and she tells me I made her cry. I don’t really remember it that way, but I did a much better job explaining the game to new players after, and got my son and now (it looks like) my daughter into it. I’d love to have my wife try again, it would be really cool to have all four of us get into something like commander or something.
Plus it will be nice to have someone in the house to play with after my son goes to College. :(
Last night I was explaining that when the game came out in 93 I would drive to the hobby store between college classes to buy way too many boosters hoping for a black lotus and discovering cards I had never heard of.
She laughed at me.
I’ve not bought Magic cards in a while but my gaming group has enough serious Magic people into it that I end up playing with every set anyway. The game is still fine, but not really innovative any longer. Digital CCGs are doing much more interesting things than what physical cardboard has to offer, IMHO. And if you want a casual gamer experience, deckbuilders like Ascension or Star Realms have more to offer to the less hardcore gaming audience. Left to my own devices I usually find other card gaming options than Magic.
Having said all that, I’m still happy to play with my gaming buddies, as well as the occasional sealed event. The relatively new Brawl format is particularly good, I think.
Very few of the digital CCGs seeing success are doing a single meaningful thing that couldn’t be done with a paper card game, except for handling fiddly bits better (and that’s an unfair point, since it’s one that applies to physical tabletop games in general), having a bunch of cards that use the concept of “randomness” in new and wacky (read: terrible for anything resembling balance or competitive play) ways, and having a handful of individual cards that do occasionally cool things that are much harder in paper, like replacing your entire deck with a new deck partway through the game. The success of Hearthstone and Shadowverse, easily the two most popular digital CCGs in the world (and basically the same game with different skins), comes from being playable on mobile, being playable for free, and having popular themes (WarCraft and anime respectively), not from some gameplay innovation that shakes the foundation of the genre or adds new levels of depth - in fact, the most common criticism of both is a significant lack of depth, both in deckbuilding and in gameplay, as the class systems and guaranteed mana streamline everything a little too much.
Two of the other popular digital CCGs right now that aren’t based on an existing physical game (sorry, Duel Links) sell themselves on being “Magic, but ever-so-slightly different and cheaper than playing the real thing,” to the point where one of them got in legal trouble with WotC and the other is developed by active professional Magic players as a way to play a similar game without all the early developmental mistakes of Magic. Anything else trying to do actual cool new stuff has had significant difficulty seeing success and/or isn’t really a CCG (looking at you, Prismata).
Beyond any of that, I have yet to see a single digital CCG even try to handle the age-old problem of “how to support more than two players in a single game,” something Magic actively supports with multiple dedicated releases a year, plus cards intended for multiplayer seeded into other releases. I reject any notion that digital CCGs are somehow doing anything “more interesting than on paper” until someone makes even the tiniest effort to approach that.
Well, I would argue that the randomness and “cool things that are much harder in paper” are exactly what makes the digital games “more interesting than on paper”. I don’t mind the randomness in small doses, but it gets really annoying in quantity. Which is why I play very limited amounts of Hearthstone.
As for the “hard on paper” stuff that Eternal does, like their Warcry mechanic and letting cards keep modifications when they go to different zones, that’s the real benefit of doing things digitally. Practically impossible to do in a physical game, and adds quite a bit to your tactical and strategic thinking. (Also I like that Eternal is making an effort with the lore side of things, putting a story behind new releases.)
Now if you want to talk real gameplay differences, there’s Infinity Wars with very non-MTG mechanics like simultaneous turns. Unfortunately that particular game has terrible technical issues and an awful business model - at least as of a year or so ago last time I played. Don’t care how good your design is, if I have to pay nearly as much as I would for physical Magic cards and the game crashes regularly, I’m out.
It’s true that digital CCGs don’t do multiplayer well (or in most cases, at all). If that’s your criteria, then yeah, stick with paper. Multiplayer online for this genre makes little sense. You’d have to build out MMO-like infrastructure, not cheap, and try to balance the game mechanics for multiplayer, not easy. But the real issue is that most of what makes multi-player TCGs interesting is the meta-gaming, not the game itself. How many commander games are won or lost because everyone goes after the guy who played the combo deck last time, or two players lock themselves in a grudge match and a third ends up winning? You don’t get that kind of more-than-just-the-game interaction online with random people in a multiplayer format. Honestly, I don’t think Magic multiplayer formats are particularly good in terms of balanced competition, but that meta-gaming aspect hides much of that. In an online world where people are just climbing the monthly ladder or whatever, you lose that aspect.
Multiplayer in Magic isn’t just free-for-all politics-heavy stuff like Commander - we just had a full set back in April based entirely around the Two-Headed Giant 2v2 format. 2HG is perfectly viable as a competitive format, particularly when done as draft or sealed.
The big issue with multiplayer in digital CCGs isn’t infrastructure, but screen real estate. Magic Online struggles quite a bit with this, but it at least makes an effort to offer it.
I see your point, but it’s still weaker than one on one. Much more vulnerable to mana problems, or any kind of poor shuffle really, since that quickly turns into 2 on 1. And you can’t feasibly do best of three due to time constraints.
In any event, I concede the point that multiplayer is a paper product in this space. If someone has an epiphany and makes a great digital multiplayer experience, great, but I won’t be holding my breath.
But I don’t much care about online multiplayer. Good one on one, or even PvE, is what digital TCGs are for as far as I’m concerned. And games like Eternal taking advantage of the digital format is a nice innovation that I’m happy to see.
The most fun I have with Magic is when I can get a 3 or 4 player game going, though my son and I do mostly 1v1 stuff the games are more interesting with more players, at least in the casual format we play in.
We just did a 2HG draft with Battlebond, the set @WarpRattler is referring to, last weekend with 12 of us playing (6 teams) and it was so freaking good. So much fun talking and bouncing ideas off your partner, and the set was just perfectly balanced with no “bad” cards. It was excellent, and nothing Hearthstone or Elder Scrolls Legends has come close to, in my humble opinion.
I like digital card games, but nothing beats playing Magic around a table with my friends, and that’s something stuff like Hearthstone can’t really provide.
My son tells me he got a beta invite for MtG Arena (though he can’t play until the 20th when there is a stress test) so keep your eyes out for that, if you signed up. I’ll be happy to share any codes I get, as well.
A handful of beta invites for Arena - go to mtgarena.com to download.
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replace the q’s with m, 6, b, s, u respectively.
Here’s 4 more. I’m keeping one for my kid.
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