This app is so well made and has a great tutorial that is super helpful for learning the game. Beyond that the actual game itself is ruined by over the top algorithms. They have taken every ounce of randomness out of a card game (I understand true randomness is not plausible on an operating system) to the point you can tell from starting hands if you are supposed to win the match or if you are supposed to lose. Granted there are plenty of good close games. But the game decides who wins and loses and it is very clear when you are supposed to lose. I play paper magic weekly so I’m well aware of mana floods, droughts, bad hands etc. but this app is very different. If you have a card that maybe isn’t the best for your deck, you are going to have that card in your starting hand almost every time. You’re on a winning streak? The game will decide it’s time for you to lose to get that win/loss ratio back down to 50% by giving you impossible hands, even on a well built deck. It’s a hopeless feeling and I’m not one to concede 5 times in a row just so I can possibly have a good match. This is especially frustrating when you pay gold or gems for an event only to find that even after a mulligan or two you are given impossible hands because it is simply not your turn to win. This game needs more randomness in the draws and WAY less algorithms deciding who wins and who loses.

I have to say there is so much content here, it’s tough to take it all in. This is not going to be a game you pick up and figure out in an hour or two…or even a week. But saying all that, there are a ton of tutorials and practice games and stuff to introduce you to it. And also, you don’t need to spend a cent to get a lot of content. I have just started to scratch the surface of the game and I already have a lot of gold and wildcards and such. I plan to save it until I have a better handle on what I want to do. There are just so many options it’s a bit overwhelming. Find an online guide, ideally one that will give you some codes for free stuff, and ease into it through that. Without a guide or a friend who can tell you what to do, you’re probably going to bail. And that’s a shame, as this is probably one of the most played and well crafted games in existence. When a card or series of cards breaks the game, they fix it. The documentation is so detailed that it kind of has its own language - you’ll pick it up eventually. I give it 4 stars because you are going to have to devote a lot of time to get to where you can feel competitive…and I haven’t gotten there yet. I hope that will happen eventually. But I also have a life that I enjoy and I refuse to get pulled into an obsession. That might be a challenge, but I’m willing to risk it.

Let me start by saying I love magic the gathering m, it is by far the best game ever made it is an incredible game of skill and one of the most fun things ive ever found period. But arena is such an incredibly broken app it simply doesnt function most of the time. about 50% of the time it just crashes for no reason, I always only get half of the gold from my rewards actually put into my account, there are always issues with sending direct challenges (if you cancel a challenge it just greys out the challenge button) and sometimes you can’t send challenges in certain formats for no discernable reason. The game freezes constantly requiring a restart which loses games all the time. And if you leave the app for more than ten seconds it says “connecting to the server” until you restart the app. Overall this is one of the worst made apps of all time, just compare it to league on mobile which is a much much more graphically complex game which runs perfectly every time. also the fact that the cards in gane are rendered in 3d was a horrible decision, as it leads to a lot of the issues i described above. Lastly there needs to be a penalty for leaving the game without conceding, almost half my games end with someone simply leaving the game and you have to wait for like three minutes for their time to run out. This app is Garbage!!!