Today Magic the Gathering Arena hit the iOS App Store.

Finally! It’s long over due on the platform. It came out on Android as an early access at the end of January.

Mini rant…

In my opinion Arena should have been on mobile from launch, or failing that within the first 6 months of launching. I really do think WotC fumbled the ball on this. By taking so long to reach other platforms other than PC, WotC really failed to make a significant dent into rival games such as Hearthstone. And that’s despite throwing lots of money at advertising, and “buying” streamers.

Initial impressions…

So this morning after downloading Arena onto my iPad, it had to then download even more data before I could do anything but play the tutorial. Then before the majority of game modes are made available I had to complete the Colour Challenge to unlock them. Which is basically play a mono coloured deck against an “AI” opponent playing one of the remaining colours, then the final game would be against a random real opponent. And you have to do that for each colour type, before you can play Standard or Historic for example.

The “AI” opponents are more logic puzzles than playing against an AI, as the cards drawn are the same each time. So it’s basically about playing the cards in the right order.

The real player opponent was fun. However there were some uneven matchups with obviously more powerful decks, they were not mono colour for starters. I think this for a complete novice to the game could be very off putting.

Being a paper player I have collected more than a handful of Arena codes over the last couple of years. These codes unlock decks, boosters, etc within Arena. You have to enter the code within the in app store to unlock them. However it appears that in the version of Arena released today there is no way to redeem those codes. So if like me you don’t have a PC/Mac you can’t use them, hopefully they won’t expire before WotC sort this out. Which would not be cool.

I knew I’d like playing MtG using Arena. It’s MtG with a slick “modern” UI. What’s not to like?

Another rant…

However it’s all the crap around playing the game that WotC have with their nickel and diming players for every penny they can screw out of them I don’t like.

I’ve seen comparisons online, and WotC are one of the meanest, less generous companies for this type of game. The in game economy is very much weighted in their favour.

Which means building up a collection and being able to build decks requires you to spend a lot of time grinding away, or spending lots of money. Neither is ideal.

Will I continue to play Arena? Possibly. Redeeming these codes is a biggie for me. Maybe a deal breaker.