One of my students has recently been given entry into the closed beta for MtG Arena. His main complaint about the game is due to him! His pc is not powerful enough at times during the game. Those times are when certain animations occur. Otherwise I believe he’s fairly happy with the actual game play.
For me Arena is dead to me until I can play it in my iPad. They could be testing it on iPad during this closed beta. For starters WotC are developing Arena in Unity. Which means they can export the game for whatever platform they like basically. No reason not to see a console version either. If White Wizard Games can do a closed Kickstarter backers alpha testing of Epic on PC/iOS/Android, and I bet they have less resources than WotC on this, then why can’t WotC with Arena? TestFlight on iOS allows this.
Because of the above Arena isn’t on my radar and wasn’t a consideration when I heard about Brawl. But since then some online have pointed out that one of the reasons Brawl may have been developed was for Arena. Commander is one, if not the most popular formats for MtG. Sadly Arena will not be able to play it due to the share number of cards that are legal in the format (thousands). So with Brawl only using the cards from Standard, and those are the cards available in Arena. The conspiracy theory is that this is why WotC invented Brawl, to add Commander like play to Arena. I certainly can see how this sounds credible. It’s also been pointed out in a podcast that Brawl in Arena may only be a 1 v 1 format, because they can’t see how the multiplayer element and board states would be handled.
For me I don’t want to have to grind to be able to do anything, like deck build.
Math Trade Update
A brief update on the UK Math Trade I’m taking part in. The list is now closed for adding games. It’s now entered the phase where people have until tomorrow I think it is to submit their want lists. This is basically you selecting the games you’d like to trade for and what you are offering from the games you put on the list.
I’ve submitted my want list.
- Apocrypha Adventure Card Game – offered £45 for this
- Tannhauser + expansions – offered Clans of Caledonia and Dark Souls
- Via Nebula – offered Dark Souls
It’s up to the software they run next to make the match ups. The Rebellion expansion I’m using as a wild card and see if I get offered anything of interest for it.