A New Arena

A few days ago, I came across a video of Magic The Gathering booster packs being opened. It was nothing special. Just a person getting disappointed or excited as he is discovering his luck in checking out the cards he got. I got a little bit nostalgic and thought to the decks I played with during high school. I very rarely recognized the cards in the video though. There have been so many new things since I first tried it.

I remember having a red deck full of goblins and damage spells. There was Shock and Fanning the Flames and those annoying goblins with haste that could attack as soon as they were cast. I also had a black deck full of vampires and zombies that annoyed the hell out of people because they either wouldn’t die or kept coming back. It became a thing at school for a while. We played between classes, traded cards and challenged each other. If I remember correctly, I was the only female playing Magic. I think I’m the only female in my circle of people who played. After a few years and a few moves, I have no idea where those decks are now.

Fortunately, a thing called MTG Arena exists. I had heard of it when it was still in beta and thought nothing of it. Although at that time, other things and other games had my attention. On a free day, I got curious and decided to download Arena. For a former player, the learning curve isn’t bad at all. There were a lot of familiar things that made it easier for me. There were also a lot of new things that made it all the more interesting to keep moving forward in the tutorial or the quest at the beginning. I’m pretty sure the virtual opening of a pack of cards doesn’t come close to the real life excitement of actually opening a booster pack. But I have to say that the game play gives me the same anxious aggression that I get when I play chess.

So far, I have been messing around with creating new decks and trying them out against other players. The game helps me out by automatically assigning the number of lands depending on the color and ratio of the creature or spells I select for a particular deck. I also like that two color lands are available. Although most of them come in tapped when they enter the board, it makes it easier to create multicolored decks as well.

I have tried the practice mode with Sparky, the AI in the game. Usually, I do that to see how new decks perform. If they do well with Sparky, I try them out in normal play and after that in ranked play. The daily and weekly quests only progress with the non practice modes. That’s not really a big deal but it’s nice to get the gold and the new cards and packs that come with it.

I even got my brother to play it so we could challenge each other. I think he’s beat me a handful of times so far but they don’t really count because I have a huge advantage of having a bigger collection of cards to choose from. I’m sure it’ll only be a matter of time until he catches up. Until then, some fun to be had.