So it's Penguin
Pete here, your semi-faithful fan of the long-running collectible trading card game Magic: The Gathering,
with some good news and some bad news. In fact, both good and bad
news are distributed in several discrete bundles, so I'll get around
to parceling them out longways here.
- bad news: COVID-19 killed paper MTG
- good news: Wizards made MTG Arena to take up the slack
- bad news: Wizards designed the game
- good news: But this time they had Hearthstone to copy
- bad news: They copied Hearthstone
- good news: At least this time they copied a decent example so it's just barely playable
First, let's recap How We Got To This Point in Magic: The Gathering (MTG) history.
When MTG first came out in the early '90s, it was going around in my nerdiest friend circles until I had to try it. And I had to say, it was an innovative game. The thrust was that it encoded a hermetic
system of magic into cards. Some cards were land cards that could represent the mystical currency "mana," while others were various classes of spells, paid for by said mana, which could summon hostile critters against an opponent, zap fireballs, all that stuff. I shrugged "neato" but did not fully buy into the game until much later. There was a lot going on in the '90s.
Looking
back, I realize that I might have been better off if I'd never been
introduced to the game. Because the Alpha game implementation would
prove to be, over 30 years of the game's now-history, the very last
thing the company would ever, ever do right.
I'll skip over the other details - the
fulls sins of Hasbro and Wizards of theMTG
Arena : The Triumph of the Mediocre Coast (WotC) and specifically Mark Rosewater could fill a city full of libraries - but let's focus on a Moby Dick that WotC has been chasing since almost the beginning: turning Magic: The Gathering into a video game.
Wizards Has a Long History of Failed Digital MTG Attempts
There's a
Wiki page listing all of the former attempts to recreate MTG in video
game form. Starting all the way back in 1997 -
Google was but a twinkle in the eye of a couple of dorm kids then -
Wizards of the Coast and its parent company Hasbro tried repeatedly
to make an MTG digital platform that would stick.
Just this history alone reads like a comedy of errors: Mono-platform support, digital publishers that folded immediately, buggy software, lack of tech support, crappy implementation all around. One time they tried to make an arcade game, yes, a stand-alone video game cabinet that takes quarters, as a version of Magic: The Gathering.
For a while there, the only MTG digital game available on mobile
platforms was "Puzzle Quest," the same spammy
match-three puzzle game you've seen a million times, but done with
mana symbols and planeswalker characters. You will ask each time,
"what were they smoking when they thought of this?"
You know how Nintendo
started out as a trading card game company and then converted to a video game company, but they succeeded because they had smart people in charge? That was what Wizards was trying to do, minus the smart people.
So fast-forward: A long history of failed MTG digital versions has led me to expect that I would never be writing the article I am today. But then something awful happened to MTG's core business model. The global COVID pandemic pretty much puts
the kibosh on large gatherings of nerds at card tables playing face to face, so Wizards HAD TO make a digital game work or die. On mobile, yet. They had already launched for Windows desktop, a dwindlingly small niche in technology now, but to count they had to port it to mobile or die.
Hearthstone Already Ate Wizards Lunch
Hearthstone, a digital trading card game based on Blizzard Entertainment's World of Warcraft universe, was everything that Wizards' misfired MTG attempts wasn't. Even though Hearthstone and Blizzard have a history of stumbling pratfalls, buggy patches, and stinking bad P.R. moves, Hearthstone was still able to eat Wizards' market simply by having a digital card game that sorta, kinda, works… most of the time. Ask any Magic player today what other card game is next closest to Magic, and they will answer not Pokemon, not Yu-Gi-Oh, but Hearthstone.
They say imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. It is also the last refuge of the hopelessly stupid. Wizards downloaded Hearthstone, played it for a while, and finally saw the light and designed MTG
Arena as a close-as-possible clone of Hearthstone. Given that Hearthstone is about a hundred times less complicated than MTG, you might be saying that this sounds like a bad idea. You are right. But it's the best we could hope for. Given how stubbornly asinine the leadership is at Wizards of the Coast, given how Mark Rosewater's solid concrete skull wouldn't accept a clue if you drilled one in there, it's a miracle that they finally got it close to right after 22 years of trying, even with an example to follow.
So yes, your best chance of understanding MTG Arena, even if you're a veteran MTG paper card player, is to come to it from Hearthstone. There's even guides
out there to explain the diffs between the two.
The MTG Arena Playing Experience
Here's why I say "play Hearthstone first and then MTG Arena will make sense."
- MTGA uses a player matching system like Hearthstone
- MTGA uses an opening hand-smoothing algorithm like Hearthstone
- MTGA has daily quests like Hearthstone, which award gold like Hearthstone
- Gold can be used to buy packs, just like Hearthstone
- The system is ridiculously generous in feeding you new packs just like Hearthstone
- Despite the generosity, you can still leapfrog ahead and win more games simply by spending more money, just like Hearthstone
- MTGA is plagued by constant updates which try to reinvent the entire concept of a card game in the interest of "appealing to new players," which everybody hates, just like Hearthstone
- New mechanics are recklessly thrown into the game, breaking the game until they have to be canceled and the company heads have to make some formal public apology before doing the same thing next season, just like Hearthstone
- There are a few limited formats which are just like Standard, but with a gimmick or tweak, just like Hearthstone
- The new cards of Standard format get all the focus, while anybody with legacy cards rotated out of Standard gets dumped into a "wild format" that is neglected and shoved out of sight, just like Hearthstone
- This means that for a "collectible trading card game," your collection might as well be set on fire once it rotates out of Standard, unless you spent all your money to buy the power cards in the prime legacy format, just like Hearthstone
- Matches are prone to stall out due to server hiccups, often leaving a card glitched in the air while your timer runs out and you scream helplessly at the screen, just like Hearthstone
- Focus is placed on getting you to log in every day so you don't miss out on the free-packs grind, but zero focus is on actual gameplay experience, just like Hearthstone
- Useless noise and animation and gimmicks are added to card play, as if they were embarrassed to have cards act like plain old cards, just like Hearthstone
- The above-mentioned noise and gimmicks makes the game consume more resources than Cyberpunk 2077 without adding any value to gameplay, just like Hearthstone
- Trading cards with other players is impossible; instead a system is in place to craft new cards from gradually earned resources, just like Hearthstone
- There is a complicated jungle of alternative experience scales, alternative currencies, and cosmetic upgrades thrown into the game, which act more like money sinks than adding any value to the play experience, just like Hearthstone
- The player base is already plagued by trolls and bots, who win matches not by playing, but by stalling as long as possible until you concede out of frustration so you don't waste your entire day, just like Hearthstone
- Nothing is done to balance game play until too-late-to-matter bans, so that during any given season, there is only one deck to play if you want to win and the rest of the cards might as well be set on fire, just like Hearthstone
You
get the picture.
Your
new player experience is that you will be put through a series of
un-skippable tutorial matches which gradually unlock cards until you
have a very basic playset. After that, you know the grind: Build
decks, get matched with players at a roughly similar experience
level, win some, lose some, log in tomorrow. The daily quests are
utterly brainless mechanics which you cannot possibly lose as long as
you keep playing, such as "play 20 green or white cards."
As
you play along and open more packs, you eventually earn "wild
cards," which are blank templates issued in the game's rarities
(common, uncommon, rare, mythic). You can redeem these for a matching
rarity of the card you want.
Things MTG Arena Has Taught Me About Magic: The Gathering
MTG
Arena is at least good for something. It is a way to play the game
without having to put on pants and attend an actual card shop. You
can now hop online and find an opponent anywhere in the world and
have a game within seconds on demand, 24/7.
This
has been an epiphany for me, because up until now I thought I was a
terrible player. Actually, it turns out that I'm really good at it,
once you remove the factors of your local game store. This is because
my only choice for a local game store (name withheld so my editors
don't get sued) is a complete scam where the card shop owners are the
judges for every match as well as being half the players, ensuring
that the cabal wins all the matches while the rest of us paid the
entry fee just to go down in defeat in rigged matches.
The
last time I played at said store, I was attending the opening
prerelease for a set. You know the drill with prereleases: You open a
box with six boosters and some extra preset cards, and have to build
a deck with what you have. If you're extremely lucky, you get a
mythic rare card, maybe two. I sit down to play and the guy across
from me makes no attempt to hide the fact that his deck has full
playsets of every mythic rare card in that set, guaranteeing him a
win against any normal prerelease deck. I knew better that to
complain; the same guy had sold me the prerelease kit, and was also
the only judge I could call to consult. I folded, told the entire
shop staff that they're all thugs, and left, with said thugs laughing
behind my back.
And
Wizards of the Coast wonders why they struggle to hang onto players.
Naturally,
shops that cheat get to be outrageously wealthy since they control
the flow of cards coming into town, in a game where the right card
can auction for six figures. Naturally, WotC also does very much of
nothing about this, since they sell cards anyway, while preaching
about how they do everything they can and urging you to waste your
time reporting foul play to them, so they can do nothing about it.
All
of the above cheating factor gets removed when you play a computer
algorithm online against people like yourself, so there is that. Now
that I play against normal players playing by the rules, I'm doing
fantastic.
In
fact, I'm doing a little too fantastic. Currently, the meta game for
MTG Standard format is the same story you've been hearing for years,
Mark Rosewater's New World Order: No combo, one super-aggressive
aggro deck, and one super-syrupy control deck to try to counter it.
Everything else is unplayable garbage, no matter what its rarity.
As
of January 2021, that aggro deck is White Weenie, its counter is
Izzet Control, and everybody else is ass out. You can't help but
collect all the cards for white weenie; the deck is mostly low
rarities. It's the same "hatebears with a side of life gain"
you've played in years past, brainless to pilot. Myself, I splash
black to get more of a Cleric tribal effect going and for more card
advantage, which helps me tremendously against White Weenie mirror
matches, while only slightly hampering me against that rare opponent
playing something else.
Most
matches don't even get played; as soon as the opponent sees plains
and a white hatebear come out, they concede. I win. Wheee.
Of
course, this will keep up until White Weenie gets nerfed, and then
Izzet Control (max money here, all high rarities) will dominate for a
moment until the next most powerful aggro deck gets to replace White
Weenies and the circle repeats.
And - I shall dare to say this again - this is exactly the same meta pattern as Hearthstone, and most collectible trading card
games, for that matter. That's just an inherent factor of designer
card games in general.
MTG Arena : The Triumph of the Mediocre
In retrospect, MTG is following the exact same pattern that we see so commonly repeated in a capitalist industrial system. This same pattern gets repeated in duopolies all the time. Whether it's Google and Apple, Intel and AMD, or Coke and Pepsi, the pattern repeats:
- Firm A rises to dominate market
- Firm B rises as a copycat of Firm A
- Firm A's investors panic and demand the company competes more aggressively with Firm B
- Firms A and B end up endlessly copying each other, even when Firm A would have done better if it ignored Firm B and kept being the innovator
In the case of Wizards of the Coast, they have taken what many game historians agree is among the most ground-breaking, innovative, engaging games even created, and neutered it to a shallow copy of its competitor. MTG fits into Hearthstone's shoes like a gorilla on a tricycle. It just so happens that Hearthstone was created by digital natives, whereas Hasbro Incorporated is apparently staffed entirely by ancient dinosaurs who still think digital electronics are a passing fad.
By
the way, MTG Arena is a miserable experience for normal-sized people
with people-range eyesight. Thanks to Maro's bass-ackwards retarding
of the game's design, everything has been practically eliminated from
the game except creatures. Said creatures then have to take up the
slack from the missing non-creature spells, so you end up with spell
effects stapled to creatures. This results in every card having a
freaking book report written on it. On the screen, every card has a
wall of text in tiny flyspeck font which is unreadable without a
magnifying glass; no on-screen magnification is built in.
You
need a law degree to understand what half the cards do, so playing
the game becomes about as exciting as filing corporate tax returns.
Your turn will be long over before you finish interpreting what the
hell a card does, so you just end up paying mana and throwing it
down, hoping it does something.
Deck building and crafting cards is also an exercise in frustration. In Hearthstone, you have a much smaller card pool than the
sprawling complexity that is MTG, but your tiny mobile phone screen
can show maybe four cards in detail at a time. Building a deck
becomes a painstaking chore of scrolling and scrolling and scrolling,
with a deck-building interface that is fiddly and nigh-impossible to
manage without a needle-pointed stylus.
And of course, both MTG Arena and Hearthstone have a raging lust for gimmicks! Bells and whistles and singing, dancing trash! Every set has the game designers asking: what new things can we do to make this like anything besides a card game? Cards have dice-rolling
mechanics, flipping mechanics, transforming mechanics, interactive
elements… There are a whole set of MTG cards right now that have
the "enter the dungeon" mechanic, with up to four cards'
worth of a "dungeon" design, with rooms and triggers in a
maze pattern.
You know, that's what this game needs, an entire D&D session stapled to a card! These useless mini-games stapled to every card just drag the game out to last eons, until it just becomes a whole RPG on its own. Meanwhile you could be building a castle in Minecraft, where you can actually play a game designed to
be that game from the start, instead of starting with a card game which is suddenly trying to be Minecraft and World of
Warcraft and D&D and Among Us and Animal
Crossing all at the same time.
I don't know why every card game designer has this massive inferiority complex. People seek out card games because they like to play with cards. Let me repeat that: BECAUSE THEY LIKE TO PLAY WITH CARDS.
Cards can be cards. We can let cards just be cards. There is nothing
wrong with a card that says "deal 3 damage" or a card that
says "counter target spell." That's what MTG got right from
Alpha, what made MTG what it is. What MTG has since left farther and
farther in its rear-view mirror for going on 30 years now.
If *I* were in charge of design for a card game, my first rule would be "no card may be printed with more than ten words on it."
TEN!
Even that is too generous, but any limit is better than no limit at
all.
But
I, as always when I talk about this frustrating, misdirected game
which is damned with idiot design, digress.
MTG
Arena: It's all you've got now. Better be happy with it.
