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…