Recent reviews by saturnine23

Please ignore Time Played -- I have hundreds of hours of play time in the stand-alone client, as well as the mobile Android version. I've been playing near-daily for 2 years. I'm also an avid paper player, trader, and collector.

This is the closest I've ever come to experiencing paper magic in a video game. If you've ever played any previous MTG video games, please know that Arena is leaps and bounds ahead of them.

And yet it's still deeply flawed. Other reviewers have gone into better detail than I ever could about the goofy matchmaking, shuffling, and ranking systems. The F2P grind is punishing. The devs are far stingier with freebies and handouts than in other F2P environments I've experienced. And you'll absolutely encounter toxic players on the regular who stall their matches (AKA roping) out of spite, or spam you with the game's limited set of phrases and emojis just to taunt you. The devs don't care about moderating or punishing this kind of behavior, so it goes unchecked.

For these reasons, Arena has my mixed and slightly leery recommendation.