Does anyone play Arena? MTGO?

[WolfWhoWanders]

I've been considering getting a laptop style device to make it easier to post things here, I enjoy the community and discussion and it is difficult to take part and keep up when I'm using a phone. My girlfriend just saw the website on my phone as I've been pouring some work into my Uro list and thinks I'm gonna go blind looking at the font/font size/layout. Plus netflix is a thing and there's a bunch of shows I might like to watch...I haven't had a computer or TV in many many years. Soooo, I was thinking about just getting a cheap chromebook type thing but it occurred to me that I might want to try playing Arena or MTGO. If you play Arena, how much do you enjoy it as (perhaps) a primarily EDH player? Is it nice for filling in some gaps in your free time? How much time/money investment does it require? If you play MTGO, how does playing EDH online compare to sitting down with humans? What is the community like? Is it difficult to keep track of board states/triggers and the like? How would you describe the gameplay experience? Is it costly to build a reasonable collection? Is there any sort of resale value? Do people play on the more casual or the more cutthroat end? How long do you spend on an average game? Thank you for your time and consideration. Also, if you have good recommendations for a laptop style device that can handle these programs with ease and is on the more affordable side of the spectrum I'd appreciate that as well.

[pokken]

I recently picked up playing commander on MTGO and it's pretty fun. The issue is the lack of socializing. I'd love to find a group that chats voice on discord or something. Been trying to get some friends into it.

The meta is pretty broad, some cedh decks, mostly medium-high power casual decks though.

[Toshi]

I play EDH on Xmage. It's Java based so it should run on basically anything (4 or more GB of RAM advised though).
It's free of charge, comes with built in chat and is easy to handle once you got to know its quirks. New sets are implemented rather quickly and most of the community is welcoming and decent.
Only potential downside; whenever new sets get released flavor of the month commanders can be omnipresent.

I've never tried MTGO since Xmage has been fulfilling my needs.
I play Arena occasionally, but i found the meta to be rather dull right now and i heavily dislike some decisions by WotC. Brawl on wednesdays only, no in game chat, yada yada.

[toctheyounger]

Mostly, MTG online is plug and play easy. There's a couple of choices, and opportunity cost is rife with those choices.

Arena - doesn't support EDH.
MTGO - costs you money to play with cards you probably already have IRL. This is why I won't, as a matter of principle.
Cockatrice - UI takes a little getting used to, which I never really came to grips with myself. Otherwise, totally free. Meta is what you make it, in that you can play with randoms online or a group of online pals.
xmage - I know very little about this one, other than that it is also free. Haven't tried it.
Untap - This is what I use, although it's easily the most budget of the options available. It's free, doesn't require any downloads, and has a low learning curve for UI. That being said, your meta could be anything, and you have no control over how friendly or toxic people are, so games can range from dumpster fire to awesome fun. You can do private games, but I'm in a weird time zone and play in down times at work mostly, so I don't have the scope for games with pals.

Personally I just resent paying more money for cards I literally already own, so I just won't go down the MTGO route. I don't have a ton of money and Wizards gets plenty of it as is.

As far as the online experience goes, it can be great. It can be terrible too, or anything in between. You do still have the Rule 0 issues of people bringing guns to knife fights, and because it's the internet people can still say whatever they like from behind a keyboard, so there are jerks aplenty. But otherwise gameplay is fine, if a little less nuanced on account of the politics being a little harder to do online than in an LGS with pals.

[Inkeyes22]

I play on both, but MTGO has a really outdated interface and in general costs more than Arena. I have spent money on Arena, but it usually f2p and I can get what I need to Brawl, which is the main thing I do there. I would recommend muting people on Arena otherwise they just spam emotes incessently. MTGO is nice in that you have a huge variety of options, and you can usually get into an EDH game pretty quickly, but there are wierd issues with cards sometimes, and you get a lot of wanna-be cEDHers that are just there to pubstomp, but I would say that maybe 35% of the games are good.

[Sinis]

I played Arena for a little bit, but, I found the timing of Magic in a computerized context aggravating. I intellectually knew how many times a player would get priority in any given turn, but if you want to pretend you have an action, it's a lot of being prompted to pass, and if you decide to auto-pass whenever you don't have an action, you're tipping your hand.

[toctheyounger]

I played Arena for a little bit, but, I found the timing of Magic in a computerized context aggravating. I intellectually knew how many times a player would get priority in any given turn, but if you want to pretend you have an action, it's a lot of being prompted to pass, and if you decide to auto-pass whenever you don't have an action, you're tipping your hand.

It's an issue on Untap too, I'm assuming with all text based UI's. Specifically because Untap is fairly freeform in that it won't stop you for priority and leaves a lot of the turn structure to the player it becomes a bit laborious (It has timings for main, attack, second main, every other trigger is on you - good practice to get into though). A lot of folks do a discord channel to chat over the game instead of relying on typing, which seems a lot easier. Obviously being at work I can't really partake in that. I'm kind of allowed work dependent, but a fair amount on my work is on the phones, so it wouldn't look great. But all reports back are that having a discord channel works a treat.

[ISBPathfinder]

I did pick up Arena back after the first Ravnica 3 set dropped. I played it for most of a year ultimately stopping and uninstalling it. I am not opposed to playing standard, modern, other formats myself but I guess there were a few issues I had with arena / standard currently.

My issues being:

• They have been pushing the hell out of planeswalkers. I kind of hate walkers and I find it kind of a miserable experience seeing how many kill a planeswalker effects you can come up with while mixing as many walkers into it. Sure, there are things like mono red that can be played its just not my style. I love midrange and the current standard is TERRIBLE for midrange tactics. Ramp decks and walker control like decks feel like they sort of dominate the field.
• There is a loss of the social element moving to Arena. Its strange that I miss this because when you go to play FNM it doesn't feel especially social but the loss of that element was noticeable to me.
• If you own everything, on average 98% of the time someone is playing essentially a meta deck. I guess maybe its not a big deal but I like deckbuilding and if you want to deckbuild you need a lot of cards. It just felt like deckbuilding was super hard when I saw more or less the established good decks every game one after the other.

[WolfWhoWanders]

Thanks for the insight, I'll look into xmage and untap. It's definitely a bit feelsbad to buy digital copies of cards I already own. I can handle a little toxicity, if anything it amuses me sometimes. I was raised to be thick skinned. All the same, part of the joy of edh is enjoying your company so I wouldn't want to deal with it too much.

[Treamayne]

I've been considering getting a laptop style device to make it easier to post things here, I enjoy the community and discussion and it is difficult to take part and keep up when I'm using a phone. ... If you play MTGO, how does playing EDH online compare to sitting down with humans?

I've played MTGO since 2006, like any other MtG experience if you have a decent group of folks it can be a great experience. If you only play pick-up games; well, then it's a toss o' the dice. Keep in mind WotC nerfed multiplayer a few years ago. Now games are limited to 4 players (used to be 6). Also, the devise screen size can be a factor for large board states, though there is a hotkey to "zoom" and give card you are hovering over, as well as a floating window to always show the card your cursor is on (hand or board).

I also like that in MTGO you can "brew" decks with cards you don't own (though you can't playtest them until you have the cards). So you can "build" all of your paper decks in the client, and even export them as CSV or text.

Mostly, MTG online is plug and play easy. There's a couple of choices, and opportunity cost is rife with those choices.

MTGO - costs you money to play with cards you probably already have IRL. This is why I won't, as a matter of principle.

Personally I just resent paying more money for cards I literally already own, so I just won't go down the MTGO route. I don't have a ton of money and Wizards gets plenty of it as is.

As far as the online experience goes, it can be great. It can be terrible too, or anything in between. You do still have the Rule 0 issues of people bringing guns to knife fights, and because it's the internet people can still say whatever they like from behind a keyboard, so there are jerks aplenty. But otherwise gameplay is fine, if a little less nuanced on account of the politics being a little harder to do online than in an LGS with pals.

MTGO does cost. But there are two+ additional factors to consider:
1) It's far cheaper than paper. Not only because you can own a single copy of a card and use it in any number of EDH decks but because the cards themselves are just cheaper digitally (not packs though). E.g. Underground Sea is < $10. (see PM)
2) if you enjoy drafting, and are good at it, you can "go infinite" (after an initial amount of investment, you can draft and sell off (or trade) you prizes and draft cards you don't want to "earn" enough to play more drafts without additional money invested. You can build a collection with this method.
+: some old players like me will give away a few hundred cards (not all chaff/commons) to cool forumites that are interested in trying MTGO so they can test it out with minimal outlay (I think it's still just $10 to start the account) to decide for themselves.

Thanks for the insight, I'll look into xmage and untap. It's definitely a bit feelsbad to buy digital copies of cards I already own. I can handle a little toxicity, if anything it amuses me sometimes. I was raised to be thick skinned. All the same, part of the joy of edh is enjoying your company so I wouldn't want to deal with it too much.

And that's where Clans come in for MTGO. If you can build up a decent clan, you usually have a solid group of people with whom to chat and play, without resorting to random pick-up games in the room.

What is the community like?
Is it difficult to keep track of board states/triggers and the like?
How would you describe the gameplay experience?
Is it costly to build a reasonable collection?
Is there any sort of resale value?
Do people play on the more casual or the more cutthroat end?
How long do you spend on an average game?

- Like any other community, depends on if you have a solid clan or pick-up games. Pick-up games will have pub-stompers fairly frequently, as well as the people that drop (often rage quit) early or whenever things don't "go their way."
- Good gameplay experience. Easy to manage turns, though there is a learning curve for managing triggers.
- Depends on what you call a reasonable collection, and how much you participate in other events and trade/sell cards (See PM)
- Yes(~ish). If you collect "standard" you can "trade" a complete set from MTGO for the physical cards (time limit for each set is on the mothership site). Also, there are store owners that will buy collections for real cash (ymmv - see PM).
- See first question in this list. I am very casual, so most players are more spikey than me and my perception is likely skewed. Probably not considered cutthroat by a true competitive commander adherent.
- Games have time-limits on MTGO. The person creating the table will decide if each player has 30, 45 or 60 minutes for their timer. Ostensibly a 4 player 60-min timer game could go for 4 hours. Realistically, I would say the average game of friends/clanmates is 1-2 hours for a game that goes ~ 10-12 turns (depending on how fast people respond to triggers and such). Also, there is a 10-minute time-out period. If a player has not responded to an event in 10 minutes, the system assumes you lost connection and you "concede," so the game can continue even if one player is AFK too long or legitimately loses connection.

[WolfWhoWanders]

Those are some pretty solid discussion points, much appreciated.

[pokken]

My ephara deck cost me like 140 bucks on mtgo

[3drinks]

I'm on modo and I don't use any other online play services. I've sold the content of my account twice now, and have since only bought back in with an Experiment Kraj deck for 15tix. (See, 3drinks DOES play U...and this is where you learn that no one wins when I do it ). I'll probably buy back in with something more substantial/in my wheelhouse when I've finished paying off this car note completely next year.

On there I'm 3drinks, as I am here, though most my other socials are THEmtg3drinks. You can catch my Twitter where I talk incessantly about iMPACT Wrestling's fantabulous TV product and sometimes share pics of my sweet mono-R deck's professional alters.

[lvg]

For those playing on MTGO. Do you make any card or deck decision because you are playing on MTGO? Even though I so far only play with friends while on a discord channel, I still mostly play sorcery speed decks (maelstrom wanderer for example). Just because keeping mana up and responding is such a pain. I just want to F6 really. Not my preferred playstyle normally.

[pokken]

I'm pokken on mtgo btw if anyone wants to add me.

I play Ephara online because I'm a damn masochist, but it's not really that bad once you get used to it.

[3drinks]

For those playing on MTGO. Do you make any card or deck decision because you are playing on MTGO? Even though I so far only play with friends while on a discord channel, I still mostly play sorcery speed decks (maelstrom wanderer for example). Just because keeping mana up and responding is such a pain. I just want to F6 really. Not my preferred playstyle normally.

Nope. If I need card X, then I'll play card X. I might not buy digital fetchlands again due to price, but I'll never compromise on deck ability for client functionality.

[onering]

I play mtgo, and i rarely run into bad play experiences. Every once in awhile some douche brings a glass cannon to take advantage of not being able to meta in random matches and cries when it doesn't go off, but typically the decks are 50-75 percent. cEDH players label their games because they want to play against cEDH, not %$#% up someone's random Gallia deck. It's really cheap compared to paper, the newer cards are closer in price to paper while the older staples are not anywhere close because theres no reserved list and plenty of supply. You'll spend less than $100 getting 1 of each dual and shock, and can round out a playset of all the duals for less than $200. The only changes I make to my decks based on the client, and I've only recently started doing this, is that I limit the interactions I run that require an absurd amount of clicks and triggers unless they win the game. I just don't want to spend 10 minutes clicking through triggers for a small advantage. It's worth it for a game ending combo, or even for a large amount of value though, but there's a few cute interactions that grind value which require too many clicks to be worth it. And I don't run things like Turntimber Ranger combo that actually go infinite and create triggers that respond it's on triggers. The recursive %$#% can crash the game, and even if you have an easy outlet it takes too long to get where you need it. Something like Worldgorger otoh gets its job done in fewer cycles and doesn't loop automatically (you have to choose targets) so you can set yields to speed it up and have a chance to remove the yields when you want to, whereas Turntimber combo will run forever once you yield automatically to it.

[3drinks]

Man. This thread is making me wanna bring back that old 3tix Alesha Spectres list back just so I can catch some @mtgnexus folk in my natural, Mardu-oriented habitat.

Even if the majority of modo commander players are nubs that cry "spirit of the format" garbage with what I imagine are beached whale noises when you blow up a nonbasic land on t4, or "afk" when you clone a hypnotic specter. At least in the time of day I was typically playing in.

But, alas, it's still the best way to play digital magic when you work nonstandard hours and differing days off to the LGS...........

[raddleman]

How easy is it to buy singles on MTGO now? I remember back in the day you had to use third party sites and go through a longer process to get individual cards. Has this changed? I love arena but crave more Commander and it's the easiest way for me to play.

[pokken]

How easy is it to buy singles on MTGO now? I remember back in the day you had to use third party sites and go through a longer process to get individual cards. Has this changed? I love arena but crave more Commander and it's the easiest way for me to play.

I bought sushi hulk today to play while all the corona virus bullcrap is closing everything down and it was 200 bucks for the stuff I was missing, and it took me 15 minutes start to finish on cardhoarder.

edit: i did make a strategic decision not to buy a 70 dollar force of negation or a 14 dollar lotus petal. Maybe later MTGO:P

[3drinks]

How easy is it to buy singles on MTGO now? I remember back in the day you had to use third party sites and go through a longer process to get individual cards. Has this changed? I love arena but crave more Commander and it's the easiest way for me to play.

I always use mtgotraders, but you can shop the bots in-app classifieds too. Mtgotraders just always worked out most efficiently for me.

[WolfWhoWanders]

What kind of cards cause lots of clicking/trigger management? I feel like I should be able to guess at this but want to ask anyways

[pokken]

Nadir kraken and ephara is hilariously tedious.

[toctheyounger]

What kind of cards cause lots of clicking/trigger management? I feel like I should be able to guess at this but want to ask anyways

It's more the sort of decks you're playing. Permission/control based stuff where you need to wait for responses or hold others up to respond get a little more laborious due to the medium.

[Toshi]

What kind of cards cause lots of clicking/trigger management? I feel like I should be able to guess at this but want to ask anyways

I can only speak for Xmage, but cards that are nerve-wracking IRL are usually just as nerve-wracking online.
Rhystic Study, Smothering Tithe, Consecrated Sphinx, Mystic Remora, ... virtually anything with a may trigger that triggers a lot.