MyMMO editor Karsten Scholz spent his school breaks many, many years ago with Magic: The Gathering. Now, despite all the criticism, he has started with MTGArena on Steam and is back in the trading card game fever.
Hearthstone, Gwent, The Elder Scrolls: Legends, Legends of Runeterra, Scrolls … over the years I have tried many digital trading card games and had a lot of fun with some of them. However, none of them compare to my first great TCG love – Magic: The Gathering (TCG stands for Trading Card Game, of course).
This is certainly due to many nostalgic memories from my school days, as we played Magic during breaks and after school. I also enjoy the complex rules behind the game, the characteristics of the 5 colors, as well as the incredibly wide range of deck strategies that have existed over the past 32 years and still exist today.
The Long Wait
The fact that I still played the aforementioned games quite extensively is simply because there were no digital variants of Magic for a long time that could engage me long-term. Attempts like Magic: The Gathering – Duels of the Planeswalkers (the ones from 2011 to 2015 are resting in my Steam library) or Magic Duels were okay for a few hours, but nothing more than that.
I kept my distance from Magic: The Gathering Arena from 2019 for a long time. The ratings on Steam reach only “Mixed” – in the end, only 62 percent of the over 21,000 ratings are positive. The criticism almost always revolves around one point: monetization:
- The business model is at least as greedy and predatory in the digital version as it is in paper form – but enriched by microtransactions, cosmetics, loot boxes, battle passes, time-limited offers, and so on…
- If you don’t invest money, you can’t keep up and are constantly losing → Pay2Win
- Some people even believe that a player’s investments affect their draw luck and starting hand.
Why did you start now? A good buddy of mine, with whom I played a lot of Magic back in the day, asked me to download the game on Steam as well as on the tablet. He had started a few weeks earlier and suggested that we could duel with the easily earned starter decks and chat about everything under the sun. Good idea, count me in!
But it didn’t stop there. I quickly got caught up in the trading card game fever again. Through beginner challenges, events, quests, and the free battle pass path, I quickly earned cards with which I could build my first own decks. With those, I tried my hand at one of the ranked modes, lost, won, climbed up, and learned about other builds of the current meta.
How has it been so far? On Thursday (July 31, 2025), the ranked season ended, and I was able to play my way up to Platinum rank quite easily – that’s not quite Diamond yet, but at least the fourth progression level. I haven’t paid a cent for Arena so far.
Maybe I was just lucky because there are one or two deck strategies in the current meta that can be implemented with relatively inexpensive cards – I was able to achieve most of my victories with a green Chocobo/bird deck and 2 white minion decks.
One of the minion decks relies on units that grant life points or benefit from healing. The other is a modified version of the cat starter deck, which exploits the synergies of the feline critters to overwhelm the opponent.
Currently, I have a total of 31 different decks in my collection, plus another 5 incomplete ones for which I still lack some key cards.
The criticism that you can only win in Magic: The Gathering Arena with a lot of money and climb the leaderboard is something I cannot confirm at this point. Also, I haven’t noticed constant punishment through bad starting cards or bad luck draws as a non-payer. Sometimes draws can be frustratingly bad, but it was like that even back then, with the real cards.
Let’s ask the internet: “Git gud” is a colloquial expression that is a deliberate misspelling of “get good” and is used in gaming contexts to urge someone to improve their skills. It means something like “Get better” or “Become good”.
Magic is simply a complex game where the effect descriptions of the cards are getting longer and longer, and one really has to pay attention not to miss anything on the game board that could decide the outcome of a match. Anyone trying it for the first time or after a long break will likely be overwhelmed by the current editions and game modes.
Here, the only solution is: Play, play, play. Get to know as many cards, effects, and current deck strategies as possible. And continuously refine one’s own decks.
Not a game for you if you are susceptible to gambling mechanisms
So there’s nothing to the criticism? Let’s not kid ourselves: The whole system with the paid boosters that contain random cards has been questionable for over 30 years. We are talking about the ancestors of loot boxes, which some organizations in the EU classify as dangerous.
In Arena, we now find not only these loot boxes back in booster form but also all the other monetization nonsense that service games have brought us in recent years. In this regard, I believe the criticism on Steam is absolutely justified. If you don’t have self-control, you can quickly spend a fortune on the game, and that is a problem.
The truth, however, also includes: Those who spend little or no money can still have fun with Arena, regularly win, and even climb the leaderboard – at least that’s my experience from the past weeks.
What I would wish for is a few cooperative modes, as there were in other Magic games, where you have to tackle certain deck strategies or challenges together. If you like PvE content in TCGs, you won’t find it in Arena. Have you tried the game yet? How is it for you?
By the way: The officials from Hasbro recently revealed details about the revenues from Q2 2025 during the latest earnings call. In particular, 2 brands from Wizards of the Coast performed well: Monopoly Go and Magic: The Gathering. There were even record revenues: Magic: The Gathering is made to empty fans’ wallets – in combination with Final Fantasy, it worked better than ever before
