Magic Goes Digital with Magic: The Gathering Arena

Magic: The Gathering Arena is Wizards of the Coast’s competitor to games like Hearthstone and Gwent. It is a digital card game experience that’s meant to capture all of the great parts of Magic, making them accessible without losing any of the complexity that makes Magic such a rewarding game to play. If you’ve ever played the game, you might imagine that this is a difficult balance to strike because Magic is complicated. To play the game at its highest levels, there are dozens of rules that you need to be familiar with, including things like the mysterious “layers” system. The question, then, is if Arena can do it. Does it work?

In short: yes. I’ve been playing Magic for about ten years now, and what you play in Arena is that very same game. Distinct from products like Magic Duels, a digital implementation of the game that was clunky and confusing to play, Arena puts the game in a very approachable framework that looks a lot like Hearthstone. You have a deck, a graveyard, a battlefield, and a hand, and the game moves through turn phases just like it does if you play it physically. If you’ve ever played a game of Magic and are looking for that in digital form, Arena is going to allow for that.

The most crucial aspect of the game is in how it manages “triggers.” Magic is turning 25 this year, and something central to its design is how to manage lots of things happening at once. Any card that has an “if” or a “when” in its rules text contains a triggered ability, and if you peruse through some cards you’ll see that lots and lots of cards in the game have this text. In the machinery of the game’s rules, this means that an ability goes on the “stack,” a way of managing the order of operations in the game. For example, if I cast a creature spell, and my opponent has a card that says “when an opponent casts a creature spell, draw a card” on it, then that ability triggers. My creature spell is in a kind of rules-lawyer waiting room, and the opponent’s “draw a card” trigger goes on top of it. If I had an instant or ability to do in response, I could then put those on the stack to respond to that card draw.