Magic: The Gathering Arena has fully launched on smartphones after a short beta period, bringing the free-to-play digital version of the collectible card game to mobile devices on iOS and Android. The good news: this is the exact same game as the PC version of MTG: Arena, just adapted for much smaller phone screens. Your collection comes and goes, which means you can grab it on your phone and play with the same cards on the desktop version, just like with other digital card games like Hearthstone. Blizzard's Warcraft-themed game may have beaten MTG in the mobile space years ago, but it's also digital-only and has much simpler rules. Magic: The Gathering debuted as physical card games in 1993 with dozens of new games since then, and while it's seen several digital adaptations (including the very old but very loyal Magic: The Gathering Online), MTG Arena has managed to simplify the game of origin. in a popular digital format designed for modern gamers. MTG Arena vs MTG Online MTG Arena features modern graphics and animations and gets expansions as they are released in the form of a paper map. It has some modes (Standard, Brawl, Historic, and Limited), but not some of the more popular ones like Commander, and you can't buy, sell, trade, or down cards. MTG Online has all the fashions and an online marketplace, but your fighting has no animation and the interface looks like something out of the early 2000s. Check out this video from the Mountain Man Magic YouTube account for a humorous look at the differences. of the games. Fortunately, MTG Arena's streamlined gameplay translates well to a smartphone. While there are settings for playing on a much smaller screen with touch controls instead of a mouse, it's all pretty intuitive and well implemented: in our hands-on time with the Android and iOS versions, we just typed on the card or target wrong once or twice. Frankly, we were surprised and thrilled that the transition from core gameplay to mobile was so smooth. Let's dive into the big interface tweaks and silent changes that make this complex game run on smartphones.
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MTG on 6-inch OLED
It is impossible to do without the feeling of using a mouse to control games that require high precision, such as real-time strategy, board games or card games, and see everything that happens on a large-scale screen. Reducing that to a phone screen takes a bit of compromise, but it's doable, and the core of games like MTG can be preserved. MTG Arena already does a lot of work to get closer to a card fighting game: During a match, your cards in hand are displayed at the bottom and a life marker at the top, with your deck and discard pile. On the left and the phase indicator, where you are on the current turn, on the right. At the top is a mirrored setting for your opponent's hand, life, deck, and discard pile. The setup of the MTG Arena mobile app is identical, only more compact. Of course, the cards are so small that you might confuse similar cards, but you probably won't lose track of any creatures, enchantments, or other types of cards that linger on the battlefield. Your hand will be half hidden at the bottom of the screen and you will have to tap on it to spread them out on the screen (hiding most of the playing field) to choose.
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(Image credit: Future) The controls have been adapted to touch - you'll still have to tap and drag cards from your hand onto the battlefield to play them - but there are other tweaks that make it easier to keep track of everything. For example, you can long press on a map in play or on top of any of the graveyards to see it in detail (instead of hovering your mouse cursor over a map on desktop), and just tap the card which you assign to attack or block, or which creature(s) spells target. You'll still make mistakes here and there, but thanks to the undo button it doesn't mean a loss. In short, the right controls and the smallest scale won't stop you from winning, it all depends on your skills... and your cards.
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MTG Sand clear
That's not to say that all MTG Arena mobile experiences are created equal: it was a bit easier to handle what was happening while playing on the Asus ROG 6,8's nearly 5-inch screen compared to the Asus ROG's. 5. The iPhone 6,1 Pro's 12-inch display. And yes, the punch-hole on the former was much less obtrusive than the notch that still cuts through the main Apple phone screen, but the developers at MTG Arena have been far enough smart enough to keep the sides of the playing field clear. There are some trade-offs when playing on a small screen: as noted above, the art on each card can become very small after being played on the field, and while critical information like creature stats are thankfully very visible, you'll need to do it. Long tap on the minions to get a good overview of them and their abilities. Given the sheer number of creatures, artifacts, and enchantments with powerful text, you'll often be pressing your opponent's cards before making your moves, or checking their graveyard to figure out which spell messed up your side of the deck. Graphically, top-tier phones will render cards with similar fidelity to their PC versions... don't be surprised by the slightly jagged edges. We haven't had a chance to look at the low-end and older phones, but since MTG Arena is a turn-based game, the performance of the device will not affect the success of the game. But what about other phones? Would playing with something more precise and mouse-adjacent help... like a stylus?
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(Image credit: Future) Not really. The touch controls are pretty good, and the cards aren't so tightly packed that you'll need an accessory to separate them. The Moto G Stylus we used made more use of the big screen, the colossal 6.8-inch display than its stylus, though we did note that its mid-range Snapdragon 678 chipset and 4GB of RAM caused some frames to skip what seemed like it. a network slowdown. Ultimately, playing MTG Arena on phones is a good experience, though given the complexity of the game itself, regardless of platform, it's going to be harder to keep up with what's happening with the games. More complex card interactions than the simpler competitive cards. games like Hearthstone. . But if you can't wait to play the digital version of the card game that started it all, the MTG Arena mobile app is the way to go. The game is free, what are you waiting for?