Richard Sejour

Arena is arguably one of the worst F2P digital card games to date. The game's economy promotes grinding in draft mode and/or spending money IRL to make any sort of progression. Also, there is an unhealthy emphasis on winning to progress with free rewards being nonexistent. With the amount of effort that you invest into Arena, you can invest a fraction of that and get more out of it in most other digital card games. The randomization components (shuffler, who goes first, etc.) have been proven to be nonrandom by several independent studies. It is well-known and accepted that the shuffler is broken/rigged so be aware that most matches have artificial outcomes. If regulations on lootboxes and gaming ever come to fruition I can guarantee that Arena will be hit with a penalties as the game has extreme predatory practices that involve tampering with the shuffler and matchmaking. Speaking of which, the matchmaking is rigged in ways that matches players based on the content on their decks over other traditional metrics such as MMR. This game is a paradise for whales and netdeckers which is in greater volume than in any other digital card game that I have come across, largely because the powerlevel of individual cards are far greater than in any other digital card game. As for strategy, I have been playing since the beta and none of the metas have as much interaction as what you experience in other card games; game-ending cards come out as early as turn 3 with little to no counterplay. The game in general is nothing more than a glorified solitaire experience where both player hope to luck out into drawing their game-ender that shuts the game down knowing full well that there are few cards in the game that can reasonably interact with them. I can't stress this enough: Arena has by far more degenerate, non-interactable, and tenable strategies that I have ever experienced in another card game, and thats usually because they are very few responses to the slew of overpowered and broken cards that plague the game. Hell, WOTC even admitted to releasing broken cards to make the game more appealing to older formats which are known to be degenerate, with no regards to the health of Standard. Nearly 2 years after the game's open beta and there are barely any modes; to add to this, nearly all of the formats are locked behind some sort of paywall or have absurd restrictions. If you are a newcomer or casual, your progression will be borderline nonexistent, because the economy and rigged matchmaking is designed in a manner to frustrate you into paying money IRL. I know because my decks with a bunch of mythics/rares frequently get matched against players with starter decks, yet my budget decks get matched against the most degenerate meta decks out there. There are far more issues with the game such as poor optimizations for computers (this game is VERRRYYY resource intensive) and bad servers, but that would take a full length article to discuss. I don't see this game appealing to anyone other than whales and mtg veterans who are both too complacent and addicted to mtg to stop supporting this garbage app. This game is absolute trash, but that doesn't come as a surprise given WOTC's continued mishandling of the mtg brand.