digitec plays "Magic: The Gathering Arena"

Raphael Knecht

21.8.2019

Translation: machine translated

"Magic: The Gathering Arena is the mother of all trading card games. For over 25 years, players have been slipping into the role of a wizard who casts spells and summons creatures. With the game "MTG: Arena", a PC client suitable for the masses has been in the beta phase for almost a year. Simon and I are going to beat the cards in the livestream.

The principle of "Magic: The Gathering Arena" is simple: two players compete against each other and start with 20 life points. Whoever is at 0 loses. Each player puts together a deck of cards. Each card (with the exception of standard lands) can be in the deck a maximum of four times. At the start of the game, each player draws a starting hand of seven cards. On your turn, you may first play one (and only one) land card. Without these, nothing works, they are your resources, called mana. There are five possible colours: red, blue, green, white and black. There are also colourless land cards.

Once you have played a land card, you can conjure up a resource of that colour and use it to cast a spell. The spells cost different amounts. The more expensive the cards, the better the spells. If you can cast a spell, your mana is used up for this turn. Don't worry: you can use the mana again on your next turn. Ideally, you will have one more mana to use each turn.

Slaughter on the battlefield

Basically, you attack your opponent primarily with creatures that have an attack and a defence value. Your opponent can block these creatures with their own creatures. If they fail to do so, they lose as many life points as the creature has attack power.

These are the very basic rules of "Magic". In addition to creatures, there are various other spells that you can use to try to flatten your opponent, defend yourself, generate more mana, discard cards and so on and so forth.

The fact that "Magic" has had fans around the world for over 25 years shows that the game works brilliantly. Sure, the cards feature fantasy creatures such as dragons, hydras and zombies. But there is a lot of tactics and logic behind the beautiful cards. "Magic" players make dozens of decisions every turn, which have a significant influence on the further course of the game.

Badder than drugs

In addition to playing, collecting cards is a big part of the game. The most expensive card recently went for over 160,000 US dollars. The more money you invest, the better your cards and the more likely you are to win in certain formats. However, there are also versions of the game where you only receive your cards before the game. There are a certain number of card packs from which you build your deck.

The packs (or boosters) always contain new cards in different rarities. Each booster contains one very rare or rare card, three "uncommon" cards (which are not so common) and 10 "common" cards (which are a dime a dozen). A map completes the booster.

So that you don't get bored with "Magic", the makers publish various new editions with new cards every year. So there is new card fodder in a quarterly cycle, which is quite expensive.

Nothing is set in stone

So that the passionate "Magic" players don't cover me with smart-ass comments here: I have tried to explain the game very simply and there are exceptions to almost every rule, which would go beyond the scope of this article. It's about the latest digital version of "Magic". "MTG: Arena" is a fairly user-friendly and "Hearthstone"-like way to play "Magic" digitally.

It features cards from the last two years. You can buy packs with two different currencies, gold and gems. Gems can be bought with real money, gold can be won in the game. You can't swap cards with other players, which is paradoxical given that "Magic" is a "trading card game".

Once you have built your deck, you compete against the computer or real players online in "MTG: Arena", win new packs, new cards and more gold, build better decks and start this addictive loop all over again.

We'll show you exactly how Arena works in our livestream from 1 pm - including freak-outs because the opponent was of course "really lucky when drawing cards".

Raphael Knecht

Senior Editor

raphael.knecht@digitecgalaxus.ch

When I'm not stuffing my face with sweets, you'll catch me running around in the gym hall. I’m a passionate floorball player and coach. On rainy days, I tinker with my homebuilt PCs, robots or other gadgets. Music is always my trusted companion. I also enjoy tackling hilly terrain on my road bike and criss-crossing the country on my cross-country skis. more

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