Magic the Gathering Online: Please no v4

I love Magic. It is one of my longest lasting hobbies. Now, sure, right now I'm not playing in real life. I take breaks here and there, sometimes card games feel great. Other times card games don't feel so great, some years I don't play it at all and instead write 300k words or whatever. Other times the draft set is core set, which I would rather gargle than play, especially when it is as actively worthless as m15 looks to be.

I think the things that make Magic itself so endearing lies in the various oddities, silliness and so forth. The game is essentially an abstraction as all RPGs are of wizard hat battles, and therein lies the rub - The abstractions themselves make for a really neat game, one built on math and theories. Magic gets pretty stupid sometimes, of course, R&D is perpetually stuck between doing a terrible job and an good job due to the fact they need to codify their theories and stick to them or instead get weird thoughts like 'X isn't very intuitive!! We should change it' or 'this doesn't feel very green'. It's an abstraction, guys, it doesn't matter.

here we have os/2

But still for all the shit talk I've ever mustered up, Magic has gotten a ton better and is a really interesting and deep game. I don't know if it is for everyone, I feel like not, but it definitely is a game that supports all its game modes and allows for a huge amount of players.

Magic Online, on the other hand, is a blight. And thanks to Wizards letting everyone do some prereleases for free, we can talk about an authentic v4 experience.


This isn't going to be a long review since there's two basic problems before we get into really talking about the new client. These are systemic, traditional issues that will simply come up.

The first one is, almost innately, I largely don't see the point of a paid online card game in this day and age. Whereas Hearthstone and MMDOC, and maybe Solforge and the other crew are all different strokes of f2p, MTGO has basically drowned the cat on that. Although an account pays you back on spending $10, that's just a joke in the modern age. Why would you play the game that straight up costs the most before you even play your first game? How absurd.

So unless you really, really like Magic there is basically no reason to choose it, and only if you can't play it in real life - which is much less difficult than it was years ago. In terms of cost Magic Online sails over the others, it is costly to get into, costly to maintain and costly to get out of. Yes, the top 10-25% of players can reliably grind to play for free, but then you're grinding the same deck day after day. The prices on redemption have increased and the prices on the side products is up too. Magic in real life is really delightful, you can recoup a lot of your costs and play a wealth of formats, ranging from the most casual to the most hardcore. Here? Not so much.

The second one is, to be really frank, for whatever reason they selected Core Set prerelease sealed as their "attempt to get people to play". It is actually hard to be level, because core set prereleases are essentially the fundamental low bar for magic events and this core set is really not fun for me. So I'm trying to line up my complaints with the user experience, not the play experience, because while this set might be ok for drafting doing three PR sealed in a row is a nightmarish bit of gameplay.

PR sealed is basically 'whoever curves out without flooding wins' and that is my exact experience in every single game. I played very little real magic, basically just mulliganing into dead hands and losing to flood/screw, or my opponents mulliganed into dead hands and they lost to flood/screw. Ok, I had one good game, maybe, but I drew a bunch of bombs and just flattened my opponent. Hurray.

Magic Online has been around for over ten years now; as online games go, there are few that have been around as long or have made quite so much money. You would think from that sentence that after a decade of existence MTGO would be a shining, polished, beautiful program. You'd think...

Poke: it's seriously like they transported the developers from 1997
Poke: everything about it
Poke: excellent period application
Poke: the devs are the madame tussaud of programmers

But you'd be wrong. Now into its fourth version, MTGO is confusing, strangely set up and tirelessly fond of blank space. Ergonomics and aesthetics are complicated things, difficult to discern, but MTGO just doesn't have it. And unlike programs like Hearthstone or MMDOC, MTGO has no bones about looking like a program you do taxes on. Originally, the game has had 3d avatars that clapped and cheered, but those days have passed, and now it is a bare bones spreadsheet.

On the other hand, let's talk improvements. For one thing, the audio work is immensely improved. We're not quite to the excellent soundtrack of DOTP2014 (I only buy DOTP when the promo is worth it, so I don't know how 2015 is yet) but it turned the audio back on and you know what? I left it on! v3 had audio so bad I would scream at my friend for leaving it on, but this is quite suitable.

I also find loading times are generally better. Trade, for example, was extremely stuttery in v3 and here I find it seems to be loading pretty smooth. I tried using the store and it loads up quite quickly, as opposed to its v3 incarnation, which lagged out and sort of had a panic attack on a computer/connection combo that is clearly holding up its end of the bargain.

As well the basic UI is a bit smoother and not nearly as dated as the older UI. Yeah, it is still pretty not terrific, but it looks like it was made in 2007 instead of 1995. There are still some odd bugs - for example, an effect (from a creature) will go on the stack and require a target. The window informing you of this will cover up your targets and leave you scratching your head til you move the window out of the way. The window is gigantic. I have no idea why.

Beyond that, while MTGO v4 is just very boilerplate. It really does remind me of a very low budget production, which is strange, because once people get hooked on MTG and drafting they tend to throw gobs of money at the problem. The problem is they're bad, and money doesn't actually fix it, apparently on either end of the equation.

So do I recommend MTGO?

No, I really don't. There are better card games to play online, at least until MTGO evolves into a version that doesn't look like a freaky spreadsheet. I haven't put money into it since 2005, and while I'm sure there are people who have fun with it, I think on average you will not.

The other tremendous issue with MTGO is it is not, on any level, fundamentally streamlined around delivering an effective online gaming experience. It is an attempt to replicate the feeling of real life Magic, except through the filter of your soulless machine and people who only chat to brag or shit talk as opposed to converse. Those are not great situations to begin and the end with, ultimately leading to a play experience which effectively replicates all of real life magic's problems while skidding away from the benefits. Games like Hex and MMDOC do their earnest to deliver you constant, consistent gameplay. MTGO's solution is to pay for playing in multiple events at a time, or just sitting on your hands waiting all day. I was playing MMDOC while I was playing MTGO, for lack of anything to do, which was pretty surreal.

As for v4, it did eventually feel like something of an improvement, although it could use some resizing and sorting to better manage progression through the menus. Clickthrough and flow are confusing, and space is used in an odd, odd manner. But that stuff is minor, and I don't know how much demand changes to the back end put on the process. It wasn't the horrible experience I was quite expecting, but for a ten year old platform that has grossed at least tens of millions of dollars you just expect a great deal more.

I really think they need to accept that MTGO should be leveraged toward a different market, but they're never going to, as they cling to the idea it offers a "not for babbies" quality of play above other DCGs. So again, Great game, terrible digital platform, why would you decide to play this?