Y'all better keep your eyes peeled, there's time thieves cavorting hereabouts. Sons of bitches made off with the last week or so of my time and I didn't even notice until it was already too late. Magic is to blame for this!
Magic: The Gathering that is, or more specifically, MTG Arena, the online version of the card game. Magic came out in the early 90s and I started playing it a few years later but until last Monday had stayed away from the online versions for various reasons.
Magic has got to be the most complicated game I've ever played and since they're always adding or tweaking game mechanics it only gets more so as time goes by. Rather than doing a bad job of explaining what it is/how it works I'll just drop the link to the wikipedia article on it and try to stay on topic. The complexity is part of what makes it so addictive, you can easily spend more time than you have to spare experimenting with techniques and styles and deck builds. Last Monday I finally gave in and installed MTG Arena and it has stolen every bit of my time ever since.
I was initially quite skeptical of Arena for much the same reasons that many people are skeptical of crypto. Why spend money on digital cards when I could spend the same and get physical ones to keep? Much like with crypto, with a little familiarity I was won over.
I have enough experience with freemium games to have a general distaste for them, usually they're a ton of grinding only to get your ass smoked by someone who had more disposable income than you. Arena is pretty mild in this regard and in some ways even improves on the physical version. I was rather pleasantly surprised, between the various challenges you can amass enough cards and one of the in-game currencies (there's two, one you pay cash for and the other you grind for) to be able to buy packs or play in ranked booster drafts and be competitive without spending a dime.
One of the reasons for this is the wildcard system, which is where Arena really improves on the physical version. Wildcards come in the same varieties of rarities as the rest of the Magic cards and get them occasionally in packs or as rewards for completing some challenge or opening a certain number of packs. When you come across a card you need that's not in your collection you can use up a wildcard and craft a copy for your collection. One of my biggest frustrations playing Magic growing up was that I didn't have the money to drop on the rare, powerful, expensive cards and usually when I played against someone who did I didn't fare so well. Wildcards alleviate that considerably and make Arena play a lot more equitable than the physical version. It's really nice for the game to come down to what and how you play and not how much money you've spent on your deck.
One other area where Arena is really nice is the collection/deck building setup. I've yet to devise a system for organizing my physical cards that's both workable and not time consuming but here digital is definitely better. You can sort by color, casting cost, format, set, rarity, or spell type and now you don't have to tear apart one deck to use the same cards in another. It all works to make building and playtesting a new deck much easier, I'm going to be using it to test and tune decks before I do all the rummaging around to assemble a new paper deck.
I'd love to play some Magic with fellow hivers, anybody else play on Arena? As you can see from the screenshots, my handle on there is hellbilly666, give me a holler!
If you're interested in playing but haven't before, Arena can be found here (It's a little more than 2GBs). The program does a better job of teaching you how to play than I ever could, if my brothers and I had had this when we were growing up we might have fought a little less...
Arena's a lot more fun when you're working with more than just the basic starter cards, below are some (case sensitive) promo codes to get a bunch of free packs to liven things up a bit.
PlayRavnica
PLAYWARSPARK
PlayM20
PlayEldraine
PlayTheros
PlayIkoria
PLAYM21
PlayZendikar
TryKaladesh
PlayKaldheim
PlayStrixhaven
PlayDND
(source -- also contains a nice guide on how to input said codes as well as others for more cosmetic stuff)
The last screenshot is of my Goblins deck for the standard format (I'd never played the format before, another perk of Arena) that's been doing pretty well, feel free to give it a try or suggest improvements! I'll save my airing of the grievances until I've played it a bit longer, if y'all don't see me around these parts for a bit it means I'm probably playing on Arena.
P.S. 
