Magic: the Gathering Arena

I've been playing a lot of Magic:the Gathering Arena over the past year. I'd gotten briefly into Magic during the '90s (still own a shoebox full of old cards) but was terrible at finding other players and my interest petered off as I got more into computer games. Revisiting it now feels odd, as MtG (and in general, the collectible card games it popularized) is the filthy rot at the root of so many despicable game industry practices. Deliberate imbalance in a pay-to-win scheme, cookie-cutter builds (oh look, it's yet another Ajani's Pridemate deck) luck-based success and gambling addiction, "specialness" inflation, chasing status symbols, loophole abuse, MtG has long served as test lab for most of the nauseating perversions of multiplayer gaming. So why, after decades of denouncing other games for copying its worst points, have I come full circle to the original perpetrator?

It's rare to get a match this enjoyable. Most kiddies chase their nominal wins via simplistic rush decks and few try to build up any real complexity. (In all fairness this guy did, but it was still satifying to beat him while he abused one of the most broken cards in the game, Thassa.) Yet, though it unfairly punishes complexity addiction, MtGA does not outlaw it altogether... which is more than can be said for most online games these days with their Diablo-style fighter/mage/thief loot grinding or deathmatch mode pistoleering.

For all its faults, MtG still allows you to struggle to make interesting things happen, to mess around with unpopular options. It still allows you to sacrifice nominal success to strive for a greater theme or chain of causality even in the context of pettiness, instead of hard-coding pettiness.

No, we really should not be bringing back the '90s, but our standards have backslid that far.