Arena App In 2026, Ranked Worst To Best

Over the past few weeks I’ve been playing Magic: The Gathering: Arena (AKA MTG: Arena) on my Android phone and my laptop (with a touchscreen.) I want to sum up my background here quickly so you know where I’m coming from: the last time I played Magic was probably two decades ago, and I played a lot starting when I was a teenager. Now I’m married and have some kids and I don’t have a whole lot of free time — but I wanted to see if I could still play the game.

So I started playing just before The Hobbit set was being released, and I learned a few valuable lessons. The following is a brief guide for those of you who’ve played Magic — probably in your distant past — and you’re considering playing Magic again here in the present.

The following “reasons to play MTG: Arena” are ordered, to the best of my ability based on my experience with MTG: Arena so far, according to the experience you’ll probably have if you’re looking to have a good time jumping in on your phone, tablet, laptop, desktop, or otherwise.

There are certain parts of the Magic experience today that I cannot imagine the eldest of the elder players reconciling with. This game still has all the basics — you draw seven cards, you take turns trying to knock out your opponent’s life total, you buy packs of cards and hope you get the cards you want for the deck you’re building — but it’s all become a significant amount more complicated.

If you’re hoping to make a green stompy deck with a bunch of trample minions, you can still do that, but you’ll probably face decks with multiple colors and card combinations that depend largely on tokens and +1/+1 counters. Its not out of the ordinary to face someone who’s created a double-digits-large hydra minion or several stacks of cat tokens by their 5th turn — the potential for madness is high. 

Chris Burns/SlashGear

If you’re looking for that most basic version of the game from the 1990s, it is not present in MTG: Arena. To be fair, it hasn’t existed for a long time before Arena existed, but still: Magic: The Gathering: Arena only includes Magic cards in sets from around 2017 on forward (except in special limited games and circumstances — but you can’t have a Cursed Scroll in your collection.)

You may be an elder player of Magic — you were probably buying booster packs for $2.50 at your local Sports Cards store. Times were great! You miss the fun parts of the game, collecting cards, making decks, seeing how well your deck does against your peers.

But you’re not in a place where you’re going to bike downtown, buy a few tacos, and join a tournament this Saturday afternoon. That’s not everyone’s situation — Magic is for everyone, of course — but maybe MTG: Arena will offer you another way back in?

Chris Burns/SlashGear

It could. I played the game after being away from the game for an extended period of time and I was able to pick up the cards and have an OK time learning the latest set of rules. And yet — no matter how much I enjoy my time playing on this little screen, it’s still a screen.

There are some events in MTG: Arena in which you can win actual physical cards — whole boxes — but the road to winning is extremely steep. But once you’re that good at the game, maybe it’ll be the perfect time to bust out your new skills on your local tournament scene anyway? They’ll never see you coming!

If you’ve played Magic in the real world and you’ve played games like Hearthstone on your phone in an effort to rekindle the magic, you’ll probably enjoy MTG: Arena’s approach. I played Hearthstone and thought it was the ideal system for this Collectable Card Game system for tiny touchscreens. Now that I’ve played MTG: Arena for a few weeks, I’m having trouble playing Hearthstone because the game feels …too simple?

While I still think the physical cards are the best way to appreciate the game, I do enjoy how MTG: Arena adds some effects and decorations to certain cards and card types without going overboard. If I cast a Smaug, (or was it “Desolation Of Smaug?”), the game shows fire and a shadow of the dragon cast across the battlefield as he flies overhead. That’s pretty fun.

If you can’t (or do not want to) get out and play the physical game, MTG: Arena is a decent alternative.

If you play the physical game, with real cards, packs, and so forth, playing MTG: Arena can potentially be a great way to playtest cards before you bring them to a real life tournament. I played every single different type of Hobbit-themed event tournament (most of which was draft-based) in the app, and I got a good sense of what cards I wanted to actually own in the real world before I went out and bought a bunch of packs (or, for the discerning player, individual singles.)

There is, of course, a bunch of ways to spend real money in the MTG: Arena app, but you can participate by racking up in-game coins with in-game achievements (which are largely simple “cast this many blue spells” sorts of things).

If you’re the sort of person that wants the thrill of opening real packs more than anything, by all means, go for it. But the MTG: Arena app has been so effective at giving me a sense of the game before I bought more cards in real life, I really wish I had access to it back in 1998. Lucky you, you’ve got it right now.