Arena is newer and looks prettier. Vault system blows so I don't really wanna spend $ on it lol

MTGO looks like something worth investing money into.

I'm pretty new to magic and am playing arena right now to learn the game.

Your opinions?

This post was edited by Lray on Oct 15 2018 06:48pm

arena.

What format do you want to play?
If newest sets, Standard, Arena is probably the choice. (Will cost more in the long run)
If Modern, Legacy, or other formats... MtGO is great.
You can buy a modern deck from one of the many vendors and play it for a long time at a set cost. Modern has a lot of great decks to choose from that are competitive, Standard is constantly changing on the other hand

If you know exactly which deck you want to play and only want to play standard ignore MTGO and play Arena for free, the wildcard system will allow you to make a decent deck for free as long as you have an idea of what is good in the meta and choose the cheapest build.

If you want to play with many strong decks Arena is not a good choice as there is no trading, MTGO you can acquire very strong decks for much less and any money spent can be somewhat redeemed later if necessary and theres more gaming modes and all the older cards are going to give you basically unlimited hours of deckbuilding etc so much youll get lost which is fun.

Drafting as a free player on Arena is a nice reward you cant get on MTGO and Arena is WAY better if you have dodgy internet when drafting as it is not time dependant to make your deck and you can choose when to play matches, no waiting for others to finish.

I played Arena for about a week, its pretty good , meta is cheap creature heavy, plenty of non casual decks in the casual games but from what I remember playing MTGO about 8 years ago it is same problem.

Arena is pretty safe from toxic behaviour if you turn the emoticons off, so that is a good thing.

I like playing standard so far. The idea of rotating sets is not new to me (coming from hearthstone). But I like the fact you can trade cards when rotations happen in MTGO or play a different format

If you are only after standard and sealed/drafts like me. Then defo MTGA

I haven't tried the other modes like legacy or modern because i'm new

Arena is great for noobs, but if you want to emulate the actual card game go with mtgo.

Maybe you could do arena to learn the basics and play for free, but it doesn't hold a candle to the actual card game or mtgo.

MTG is normally 3 rounds with a 15 card sideboard, so you can bring in cards to deal with your opponents deck, on mtga you just play one game.

There is no chatting on mtga, there is no trading on mtga, and any money you spend on mtga is gone for good.

MTGO you can trade, chat, have a friends list, buy specific cards etc . . but it costs a lot more, but you can actually sell your tickets to a card site and get some money back if you ever wanted to. So mtgo is also an investment as well as a game.

MTGO has a market where prices of cards go up and down, like crypto's or the stock market, so that is another element to mtgo.

TLDR; for casual / budget players and noobs probably go mtga. If you want to play the more competitive scene go with mtgo.

You can play competitive bo3 with sideboard on mtga btw

what if i want to casually play mtgo?