Magic: The Gathering Arena

Magic: The Gathering Arena or MTG Arena is a free-to-play digital collectible card game developed and published by Wizards of the Coast (WotC). The game is a digital adaption based on the Magic: The Gathering (MTG) card game, allowing players to gain cards through booster packs, in-game achievements or microtransaction purchases, and build their own decks to challenge other players. The game was released in a beta state in November 2017, and was fully released for Microsoft Windows users in September 2019, and a macOS version on June 25, 2020. Mobile device versions were released in March 2021.

MTG Arena follows the same rules as the physical card game, in which players use decks of cards that include land cards that generate five separate colors of mana, and play cards that consume that mana to summon creatures, cast offensive and defensive spells, and/or activate effects and abilities. Players battle other players using a selected deck, with the goal of reducing the opponent's life-total to zero before their opponent can do the same to them.

MTG Arena supports both Constructed Deck play and Limited play. In Constructed play, players create decks of cards from their library. The game gives new players a library of base cards and pre-made decks from those cards, but as players win matches and complete daily quests, they can earn new booster packs that add cards to their library, and allow players to then customize their decks and improve them. Unlike most physical packs of Magic cards and those used in Limited events, which usually contain 15-16 playable cards, purchased packs in MTG Arena contain 8 cards (1 Mythic/Rare, 2 Uncommon, and 5 Common).

The most popular type of limited play, booster draft, pits players against seven other players by having them choose and acquire cards in turn from packs that are supplied by the game. Those cards are then used to create a Limited deck used for the event. An additional Limited format called Sealed allows players to open a set number of special booster packs and build a deck only with cards from those packs. In both varieties of Limited, players attempt to win as many matches as they can with that deck. In best-of-one, the event ends once the player has either won 7 or lost 3 matches. In best-of-three, the event ends after the player completes three matches, regardless of their outcome. In most Limited events, the player keeps all the cards drafted and adds them to their library, and there are generally prizes based on wins that may give booster packs or in-game currency as a reward.

MTG Arena supports best-of-three and best-of-one matches for both Limited and Constructed. In best-of-one games, players' opening hands are not random; rather, the client generates multiple hands and selects one based on certain properties of the player's deck. Hand-smoothing exists to reduce the variance inherent to the game, which is exacerbated by the best-of-one format. The exact algorithm is not known to the public.

Arena follows the popular freemium paradigm, allowing users to play for free with optional microtransactions. Players can use real-world currency to buy gems or in-game currency, which can be spent on booster packs or enter draft or constructed events. Gems are also given as rewards for winning draft mode. In addition to regular cards from the set, a player may also receive "Wildcards" of any rarity in a booster pack or as a reward. The player may swap these Wildcards for any card of the same rarity. Magic: The Gathering allows decks with up to four copies of the same card, so once a player earns a fifth copy of a common or uncommon card through booster packs, this instead is used to add to a Vault meter, based on its rarity. When the Vault meter is filled, the player can open it to gain Wildcards. Fifth copies of rares or mythic rares are instead turned directly into gems. The game does not include a feature to trade cards with other players as the developers state this would affect their ability to offer in-game rewards at the level they want while effectively calibrating the economy to make it easy and efficient to get cards through game-play.

As with the physical edition, new expansions are introduced into MTG Arena as other sets are retired. When the game was first released, the bulk of the game's modes required players to build "standard" decks that use cards from the current active expansions. However, support for "historic" decks that use any card available in the game has increased since its initial release, and is now (2020) an active part of the game with multiple releases of Historic and Modern sets and anthologies throughout a year. As of May 2020, Historic modes contribute to progression of daily wins and quests and WotC has committed to support the "historic" format going forward permanently. Ranked play with these Historic decks will be tracked separately from those in the Standard play, and players are now able to purchase packs of or craft both standard and historic cards.

With the addition of the Core 2021 set in July 2020, Arena was also updated to include support for the new "Jumpstart" booster mode, themed 20-card packs designed to allow a player to quickly get into the game.