User:Student3225/sandbox

Magic: The Gathering Arena is a free-to-play digital collectible card game being developed by Wizards of the Coast's internal development studio, Wizards Digital Games Studio. The game is a digital adaption of the Magic: The Gathering card game, allowing players to gain cards through booster packs, in-game achievements or microtransaction purchases, and build decks to challenge other players.

Gameplay
Magic: The Gathering Arena follows most of the same rules as the physical card game, where players use decks of cards including land cards that generate mana. Players play cards that consume that mana to summon creatures, cast offensive and defensive spells, or other effects to battle other players using a selected deck. The goal of the game is achieving one of the conditions to win, such as reducing the opponent's health to zero before their opponent can do the same to them.

While the game's rules are similar to the paper version's rules there are some differences:


 * In Magic: The Gathering Arena, the algorithm that shuffles and deals cards will create two opening hands and choose whichever has a better balance of lands and spells when playing a best of one match. This is not within the rules of the game officially for best of ones.
 * At the beginning of a game, players decide who goes first by flipping a coin or via a similar method where each player has an equivalent chance to win. The winner of the flip is given the choice of going first or second according to the rules, but in Magic: The Gathering Arena the player is forced to go first. Also, when playing a best of three the loser of the first match is supposed to have the option of going first in the second game. In Magic: The Gathering Arena the losing player is forced to go first in the second match. These have been addressed and are planned to be changed before the game's official release.

Arena is free to play, but it is supported by microtransactions. Players can use real-world currency to buy gems, the in-game currency, which in turn can be spent on booster packs or as an entry fee for some formats. Gems are also given as rewards for winning draft mode. A booster pack has a chance of including a Wildcard of any rarity. The player may swap these Wildcards for any card of the same rarity type. Magic: The Gathering allows decks with up to four copies of the same card, so once a player earns a fifth copy of a named 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. The Vault is a temporary solution to the fifth copy problem, and Wizards of the Coast is planning on creating a new solution, with duplicate protection as the main candidate for a replacement.

Card acquisition is done through opening booster packs, redeeming Wildcards, daily quests, rewards from playing in some formats, and promotional codes that can be redeemed in the game's store. 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 gameplay.

Magic: The Gathering Arena supports both Constructed Deck play and Draft 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 or 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. In Draft play, players are first given a number of special booster packs to build out a deck. They then try to win as many matches as they can with that deck. Once the player has won either 7 matches or lost three games with that deck, that deck is then retired; the player gets to keep all the cards drafted and also earns rewards that provide more booster packs and resources to build up their library.

Game Formats
The Standard Constructed format is always available to play while the Booster Draft and Sealed Deck formats are sometimes not available, or switch which of the game's sets they are using. The game formats available rotate on Magic: The Gathering Arena based on the schedule provided on the game's official site and forums.

Magic: The Gathering Arena also has some more casual formats available including: Momir, Singleton, Pauper, and Block/Set Constructed.

The game has also had new game formats which were exclusive to Magic: The Gathering Arena including: "Day[9]'s Insta-Ban" and "Gaby's Greedy Dominaria Draft." Day[9]'s Insta-Ban format was a 60-card constructed format where all cards with spell type "instant" or keyword "flash" were not allowed to be used. Gaby's Greedy Dominaria Draft was a regular Booster Draft of Dominaria, but with the rule changes that 2 lands could be played per turn, there was no maximum hand size, and starting hand size was nine.

Development
Arena is designed to be a more modern method of playing Magic: The Gathering with other players while using a computer when compared to Magic: The Gathering Online. A key goal of its development was to allow Arena to remain current with physical releases of new expansions to the physical game, with the goal of having the digital version of the expansion available the same day that they are available in retail. For example, the Dominaria expansion was released simultaneously as a retail product and within Arena on April 27, 2018, while the first major core game update in several years, "Core 19", was available in Arena on the same day as the set's street date of July 13, 2018. The game will also stay current with the designated Standard format, where cards from the last few major expansions are considered valid for deck construction. Players will not be able to gain cards from sets retired from Standard, and while the game presently does not have such modes, the developers want to offer means to play with non-standard decks in the future.

The core part of the development of Arena was its game rules engine (GRE). The goal of this engine was to make a system that could handle current and future rulesets for Magic to support their plan to remain concurrent with the physical releases. The GRE provided means to implement per-card level rules and effects, allowing it to be expandable. The GRE also helped towards speeding up play in the game. Compared to other digital card games like Hearthstone where an opponent cannot interact during a player's turn, Magic: The Gathering allows opponents to react throughout a player's turn. In previous iterations of Magic games that allowed this, including both Online and Duels of the Planeswalkers, these systems were found to slow down the game while waiting for an opponent to react or opt to not react. Instead, of Arena, the developers were able to use the per-card support to determine when reactions to a played card needed to be allowed, using observations from Magic tournament play. This helped to speed up the game for both players while still allowing for complete card reactions to be played out.

Arena is not anticipated to replace Magic: The Gathering Online; Online will continue to support the whole of Magic's card history, while Arena will only include cards in the current Standard sets from its initial release and any expansions going forward.

Arena was first tested in a closed beta. An initial stress-test beta to selected users started in November 3, 2017, with those selected limited to non-disclosure agreements for testing purposes, while others could apply to gain access to later stages of the closed beta. The first large scale closed beta started in December 2017. Its open beta started on September 27, 2018, with its full launch expected in 2019.

Promotion and Marketing
Wizards of the Coast has created programs to reward content creators for promoting Magic: The Gathering Arena which include:


 * Paying for use of their likeness.
 * Promoting the creator in-game or on their website.
 * Providing the creator with codes to give away.

They also took part in Twitch.tv's bounty board program to have popular streamers play their game as a means of promotion when it went into open beta. This included players who normally play Hearthstone, another digital collectible card game broadcast on twitch.tv. Many of these players were then invited to play against each other at TwitchCon 2018, Twitch.tv's yearly convention, on Wizard's official Magic: The Gathering channel on Twitch.tv.

Before the release of the open beta, Magic: The Gathering Online was the primary software streamed on Twitch.tv under the Magic: The Gathering game channel. After the open beta's release, average viewers of this channel significantly increased, virtually doubling from September to October of 2018 (5,715 to 11,125 average viewers) and has maintained the increased viewership.

The open beta of Magic: The Gathering Arena was promoted to players of the physical card game by adding promotional codes that could be redeemed for digital cards to pre-release booster packs and Planeswalker decks of Guilds of Ravnica.

Reception
Since the game is still in beta, reception by most outlets has not officially been published.