Hi all. Here is the thing: I am a casual MTG player but by no means a beginner I took a loan here {link deleted} to upgrade my PC. I recently got my girlfriend into the game, and she loved it, although she is still struggling with different concepts of it. I thought that maybe MTG Arena would be a good idea to play together. She could have a rather basic deck to learn, I could teach her some stuff, things like that. Is MTG Arena a good platform for that? Is it beginner-friendly? How about F2P friendly? Anyways, thanks for any info you can give me.

no

It depends how serious you want to get. I'm a dedicated casual player, and I do fine with F2P. Granted, I mostly play brawl, so I don't have a clue how the experience is for people who play other formats.

I have been F2P since the beta, except the Welcome Pack which is just a good deal. I mainly play Limited but I have really enjoyed being able to play Magic for free. Even if I had to drop like $10 every set, that still works out to like less than a dollar per draft.

When I did play Standard, it was also easy to keep up for me because I had pet decks rather than trying to make every possible meta deck. That said, Standard sucked so much over the past year I stopped playing it.

it is, although if you're doing F2P it takes a long time to build the resources to craft your first real deck, so I'd recommend working out what a good, solid list is before committing any of your wildcards. fortunately, every week, they publish a review of decks that have done well that week, so you'll have a good sense of what people are running right now. (if you're doing historic, I'd recommend Sultai, it's a good jack-of-all-trades list that's easy to get value out of. just look for the deck with uro, titan of nature's wrath, nissa, who shakes the world, and hydroid krasis and craft that.) draft is the best value for gold/gems if you can do alright consistently, but it can be pretty costly to start if you don't have the fundamentals down, so if you're new to the game as a whole it may be better to start by buying packs so you can build up your collection.

I'd say yeah it is, but know you probably aren't passing Gold.

Agree with you. Free version is much more attractive.