So I've been hedging forever on trying out Magic Online. As is typical for the Wizards marketing department I can't find any information about how much it costs or what you can do other then constantly hearing about people that do draft tournaments on it.

With a kind my hobby budget is limited as it is and I'm loathe to split that between real cards and digital ones. Anyone else play and have an opinion on it?

Not now. Definitely not now.

They just switched to a new client which is as bad as something 'ready for the public' can be. It has massive memory leaks, meaning no matter how strong your pc, after 2-3 games MTGO will have hogged all the RAM of your pc and you will need to restart the client... not to mention some baffling UI decisions and bugs of all sorts, BIG and smalls.

Paying [a considerate] amount of money to get into MTGO now is not a good choice, in fact a lot of people have been selling all their cards and getting out.

This is basically the response of all people who don't play the client very often and are reactionary based on others analysis.

Yes, the program has a lot of memory leaks and if you don't have a powerful system you're not going to be able to run the program well. That is a problem. However, to say that no matter the strength of your computer you'll have to restart is false. The program caps out at 2gb of ram while leaking, which is ridiculous but to say that nobody's system will be able to handle that is false.

The UI is laterally terrible as compared to version three. It's equally confusing and unintuitive. Nothing new here seeing the low quality of all Wizards technological pursuits.

I use MTGO every day. Right now, singles prices are low, so buying cards is safe. Yes, the player base has dwindled but it's more of people's systems not being able to handle the client than it just being objectively bad comparatively. MTGO is still fine if you want to draft every once in a while and despite there being bugs and such, it's the best non-paper representation of the game that you can play. I'm not saying that there aren't problems with the client but to say that MTGO is only negatives is to take away from the fact that you still get to play Magic.

I use it to draft at my leisure, and it works just fine for that. Rebooting the client occasionally is a necessity currently, but I run it on a 4 year old laptop just fine, so pretty much any system can handle it. It costs like 15 bucks to start, and that gets you a couple free half drafts and some cards, but to play much more than Standard Pauper your going to need to put more money into it. The upside is that cards are cheaper across the board digitally, and you can spend unopened packs to draft so you can slow the bleed considerably, and in general I recommend it if you are looking to spend more time on Magic and don't like your other options.

I haven't played much in a while other than in the MOJO, but for a while I was playing Commander fairly regularly, which was great because I could build a pretty decent theme deck for very little budget investment.

I don't know much about the current client, since as I said I haven't used it much, but as a general concept it's absolutely worth it. If you have a problem with it, it's almost certainly going to be one of those external factors--memory leaks, UI issues (haven't really had any worth noting myself), and so on.

Just as with paper Magic, once you make an initial investment you don't have to pay a dime more unless you want to, so unless you have impulse-control issues there's not much of a reason not to have it available as an option, even if you only use it once in a blue moon.

If you want to play Standard, the demand curve is a lot steeper in MTGO than in paper, which means the very top top tier cards can be a bit more expensive than their paper counterparts, but the tier 2 cards are very cheap. You can build a "casual standard" deck for five to ten dollars, and there is always someone to play against. If you don't draft very often, and you end up with left over prize packs, you can sell them uncracked for almost their full value depending on what set it is. Note that I have not played with the new client yet though.

It works fine for me. My only problem with it is it's Steam like presence allowing me to bleed money into it. In real life, I have the limitations of the store (and that I am not able to play drunk) meaning that I end up playing a lot more because it's easier. The prices are exactly like in real life for Limited. The individual cards cost about 20% as much as they do for a real copy.

I've been wondering if it's financially feasible to just buy playsets of every card and take advantage of the turn in program. Not sure if I'd save money though in the long run...although with the fetch lands it may be worth it...maybe. Are they even still doing that?

Where do you shop? For Standard, the cards are easily 10% cheaper online than paper counterparts, and as soon as they rotate the drop to about 20% their real life value.

I wonder if it's based on country though. I tried to tie my online account to my new UK bank and they wanted to charge me 25 dollars more for 100 event tickets...needless to say I switched back to US were 100 event tickets is 100 dollars, not 125 dollars

I've been buying into Legacy on MTGO, so there's that little tidbit.

I play MTGO exclusively and have no issue with performance because ny playtime is limited to 3-4 games usually. The client is unintuitive, but I got over that and have a great time playing. I haven't played since KTK hit because I'm not a fan of the morph theme.

No.

It's expensive as ****, looks like ****, has an interface that is complete ****. And the odds of WOTC suddenly seeing the light and fixing all its issues or actually, you know, updating it to a modern client......... well that would be something to see now wouldn't it?

It's less money than paper, but only slightly, and imho you would be better off with ball on a string attached to a cup.

I would also say no it's way to expensive and buggy.

Just use untap.net the ui is better and its free.

What parts do you like about the game (ie just playing, social interaction, playing combo, etc)? What do you like to play (ie draft, commander, standard, pauper, etc.)?

The necromancy is strong in this one.

I actually don't have a problem with the interface per se. What I have a problem with is finishing a match in 25 minutes. I just played a stupid n00b draft with phantoms points and lost both matches to timing out. IN GAME 2. I guess I could drop the begin combat stop? Learn hot keys?

I mean you should probably learn hotkeys anyway.

When I first started I had a few time out issues. I had to use the hot keys for a while until I learned to just think faster. Now I just use the mouse and usually have more time left on my clock than my opponents. Sometimes by a wide margin.

25 minutes is ample time to finish a match. You either need to become more familiar with the client or just make decisions faster.

Setting your stops correctly and learning the appropriate hotkeys will probably save you a decent amount of time, and just learning the flow of the client so you know when you're going to need to do things will help a great deal, but the real savings tends to come from learning to think on your feet and on your opponent's time rather than your own.

Many players new to Magic Online will think through their decisions when they're asked to make them, because that's when they have the most information and because that's what they do in paper. They'll do things like wait until blockers are being declared to decide how to block, and wait until they draw to figure out what they want to do during their turn. But that wastes precious time, because usually most of that thinking could have been done beforehand. You can plan a lot of your plays in advance, and even if something happens to force those plans to change, you're still ahead because a lot of the background work is done.

I'm getting faster! Still timed out once, I think because I went into the tank for like 5 minutes on some moderately complicated board state with a very slim margin.

The other thing that trips me up is that I "think ahead" assuming I am going block one way, but then either something happens I didn't expect or I find I missed something and I am paralyzed with indecision (this happens in paper too... but in paper you can get away with using 35 of the 50 minutes on your turns.... usually).

I also need to count power on the board automatically.

Hotkeys help.