Now here's an important question:

If Smuggler's Copter is banned in standard, will it be available in Arena?
What's gonna happen with banned cards? Will they be in the card pool, but excluded from tournaments? Or just unavailable?

Maybe available for casual but not on ladder?

Something interesting i was thinking about was if they plan to imitate standard they can't leave cards out just because they're hard to implement.

Cards that have a naming clause like dispossess, mindslaver like abilities ect ect all need to be available, gonna be interesting to see how that plays out as i imagine disposess naming will be clunky as all hell on xbox for example.

I hadn't thought about that but they did say they added text and name search so that makes things like that definitely be able to be done despite how clunky it might get on a console.

If MTGO can do those cards, I can't imagine Arena not being able to do it (since they basically come from the same company now, instead of Stainless).

Redeem codes from paper to Arena could be a thing.
Although it details "Items" and not specifically cards.

Dat Flaghip tho.

My concern with this though is that MTGO barely manages this, and sacrifices a lot of aesthetics for these kind of cards (not sure if you've seen a mindslaver effect on mtgo but it certainly isn't pretty)
I wonder if they'll be able to program them not only for arena in general, but for the console/ios crowd as well without making it extremely cumbersome, that seems tough especially as it's only going to be for a couple of cards

I imagine there's gonna end up with some bit of ugly no matter what digitally when it comes to mindslaver type stuff but its bound to get programmed somehow.
Though Emrakul is out of standard now and they could avoid printing any new ones and stay focused on standard but they are promising to listen to fans and see about expanding out to modern and beyond, so I guess we will have to see.

Tbf, nothing in MTGO is pretty, so by the logic that they can't make it look good because it doesn't in MTGO, everything in Arena should be hideous

Meh.
You're the only one I've ever met then. I know many players are 1v1 only and don't care to do any multiplayer but I've never met a person who hated it and didn't capitalize the fact that they don't.
I like (and am pretty damn good at) 1v1 as much as the next guy but seriously, if this turns out to be 1v1 standard only they have lost me I think. At the very least I don't see myself being very interested in it for long enough to sink a bunch of money into it if that turns out to be fact. Think about how many successful games have multiplayer as a bedrock or at least a very persuasive load bearing beam.
I would hope to all the Gods that Wizards have seen that multiplayer has been a thing throughout DOTP and would not want to loose those people by all the sudden not even offering 2hg let alone 3v and 4v.

2HG, EDH, or Archenemy would be enough to guarantee my interest, at least. Rainbow Stairwell/Prismatic maybe too, or Star magic (really old/obscure format.) Especially if there's any chance I won't have every card. I love alternate formats, especially when the build limitations keep the decks from being all rares/mythics.

So I have a question for anyone that can answer it :

I signed up for the Beta. I've already gotten the "thank you for choosing to be ...." email from them. I read the priority access clause, and realized that I hadn't linked my Duels account. So I quickly created a wizards account (with the same email address I used to sign up for the beta) and linked it with my duels account. Now I'm just wondering if their system will pick it up because I did the whole linking thing after I signed up for the beta and got their confirmation email. I suppose it depends on how their system works - a priority/non-priority might have been assigned before the confirmation email was sent and won't be updated which would suck. Here's hoping their systems update properly and the priority is assigned when the actual invitations are sent - which is how it should be ... but you know , WOTC has a history ...

What do you guys think ?

Considering some of the qualifications for priority access are prerelease stuff that can't have possibly happened yet, I assume that your account should have been updated when you linked it.

But yeah, WOTC has a history...

They confirmed that updating the account will work I do believe.

I've had this confirmed with Support two days ago, so don't worry it'll update correctly.
As of now, the Beta signup works only as a show of interest.
They will pool mails and DCI in a later date and double check both with the WPN LGS pre-release reports and Duels CSID, to apply priority accordingly.

As of now, the data stored into your Wizards account hasn't been read yet, so priority hasn't been given at all.

Duels is still going alarmingly strong on Xbox. I've been playing every day or two and never have problems instantly getting matches. I hope it stays like this until Arena comes out

The iOs ladder has never been more competitive IMO, we are also trying to pull a tribal league to kill time until arena comes out.

I've only recently been looking into Arena (is it based on the first Magic novel?) and I am not impressed whatever by the visual. I don't like seeing the half cards presented on the battlefield, and am not sure how it will play out. How hard can it be to just code Magic the Gathering to work properly, add some flashy effects, and make it run well?

Not looking forward to it.

I don't get the hate for cutting the unreadable text boxes from cards that are in play so that there is more room on the battlefield. There's no point to having the whole card shown since you have to check the full card to fully read it anyway and all the info is condensed in tips like in duels, which means you can tell there's something going on at least from a glance.

That's the power of it being digital at work; you don't need to show the clunky rules text part of the card unless you want/need to read it (by checking the enlarged version like duels again or even MTGO which can't even show it properly either) and if they did they would be massive cards taking up way too much space to actually play the game efficiently.

On iOS, there are no tooltips, so I don't have access to that info at a glance, anyway. Many are unreadable, but there are enough cards that give me a visual cue to remember what I already know of the card. If it's a card from a set I'm not familiar with, those hints (mana symbols or keywords) can be great help instead of having to zoom in (especially on multi-player where I have to pause to zoom.

It's not a make-or-break issue or anything, it's just personal preference.