MTG Arena Part 1: How to Get Started Playing for Free
Are you interested in trying out Magic: The Gathering for
free? If so, give Magic: The Gathering Arena a try.
This article will be broken down into 3 parts. In Part 1, I
will explain the basics of how to get started playing Magic: The Gathering
Arena. Part 2 will get very in-depth on how to get the best return from free
play in MTG Arena using the free gold earnings and free cards. Part 3 will
discuss the financial aspect of gems.
[Note: I apologize for re-posting this article. For some reason this
article just completely disappeared from my blog. Being that it is Part 1
of a multi-part series, I needed to get it back up again.]
Part 1: Getting Started
What is Magic: the
Gathering?
Magic: The Gathering (MTG for short) is a card game where
you play as a mythical Planeswalker, traveling through different dimensions, to
face off against other opponents, like yourself. There are many themes, colors,
characters and other aspects to choose from to make this game your own and to
suit your personal taste in play style. MTG can be anything you want it to be.
Its themes and subject matter lie mostly in the realm of folklore, mythology
and fantasy, so if you are not into that, you can stop reading now. If this excites
you, do continue!
Magic The Gathering, created in 1993, is the world’s oldest,
largest and most popular collectible card game. It is printed in dozens of
languages and played around the world. You can walk into any game store in nearly
any country and be able to sit down and play other people, even without
speaking their language. Playing MTG Arena online makes this much easier, as
everything will be in your native language.
There is something for everyone with MTG. If you don’t like
the thought casting magic spells or the idea of dragons being in a game, fear
not, you can play with Birds, Dinosaurs, Pirates and other less evil sounding
themes. Growing up in a southern Baptist household in the 80’s and 90’s, there
were many movements that preached that everything secular will warp your
fragile little mind. I regret not being able to get into MTG at an earlier age,
as I absolutely love playing it now as an adult. It has not warped my mind, and
I assure you, I have not sold my soul to the devil.
It’s good clean fun that people of all ages, from young
children to grandparents, can play together as friends and family. I have been
beaten by my friend’s 7 year old, and I have taught a 70 year old how to play
and enjoy the game. MTG has a strong worldwide community, and I have made many
new friends by playing these types of games in my local game stores, as well as
many hours of fun with close friends and family.
How do I play?
While this will not be a tutorial of how to play the game, I
am going to do my best to oversimplify its explanation and process. You will
learn how to play by actually playing through all of the well made MTG Arena
tutorials.
You start out with a hand of cards from your own personal
deck. Each card has a cost to play it from your hand. You pay for these cards
by placing Land cards, which are mixed into your deck as well. Once per turn
you may place a land card from your hand onto the battlefield (the play area in
front of you). Then during each turn, you may do as many things as you wish until
you cannot do anymore. You may “Tap” (turn sideways) your Land cards to
generate Mana. Mana is what you use to pay the casting cost of the other cards
in your hand. Once cards on the battlefield are “tapped” or spent, they remain
on the table for your next turn. At the beginning of your next turn, all of
your cards “Untap”, including the spent Land cards, so that you may reuse them
again and again.
Cards you may play range from casting spells, such as damage
spells to your opponent, or healing spells for yourself. These types of cards
will be used once, then discarded. You may also cast cards from your hand that
are creatures. Creatures can be whatever the theme of your deck is or just your
favorite cards you own. They range from Angels to Demons, Goblins to Zombies,
wild animals to Dinosaurs, whatever you want, there is probably something for
you in MTG that you will enjoy playing with.Your creatures remain on the
battlefield between each round. Once you pay for them, they are permanently
part of your battlefield until they either die or are removed by a card your
opponent plays.
In the example below, I am playing a Merfolk deck. Yes, you
read that right, all of my creatures are themed around the mermaids and mermen
of ancient folklore.
Artwork on the cards depict their subject matter and are
painted by many talented artists all over the world. Much of the artwork these
days are painted digitally, but quite a few of the artists still paint on
traditional media, such as oil on canvas or acrylics. The artwork is amazing
and is a big draw to the game. Many of the artists even sell prints of the
original artwork depicted on the cards. I happen to own one, signed by the
artist, of one of my favorite pieces of MTG card art.
The main win condition of the game is to defeat your
opponent by reducing their life total from the starting 20 points down to 0.
You do this with the combination of spells you cast and the creatures you play
to your battlefield. You may command your creatures to attack your opponent,
and your opponent may command their creatures to block some of the attacks. The
resulting battle may reduce your opponents total life points by the amount of
damage that gets through to them. You will keep taking turns going back and
forth with these same steps until one of you loses the match. Games can range
from a few minutes to 20 or more minutes, depending how easy or complicated the
state of the game becomes during the match. Think of it as a chess match,
except with cards and of course adding the luck of the draw. It is a card game
after all!
The Cost of Getting Started
You may ask, “This sounds really cool! How much does it cost
to play?”
Well, that depends on how far you want to go with it. You
can play casually or semi-competitively for free or investing only a few
dollars into the game. Pro level players have invested $100’s and $1000’s into
their decks to play at the top tiers in tournaments for million dollar prizes.
The scope of this article will be playing for free though.
I will guide you through how to get started and how to amass
a nice collection of free cards for MTG.
Magic The Gathering,
physical version:
You may ask, “Wait, MTG Arena is all online? What if I want
to play the physical paper version? Can I get into that for free too?”
The short answer is, Yes, you can. If you wish to play
“paper Magic” with physical cards, you can visit nearly any local game store
that supports Magic The Gathering (most do) and ask if they have any Welcome
Decks. Wizards of the Coast provide them to the local game stores for free to
help get new players into the game.
DO NOT EVER PAY FOR A WELCOME DECK! They are FREE! Also, DO
NOT PAY for a “starter deck” either, they are basically 2 free welcome decks
packaged together.
If you want to pay for a more premium option to get started
in paper MTG, pickup a Duel Deck, or a
pair of Planeswalker Decks. Two decks will run you less than $25 and provide
everything you need for two people to play. Other cheap options are some larger
stores offer pre-constructed decks with various themes starting at $7/ea. These
are also an excellent option to go with.
However, the free option is the Welcome Deck. In a Welcome
Deck, you will get two 30 cards deck halves in the box, each a different color,
to learn to play with. Once you have tried each color, you can then combine
them for form a standard full 60 card deck to start playing with.
If time allows for the game store staff, many will sit down
and teach you to play or show you a quick demo of how to play it.
After you learn to play, you get to keep the Welcome Deck.
Often, if still available, staff may give you a promo card left over from
previous events.
Make sure to check out Wizards of the Coast’s Open House
event calendar on their website. Each Open House showcases the latest set that
will be released the following week. These are done 4 times a year, when each
new set is released. Your Welcome deck will usually consist of cards from the
new set coming out, and you will usually receive a free full art foil promo
card. That is a pretty nice start for free!
Bring your friends back and request another one for
yourself, as well as have your friend request their own Welcome Decks. You can
all start playing immediately with no cost to you.
Another way to start your collection is show up to a local
game store for Friday Night Magic, and ask around to see if anyone has any
cards they want to get rid of for free. Often times you will find people giving
away stacks and small boxes of cards for free because they have too many
duplicates of them already. These cards will be a great start to building your
physical collection. Use them to start swapping out cards from your Welcome
Deck to make them stronger. This is an entire subject I may write about in a
future article on how to get started on the cheap for paper MTG.
The only downside to MTG Arena is that you cannot trade cards
with anybody, and there is no marketplace to buy/sell/trade cards. While this
takes away a huge part of the fun of the physical game, it is still a great
alternative to those with no local game stores or those that do not have anyone
local to play the physical game with. The Arena digital offering gives you most
of that same experience and excitement from your own home.
For the remainder of this article, we will discuss only MTG
Arena.
MTG Arena
The cost of playing Arena is: FREE! It is free to download,
free to play, and you can win gold, new cards and booster packs just by playing
the free portions of the game. You can get quite far this way if you take the
time to play a little each day.
Does all of this sound affordable so far? If so, continue
reading.
How to Get Started
To begin with, you will need to download the game client. It
is only available on Windows, at this point in time. Click the link below to
take you to Wizards of the Coast’s MTG Arena website to download the game
client.
(Note: I am not associated with Wizards of the Coast in any
way)
Here you can also find a few quick start videos and other
information on how to play the game, as well as the latest news regarding
Arena. Don’t get too caught up in learning how to play yet, as the game itself
has a wonderful tutorial mode that will guide you through.
Once installed, you will need to sign up for a free account
to begin playing.
Here is the main welcome screen. You can do everything from
looking at your current rankings, check your amount of gold amassed, look
through your collection of cards and build your own decks.
FREE STUFF RIGHT NOW!
- BOLD CAPITAL LETTERS AND EXCLAMATION POINTS! YAY!
Before getting started, you will want to grab all the free
stuff codes before they expire. As of this writing, there are 8 of them,
including codes to give you 6 free booster packs and a few free cards and
cosmetic items for them. By the time you read this, a new set may have come
out, and there will be new codes for free booster packs for it as well.
The link below contains all current codes. The person
running this site keeps them updated as new codes come and go. This is a great
resource for getting free stuff. (Note: I am not associated with this site in
any way)
https://mtgacodes.altervista.org/
SAVE YOUR WILD CARDS!
Periodically you will obtain wild cards through opening
booster packs or as rewards for completing quests.
Wild cards let you trade one card of that rarity level for
any card available on Arena. In paper MTG, this can even equate to cards worth
hundreds of dollars. This is the only way currently that you will be able to
get exactly the cards you need and want in Arena, as there is no way to
buy/trade for specific cards. It is completely up to the luck of the draw for
opening booster packs and when winning random single cards as to what you will
get.
A note on Booster Packs: MTG Arena booster packs are a
package of 8 cards per pack, consisting of 5 common, 2 uncommon and either a
Rare or Mythic Rare card to add to your collection. If you open a pack or
acquire a card that you already own the maximum copies of, then it will convert
that card to a wild card of the same rarity type. You can only have a maximum
of 4 of each specific card in the game. 4 cards is the limit of any one
particular card, as per the deck building rules, so you will never need more
than 4 anyway.
I cannot stress enough that you should save your wild cards.
You will want them later on to craft that super powerful deck you’ve been wanting.
There are many online resources for deck building ideas. I will list a few at
the end of this article.
You can check how many of each type of wild card you have in
the upper right corner of the main game screen. Just move your mouse over the
red flower icon and you will see your total amount of wild cards. In the
screenshot below, you can see my current total. Had I not wasted my wild cards
on a bad idea, I would have had twice as many as this, which would have let me
build nearly any deck I wanted, including decks worth hundreds of dollars in
paper MTG. Learn from my mistake!
Learn to Play
MTG Arena has added in a wonderful training mode, and a
little guide, Sparky, to help you along the way. Sparky will show you the
ropes. You will learn all the basics of how to play the game, basic terms and
steps of gameplay, and basic terms on some of the cards.
Should you ever have a question about what the term on a
card does, you can simply move your mouse over the card, and it will tell you
next to the card what each term does.
Once you complete the training mode, you should be given
some free decks, cards and gold. Save those for later.
Next, move on to the Mastery Tree.
This will allow you to try many more different deck types, multi-color decks, new mechanics and advanced skills. After each win, you will have completed one piece of the Mastery Tree, and will receive a reward. Rewards include more free cards, as seen in the screenshot above, to game cosmetics, to the final end point of multiple complete new decks.
These new decks contain many more cards you can use to build
other decks. Cards don’t have to remain in the deck they come in. You can use
them to build anything to your liking, play style or theme.
Once you have completed the Mastery Tree, you should have
enough new cards and pre-constructed decks to start playing through the daily
quests to earn gold, cards and booster packs each day.
This is all still completely free at this point. In fact,
you can keep playing for free indefinitely.
Where do I go from
here?
Let us look at your new collection for a moment. On the main
menu, click on the Decks tab.
You will see all of the pre-constructed decks that you won
during Training and Mastery Tree sessions.
Play with some of these decks a few times each to find one
that fits your play style, and interests the best. It is important to like the
deck you play, or you will not have any fun playing.
To try different decks out, go back to the Home screen, and
click on the big orange Play button on the bottom right of the screen. You will
see a few options to play different game types. Choose the Practice match. This
will let you play against your training guide, Sparky, instead of a randomly
paired human player.
You will not gain any daily or weekly win bonuses for
playing Practice matches, but you will get a good feel for your decks without
having to lose to actual people. There are also no time limits in Practice
matches, giving you plenty of time to read and learn what the cards say.
Get familiar with your deck to the point you know what each
card does just by the art on it. If you don’t have to read the card, you can
make quicker decision while playing.
Once you gravitate towards a deck you like, you can start to
modify it to make it more powerful. Again, check the end of this article for
deck building resources.
Back on the Home screen, click on the Decks tab. Select the
deck you want to edit, then click on the CLONE button on the bottom of the
screen. This is important so that you do not mess up your pre-constructed deck.
You can easily rebuild the pre-constructed decks, but you will need to go look
for the original list online somewhere and then take the time to rebuild it.
It’s just easier to modify a cloned deck, give it its own name and start
personalizing it to your liking.
You will be able to browse through your card collection, use
filters to see only what you want to see, and add/remove cards from the deck
you are building.
Above is my original deck I built when I first started
playing. It is full of things that fly, such as birds, Pegasus and Angels,
which can’t be blocked by most opposing creatures. I’ve included thing that
help me regenerate life each time I attack (Lifelink) and if I survive long
enough, I have large creatures, such as Mammoths and Dinosaurs, that I can cast
to end the game quickly. I also have cards that let me make my opponents
creatures useless, so they can neither attack me or block my creatures. This
deck isn’t the best deck, and while I used the free cards that I had on hand, I
wasted some of my valuable wild cards creating cards for this deck that I now
regret.
I will not go into the specifics of how to build a deck,
there are plenty of tutorials out there for this, but the basics are:
·
Roughly 20 lands
·
Some cheap (1-2 mana cost) cards to play early
game
·
A few cards to help mitigate your opponents,
such as removal spells
·
The rest of the deck will be the main meat and
potatoes of the deck, consisting of whatever you have in mind that your deck is
supposed to do to win the game.
There is no one winning strategy. In fact, there are quite a
few different deck architypes you can build, depending on your play style. A
few examples include:
·
Burn Decks – Typically Red decks, they including
lots of cheap small creatures to play to help block or swarm your opponent
with, meanwhile the rest of your deck is stuffed with cheap direct damage
spells, such as lightning bolts and shocks to quickly burn down your opponent,
or remove their creatures.
·
Fast and Cheap, Tokens, Swarm – Decks full of
fast, cheap creatures that can you get out very quickly to start swarming your
opponent with. Many of these cards create Tokens, which are additional
creatures generated, by a card effect, to give you even more creatures on the
battlefield to swarm your opponent with. These decks consist of single color or
multi-color decks. There are many themes to choose from, including goblins,
soldiers and warriors, plants and elves.
·
Control Decks – These decks typically contain
more Blue cards, and include many cards that counter what your opponent plays,
removes their creatures from the game and other general abilities that let you
“control” what your opponent does or doesn’t do. Meanwhile you will have constructed
in some kind of win condition to work through while you keep your opponent at
bay.
·
Big Stompy Decks – These types of decks are
typically slower to get going, as they usually require lots of mana to play
very large creatures that deal lots of damage. These typically have large
creatures such as Dinosaurs, Dragons and large sea creatures in them.
·
Mill Decks – An alternate win condition for MTG
is that if you have no cards in your draw deck the next time you draw a card,
the game ends and you lose. Many cards in MTG allow you to discard cards from
both your opponents hand as well as directly from their draw deck. If you can
remove cards fast enough before your opponent can defeat you, you will end up
winning since your opponent will have no more cards to draw.
These are just a few architype examples. There are dozens
more. I will leave some of these up to future deck tech articles, or check the
links are the end of this article for more resources to find deck ideas.
Conclusion and
further resources
That’s it for now. I hope this quick start guide helped you
in some way.
Stay tuned for Part 2: Best ROI Strategies for Free Play.
As promised, here are some of my most heavily used resources
for deck building ideas. I am in no way associated with any of these sites. I
just enjoy using them, as they are great resources for playing MTG.
·
https://mtgarena.pro/ - Great tracker.
You can install this on your PC, and while MTG Arena is open, it will
continually send the logged data from MTG Arena to your MTG Arena Pro online
account. You can then use this account to track your stats, get ideas of decks
to build with what you have in your collection and more. You can browse your
historical data too, such as all of your wins and losses, what you won each day
and more. I was able to quickly use the info on this site to help me craft my
daily grind deck with what cards I had in my collection.
·
https://tappedout.net/ - This is an
excellent deck building resources and another good place for deck ideas based
on your search criteria.
·
https://www.mtggoldfish.com/metagame/arena_standard#paper
– The deck lists that MTGGoldFish tracks. They have lists of the latest decks
currently winning in the meta, as well as price guides and such for paper
magic.
·
https://www.youtube.com/user/tolariancommunity
- Tolarian Community College is a great resource for magic players, both new
and old. There’s lots of product reviews as well as set reviews which can be
used for Arena.
·
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCVUe3VO-3FSZmZA-MpAhSiQ
- Bad Boy Gaming is a great source for MTG deck builds, budget builds and deck
techs. He also spend a lot of time playing MTG Arena with lots of interesting
deck builds. It’s a good source for new ideas and mechanics.
I have quite a few other resources
I use as well, but most cater to paper magic or the financial side of the
physical cards.
Let me know in the comments below if you liked this article
and what else you would like to see from me.
Thanks!
Joe
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