>build a beta that will be subject to change, including UI elements and gameplay systems
>better make sure the credit card interface works :^)
I saw some gameplay the other day and, aside from the technical limitations like no friends list, insulting monetization, and so on, two things stood out to me:
>The game is breathtakingly ugly.
Magic's art has traditionally been beautiful, and eroded steadily since the inception of the modern card frame. Despite that, the sterile presentation of MTGA combined with cropped card art, gratuitous sound effects, and desperate attempts to make its planeswalkers the class analogues of Hearthstone and Shadowverse are a new low for the game. It's genuinely stupefying how people in charge of this much money chase after years-entrenched markets and think they'll uproot the player bases being fleeced by more friendly digital games.
Honestly, how fucking hard is it to accept a dominating position within a niche? MTG has always been the complicated, counterintuitive card game compared to its peers, and that complexity is what allowed it to thrive in a market threatened by Naturo and DBZ tie-ins.
>"Ranked" games are one-and-done
This is more odious to someone who's played a bunch of tournament MTG like me, but a single game doesn't mean ANYTHING. Getting beaten by a gimmicky aggro/combo deck is apparently just as valid as fighting for 20 minutes vs control or midrange. While I don't care to preserve the sanctity of a shitty game client, this is a huge problem for the game because it simply isn't meant to be played in iPad-sized segments. Wizards of the Coast isn't interested in presenting the game that defined a genre, it's presenting people an idea of what they think the game is like.
MTG's actual problem is the lack of a clear progression track for new players due to the variety of different formats and their utter lack of commonality. MTGA does nothing to fix that and will likely be dominated by a cabal of whales before official release anyway.
>>15538678
>decks consists of nothing but cheap removal, counterspells, and those planeswalkers
<baddy can't play against control decks
You can play creatures in your second main phase, dude.
>>15538710
>and to my knowledge hasn't been removed
They did remove it, after a couple weeks of trying to astroturf it on social media and pretending that the sale of personal data and IP addresses to "business partners" wasn't spyware. Don't forget the recent "Guilds of Ravnica: Mythic Edition" fiasco, which was a transparent excuse to print money and fuck non-collectors.