Some thoughts on Gwent after playing Magic The Gathering Arena for a day

With the meta being a bit oppressive since the last patch I thought I would take a break from it and try a new CCG. I have some friends who play Magic and it obviously has a legendary status among card games so I decided to give Arena a try. Im a total noob to Magic, played the paper game a tiny bit in junior high, and this is my impression after playing for literally a day so obviously I could be very wrong about plenty of things with Magic. Still the experience made me appreciate a few things about Gwent that I thought I would share here.

I went through the tutorials (called "Color Challenges" to get you acquainted to each colors starter deck) and everything felt pretty good, was breezing through them but still having fun. Each tutorial ends with you facing another actual player and the first deck I went up against was…. a mill deck. There was a card that milled 3 of my cards whenever the other player put a land in play. I literally couldn't draw anything valuable. It was honestly kind of funny but I would say that this set the groundwork for my introduction to facing other players in the game.

While fundamentally Magic is a lot more complicated in structure than Gwent (different phases to turns, playing multiple cards in a turn or playing instantly to react to something your opponent does) the cards are also waaaaaaaaay more complicated. Its pretty normal to have a game with 5 cards in play that have as much text as collusion. There are cards like scenarios that have more phases and cant be interacted with. There are cards that turn your land into monsters that still act like land and cant be killed. If you have any card with an ability in play you have to click "confirm choice" just to not use the ability after every time your opponent does something. Its clearly a deep game with a lot of thought and decades of refinement from the paper game (at least I assume it is?) but for a completely new player jumping out of the tutorials into actual matches was like diving from the kiddie pool into the Marianas trench. I would spend half of my turn reading a book of text just to decide I didn't have a way to really interact with what they were doing and then end my turn. In short, the game clearly tries to onboard new players but the learning curve is so steep that in order to learn on your own you will clearly just need to suffer for awhile.

One thing that I noticed right away was how much better Gwent looks. Plenty of people have pointed out the difference in art style between Magic's "high fantasy" and Gwent's more gritty realism but I mean overall it really made me appreciate how much time goes into the aesthetics of Gwent. The game boards (backgrounds that you play on) in magic look like they came from Warcraft 3 with cartoonish over-the-top lava pits and magical orbs and things. None of the cards are animated and I don't think any of them have voice lines other than metal clanking or an animal sound. The animations amount to "this card bumps into that card" along with a few ways to show statuses. Gwents choice of leader skins also has nothing similar going on in Magic, while its a minor point I actually like it a lot more now that I have played without it.

I'll briefly mention the little bit of research I did on Youtube as well. I did a search for "Magic the Gathering Arena beginner guide" last night to try and get some more info and hopefully inform myself a bit on the economy, building decks etc. Most of the videos I found were over 30 min and would cover some basics and then launch into complex mechanics, how to maximize all of the different currencies etc. Maybe its because I was tired or maybe I'm just stupid but I found the info to be only slightly less dense than just playing the game and figuring it out myself. As a side note the folks who were doing the explaining did not come close to the charisma of some of the heavyweights in Gwent Youtube/ Twitch like Freddybabes, Fuchsia Briefs, Specimen or the much missed McBeard who make learning more about the cards and the game more enjoyable. I know that might be because the videos are targeted towards kids but I think reading walls of text and memorizing billions of cards and keywords probably doesn't give one much "joie de vivre" either.

In summary I'm glad I took the time to check out another game and put in perspective how good we have it in Gwent. Is it perfect? Absolutely not. Are there decisions that the devs make that I can't for the life of me understand? Sure. Are there annoying cards and mechanics dominating the meta right now? Definitely. However Gwent still has a ton to offer and I can't really see myself picking up another card game and putting the time into it that I have with Gwent. I'm going to keep playing MTGA every once in awhile since its still pretty fun but I doubt it will every be more than just messing around for me.

Thanks for coming to my Ted talk.