jakob187's Game of the Year for 2018...and HELLO!

It's been a year since I bounced off the site to put some things in life together. Those things didn't get put together. Actually, it went terrible. However, I've bounced back from those things. There's lots of bouncing.

Anyways, I figured I'd bounce back on and put my two cents in on something way too early because there's honestly nothing else I care about playing lately, so my GOTY isn't going to be changing.

Magic The Gathering: Arena.

That's my Game of the Year, folks.

Despite having some flaws (terrible system for handling duplicate cards, Standard-only formats and cards, no rewards past 15 wins, lack of friends list and private matches), it's Magic the Gathering in video game form...the way that it should be. It's excellent. It runs well. It makes me want to collect Magic cards all over again. It brought me back from my year-long hiatus from Magic the Gathering.

Once this moves out of beta and becomes feature complete, I'm pretty sure I won't have any other games that I'll want to play other than Path of Exile...which would be my second GOTY for 2018. The Delve and Incursion leagues have handily proven that Grinding Gear Games is the king of ARPGs, and Blizzard should just put Diablo to rest at this point.

Anyways, that's it. If you haven't played MTG Arena, you should, even if you know nothing about MTG.

I disagree with your opinions, but I respect them.

Welcome back(?) duder. Honestly, I've heard a lot of positive things about MTG Arena, but I simply just don't know if I have room in my heart to go down the endless dark void of CCGs. But if I did, I'd certainly go full Magic over ever picking up Hearthstone again.

So as of today, they have added the ability to directly challenge your friends, as well as a TON of other improvements for interactions. The game plays soooooooo much better now, and I didn't even know if was playing that poorly.

Moreover, it's version 0.9, which means they're getting really close to full release. Hopefully, the Vault situation is solved by EOY.

@arbitrarywater: Thanks, duder. Also, MTG > Hearthstone. I haven't been able to touch Hearthstone in forever on a serious level because the deck archetypes never really change much, and it just gets too boring for me.

@sweep: Still want you inside me, you tasty muthafucker you!

Been obsessed with Magic this year, both paper and online. Arena is much better ever since they made actions resolve faster, it's pretty good now.

I was crazy deep into that Puzzle Quest: Magic game, but that's about the extent of my experience with MTG as a whole.

If I utterly despise the seedy business model of paper Magic, will I be similarly repulsed by Arena? I'm not willing to support anything resembling that hive of gambling, speculation and laundering, that Wizards enables but plays dumb about publicly because they're not willing to come clean about their intentions and put a direct price tag of $400/year on their game. (I guess it could be worse -- they could explicitly sanction the secondary market and somehow profit directly off it. Good thing no one is shameless enough to- oh wait.)

Though I guess the other part of why I bailed on Magic, was the season of shameless midrange value decks that culminated in goddamn Siege Rhino. (And then, oh no, Siege Rhino pushed Melira Pod over the edge in Modern. Better ban Rhino Pod.) If Wizards is still pushing high-power boring cards then I'll probably lose interest pretty quickly.

@fnrslvr: It is really viable to keep grinding away at the game (magic arena) and not have to put a cent into it. Being a good magic player in general also helps make the grind faster, but even so it is really not bad