5 Essential Beginner Tips for MTGA

Last updated on May 23, 2024

This post is was written by Patrick Armstrong from The Nerd Stash.

Crime Novelist | Illustration by Izzy

Whether you just learned how to tap a Swamp or you know the ’95 banned list off the top of your head, MTG Arena is a great way to experience Magic: The Gathering. It can also be an overwhelming one, even for a player such as myself who plies his trade writing game guides for The Nerd Stash. From deathtouch and double strike to cloak and disguise, keyword abilities and other mechanics take time to learn, let alone master.

All is not lost for those new to the planes, however. Arena’s tutorial provides a strong foundation, and with some pointers, you’ll win a dragon‘s horde of Gold, gems and cards in no time. Here are 5 essential beginner tips for Magic: The Gathering Arena.

Complete the Color Challenge and Jump In!

So you’ve downloaded Arena. What should you do first? The tutorial walks you through the basics, but after completing it, there are a lot of options. Drafts, Historic, Standard, and Limited only scratch the surface of what MTGA holds. The Color Challenge is the perfect place to start. In it, you pick a mono-color deck to complete five battles. You even keep the cards after. Although the Color Challenge decks aren’t amazing, they’re enough to get you started. Even better, they teach you fundamental skills that you’ll carry with you forever.

After completing Color Challenge, Jump In! is your best bet. This mode lets you combine two half-decks from various Alchemy themes. Test them against other players’ Jump In! decks as much as you want, and when you’re done you keep all the cards. These decks are much better than those in the Color Challenge, and adding one or two to your collection gives you enough to start building your own. My Black-Red Suspects Phyrexian deck went 3-0 before I swapped it for a Black-Green Hungry Depths deck, and I’m delighted with both. It costs 1000 Gold or 200 Gems to enter, and you can grind that much Gold with just a couple of Daily Challenges.

You Don’t Need to Learn Everything at Once

Trying to learn everything at once is impossible. Fortunately, you don’t need to know it all to play. Core mechanics like tapping, drawing cards, and attacking apply to every deck. Once you know the basics, you just need to learn what your own deck does and go from there. While it’s tempting to study the full list of keywords until you’ve drained Arena’s knowledge like an illithid eating a brain, don’t. There’s an easier (and more fun) way to learn.

It’s okay to learn what your opponent’s cards do in the middle of a match when you see them for the first time. Don’t recognize trample? No worries. Here’s what to do:

• Click on the card for a detailed view.
• Check out the pop-up window beside it for keyword explanations.
• Look at the board and consider what your opponent might be planning.

It’s fine if you don’t understand all the tricks and underlying strategy yet. Understanding the stack and card synergies takes time. There’s no shame in losing to something you’ve never seen before (or in general), so why pressure yourself? If you’re having fun and learning, you’re doing great.

Grind Gold Instead of Buying Gems

Color Challenge and Jump In! get you started, but you’ll soon want more cards. For that, you need either gold or gems. There’s no doubt that gems (the game’s premium currency) speed up progression in Arena. Still, free-to-play is a perfectly viable approach, even though it requires more grinding for gold. There are two main ways to get gold:

• Play matches
• Complete daily quests

Quests award you with gold and Mastery XP for doing things like casting 20 red spells, playing 25 lands, or earning wins. If you don’t like one of the quests available, you can click it to swap it for a new one. You’ll lose any progress on it if you do, but if you’re a die-hard Blue-Black player who keeps rolling Green-White quests, it might be worth it. The best part is daily rewards and daily quests and reward you just for playing the game. Since you can buy packs for 1000 gold in the shop, you can steadily build your collection without spending any real money.

Battle Passes have appeared in games as varied as Hearthstone and Fortnite, and MTGA has its own version: the Mastery Pass. Like BPs in other games, Mastery has a basic and premium tier. You’ll earn more if you pay for premium, but you’ll still earn a free booster pack every other level on the basic tier. Resist the urge to spend real money chasing cards, at least at first. Until you’re experienced, a collection full of mythics won’t help much anyway.

Diversify Your Color Palette

With so many fun decks, mechanics, and strategies, it’s easy to fall in love with one of them. There’s nothing wrong with devoting yourself to a single playstyle, but the more diverse your experience, the better you’ll be. Even if you know you’re a Goblin Burn superfan, it’s a good idea to play with other colors and mechanics a bit. Playing with a deck is one of the fastest ways to learn how an opponent of that type thinks. The better you understand their strategy, the better you can counter them. While this matters in casual games, it’s vital in ranked where players tend to have a stronger understanding of their opponents’ decks and win conditions.

Wrap Up

Tidy Conclusion | Illustration by Bastien L. Deharme

Building your first deck can be intimidating. It’s often easiest to start with a simple idea, mechanic, or theme to build around. One of the best methods is to copy an existing deck and modify it from there. That way you have a starting framework, giving your creativity room to breathe while providing the assurance of a decent foundation. Leisurely building a deck from your collection gives plenty of time to theorycraft. Draft is a different world, since you’re not only under time pressure but also fighting over valuable cards with other players.

Arena Tutor is an excellent stepping stone and well-worth the download, especially since it’s free. During a draft, it’s easy to mess up your mana curve or fall for a tempting rare when the uncommon next to it would help you more. Arena Tutor helps you avoid some of the easiest traps to fall into when you’re new. Even once you have more experience with the game, the app is a convenient way to predict wins, track played cards, and recommend picks that work with your strategy. It won’t turn you into Jace overnight, but it’s a great bit of magic to add to any planeswalker’s spellbook.