Why would Wizards make this the goal of Magic Arena? Well, in all honesty, the answer is that Wizards already have the rest of us hooked. Combine this with Wizards shuttering Magic Duels, which had a similar although much more limited goal, and Wizards' intentions are crystal clear: the primary goal for Magic Arena is to have a digital client that is accessible to less enfranchised Magic players. This has been mostly consistent from when we first heard about Magic Digital Next (for whom Magic Arena is one of its big projects) a couple of years ago to a conversation I had with head designer Chris Clay at Grand Prix Las Vegas. While the communication from Wizards sometimes becomes muddled thanks to its tendency to answer questions about Arena with phrases like "anything is possible" or "you never know," if you take what Wizards has said about Arena as a whole, the mission of the game is clear: to make Magic Arena the best digital Magic experience possible for new and intermediate players. While viewing Arena through the lens of Magic Online is in some ways inevitable, it's also not really fair to Arena itself, which deserves to stand on its own, to succeed or fail on its own merits, and not based on the checkered history of Magic Online. Wizards' original digital client's failings make people skittish about Arena, but at the same time, some of the more requested features for Arena (like chess clocks, the ability to auto-yield to triggers, and the like) are things that Magic Online has been doing for years. For better or worse, Arena has always been viewed through the lens of Magic Online. Others hope that it will change and mold itself into an eventual Magic Online replacement, fit for competitive play and huge big-money tournaments. Some people love the casual kitchen-table feel of the game's free-to-play aspects. With a successful launch out of the way and tons of people playing, watching, and talking about Magic Arena, the big question is where the client goes from here. This is where the community is divided.
However, on an average day, there are more people streaming Magic and more people watching Magic now than there were just a few months ago, and some of those sponsored streams have continued to play the game for fun, without being paid for the pleasure. While much was made about Magic beating Hearthstone in Twitch views during the big preview streaming event, this is somewhat deceiving thanks to the high number of sponsored streamers from other games. While there are certainly still some issues on Arena that need to be fixed, it's hard to consider the launch of the game anything short of a huge success. While Magic Online does a great job being a straightforward, no-frills port of the paper game into the digital world, Magic Arena feels like a video game where you happen to be playing Magic. In many ways, Arena is everything that Magic Online is not. While it still has some flaws, many people view it as the digital Magic game they have been waiting for, with sleek graphics and animations a free-to-play pat and fast, fun gameplay. So far, the game is getting a lot of praise, from both the free-to-play community and, more surprisingly, the professional Spike community on social media and Reddit.
When you combine this with the fact that Hasbro CEO Brian Goldner has repeatedly promised the game would "launch" in 2018 during various conference calls with investors, it's pretty safe to think of the start of open beta alongside Standard rotation and the release of Guilds of Ravnica as the official launch of Magic Arena. Magic Arena is now officially in open beta, which should probably be considered the official release of the game, considering that games have a tendency to stay in open beta for years and occasionally for their entire life cycle.