Gaming off the Beaten Path

  This one has been a long time coming, but I think I'm finally ready. It's finally time to talk about Magic the Gathering: Arena. I started playing, predominately on mobile, during the pandemic and I've always kind of toyed with the idea of reviewing it. It's sort of a video game, sort of not. It's modern and not super obscure and I feel like there is already a lot of content about it already. But I finally decided that I wanted to give my thoughts about it, even if it would be just another reviewer screaming into a void. I play a lot of MTGA and I have a lot of thoughts on it and besides, card gaming is still gaming. And while I am still relatively new to Arena, I am most certainly not new to MTG. I was eight years old when I first saw kids playing Magic in the lunchroom and I knew immediately that I had to get in on that. One of my friends taught me how to play and I started trying to get cards any way I could. Using my allowance, asking for them as gifts, beggin...

  Growing up, a lot of the games we played regularly ended up with nicknames for one reason or the other. It was pretty common to call Goldeneye: 007 just "Goldeneye," but we eventually just started calling it "Bond." Sure, there were other James Bond games out there, but at the time, this was the only one that mattered. PS1 skating titles 2Xtreme and 3Xtreme were "2X" and "3X" respectively.   Vigilante 8 came to be known as "Tomato Juice," get it, because V8? Final Fantasy VII was so essential to us that it was simply "VII," though not too many console series had seventh entries at that point anyway. This week's game, simply called the Pokemon Trading Card game, also had a nickname, one of my good friends came up with it and it stuck like glue: "The addiction game." Yeah, that pretty well covers it. Even after playing it some 20+ years later, I can't put my finger on just what was so enticing about a digi...