The free Magic: The Gathering game has just launched and it's quite good

The free-to-play Magic: The Gathering Arena game launches today on PC, and it's rather good.

What Arena does marvellously is make sense of an otherwise complex card game. In Magic, for instance, there's a resource-gathering mechanic and card 'tapping', and an unusual block system - at least to my untrained eye. And when it all kicks off, it can be very hard to keep track of, so having a game do the hard work for you, and talk you through it, is very helpful.

This was especially obvious to me after playing my first game of Magic: The Gathering with physical cards earlier this week, and then playing it in Arena today. What I really like is how it's exactly the same game, which makes it, I believe, the only online collectible card game out there with a physical counterpart.

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