They want you paying money for gems, bleeding those gems over time, and getting you to re-up. They don't want you playing non-rotating constructed formats. Ultimately, all of Arena is built towards funneling people back toward the gem shop.

'Well just don't let mobile clients queue for EDH lobbies!' This isn't a wise investment of development time or OpEx resources in the long term if it functionally limits the player pool to those playing on PC or very large tablets. You have to develop some sort of hacked together scrolling/expanding/contracting system for four boardstates that are known to get gigantic. The scope of Magic is fucking gigantic, and when the only really celebrated way to play multiplayer features a card pool in excess of 20k unique cards, you have to draw the line somewhere.Īdditionally, aspirations towards mobile phone screen sizes and resolutions would make representing your average EDH game visually all but impossible. From everything I have seen of the project, the team was comically under-resourced and knocking off multiplayer support seems like just basic Project Management 101.

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