While a game like Hearthstone can be free-to-play, with incentives like pack discounts and daily quests, MTGO is not such a beast and often mirrors the same costs as its paper counterpart. The second is that players simply have a hard time reinvesting the same money they sunk into their paper collections on an online platform-buying their collections twice, so to speak.

This complexity has contributed to numerous version updates, interface changes, and complaints about software bugs throughout MTGO's lifespan. The first is that Magic: The Gathering has a much more complex rules engine than a game like Hearthstone or Elder Scrolls: Legends, which means that it's much more complicated to emulate that experience on a smaller platform. This was long before phone and tablet games and, for the past 15 or so years, it has been reserved primarily for purists and professionals. The first and longest running iteration of digital Magic was released way back in 2002 in the form of Magic: The Gathering Online or MTGO.

Play magic on pc free