Magic: The Gathering is one of the most popular card games in the world. In the late 90s, a beta opened for a client known as Magic: The Gathering Online, this client is still going strong even today, just held back by the old UI. After some years, in the 2010s, Magic: The Gathering Arena has released on PC, Android and many other platforms. This experience launched the game into the mainstream, propelling the sales of paper format. However, it was quite buggy on release, and it is still buggy today. We at Infinite Start will cover all the issues the new-old client still has compared to the 90s one.
It’s not Magic anymore
As of 2025, an update that was rolled out on 2024 is causing severe issues with shader compilations that get out of hand and crash the game. This happens every time a player interacts with anything that displays some semblance of 3D effects. It was also reported for years that this problem was building up, however, WOTC never did anything to fix this issue that plagued so many players. It is a very easy thing to fix too from a programming standpoint, the only implementation that needs to be done is just adding settings in the game. A mere list of presets does not help to configure the experience of players.
Being able to disable 3D models and animations would help a ton to soft patch the issues caused by them. Even on strong systems, this issue persist and its ruining paid ranked matches by many users. No wonder there’s a huge movement towards switching to Magic: The Gathering Online, which is now the preferred client for many. Despite its clunky UI, MTGO still provides plenty of things that aren’t available in MTGA. If WOTC wants to stop bleeding players, they should do something to fix it.
