Planeswalkers wanted: How Magic the Gathering Arena hooks new users
The Journey Begins
Hail adventurer, not from around these parts are you? How could I tell? Well, I had that same look on my face not but a month ago myself. As an avid gamer, I always enjoy beating my fellow gamers, and as an engineer I also enjoy finding the best ways to do things. Over many years, I’ve learned that for me, card games hit the sweet spot of competition and problem solving.
There are a lot of card games out there, both in real life (Keyforge, Pokémon) and online (Hearthstone, Legends of Runeterra). Having played some of these games for quite a few years already, I knew I wanted to play something less random than Hearthstone, something I could do in person like Keyforge and something that was easy to learn, but hard to master. When figuring out which game would scratch this itch the most, the clouds parted, an angel came down from the sky and uttered the words “Magic the Gathering”. Designed by Wizards of the Coast, Magic has been around since before I was born, has an active player base (yay socializing with real people) and a great online game client in the form of Magic the Gathering Arena (MTG Arena) so I could sharpen my skills before spending the money on real cards. As I got into MTG Arena, I noticed how refined and smooth of an experience it was interacting with the app and learning the rules of the game. As someone who wants to get into product management, I thought I could use this opportunity as a new user to break down my experience of joining the community, as well as learn more about the tips and tricks great designers and product managers use to hook customers into their products well enough that some nerd online decided to write a 3000+ word article on the subtleties of their customer acquisition process.
The First Battle, and the 4 Afterwards
Once I decided to download the app and make my account (two topics in which multiple articles could be written about), I was greeted by a British ball that mentioned something about a battle, weird. This is where the first product management tip comes into play, reducing decision fatigue as much as possible. Once I made my account, I was immediately pulled into the game and plopped in front of an angry elf.
Think of your mental wellbeing for the day like a tank of gas in a car. Every decision you make throughout the day uses some of that gas. Decisions like deciding what shirt to wear will use a little bit of gas, and more complex decisions like deciding the best way to discover the root cause of a problem take exponentially more gas. As your gas tank gets more and more depleted, decision fatigue increases. This means that your decision making goes from getting a bit cloudy, to thinking eating peanut butter out of the jar is a totally fine dinner. Product managers and designers understand that the less decisions the user has to make or the easier the decision is to make, the more likely a user will be to appreciate the product, and continue to use it. This is especially critical since you can only make one first impression, if product managers screw up here, the customer acquisition cost is not only wasted, but they have burned the lead entirely, in the same way that if you try a new restaurant and your food comes out burnt, you’re not going to go back.
The first tutorial does a great job of teaching you the fundamental rules of the game: how to play cards, the cost of playing cards and how you use those cards to defeat your opponent. It keeps the mechanics simple by using basic cards and walks you through everything, highlighting the next rule of product management, leveraging multiple teaching methods to engage users. The first tutorial mission could have just been the orb talking to you about all of these things, but instead, you drag and move the highlighted cards yourself with explanations and imagery backing you up along the way. Some people would have been perfectly fine listening to an explanation of what everything does, other people would be fine just playing the highlighted cards themselves, and other people would have been fine with a picture flipbook, but by combining all 3 of these learning styles into one lesson plan, product managers are able to make sure that most users learn these key principles one way or another.
Magic can be a complicated game that can get overwhelming very quickly if you’re a new user, so an important thing that the product managers and designers have to consider is keeping progress slow and steady. The remaining 4 tutorials slowly add in new features and take great care in teaching users about cards with multiple mechanics. While it doesn’t teach you everything about the game, it gives you enough of the language to be able to google concepts and interactions to expand your knowledge such as learning why the damn monkey, Ragavan, Nimble Pilferer, is a good card.
Another subtle thing the tutorial does is make the user feel good about themselves. It is satisfying for the user to be seeing victory screens all of the time when they learn how to do something. This feeling creates a pavlovian response through positive reinforcement, which I believe has an impact on how likely new users are to make it through the tutorial experience and become active players.
Every Adventure Begins with a Single Deck
Once you make it through the tutorial (and about 650 words, good on you), you are greeted with a secondary set of tutorials called the colour challenges. These challenges take the opportunity to show off how the five colours of Magic The Gathering work and what their strengths/weaknesses are. This mode acts as a puzzle box, it gives the designers the ability to create a consistent and repeatable environment for players to learn the new mechanics and tricks in isolation. Since there are 5 colours, each with 4 challenges and one match at the end to put it all into practice, it gives new players a much more in depth understanding of the mechanics than just the 5 tutorial matches, and teaches new players strategies and patterns to look out for when playing decks in the future.
As a new player, once you are done the initial colour challenges, every day you are given additional challenges to complete which reward you with more decks and cards to play and learn with. Huge kudos to the product managers because once you complete all of the challenges, you end up with 15 decks, all with unique cards, which is a significant amount to start a collection with versus some of the other, more mainstream online card games like Hearthstone.
Writing your Own Story
Once you make it through the colour challenges and tutorials, this is where the experience really opens up and you can start to explore what experience you want to have when playing the game. Your main choice is what kind of game modes you want to play and MTG Arena has 3 main ways to play: standard, ranked and draft. Product managers understand the importance of making sure that there is something for everyone in what they make, so being able to understand their audience and the tendencies they have is critical in making features that any given audience will love.
Standard play is for people who enjoy playing the game. They don’t want to get involved with what decks win the most or becoming #1 in the world. They just like Magic, and enjoy playing decks that do fun things or have fun themes. Ranked play is Magic’s competitive format. This mode is all about creating the best decks, piloting them in the most efficient way, to win matches and become the best player. Draft play is the most unique format. Each player is given a set of booster packs and you and a group of players must build a deck using cards from these booster packs and face off against each other using them (which is incredibly fun to do in person, I must say!). All of these modes reward different players and different habits or skills, but, at the end of the day, the most important thing is having fun, and the game does a great job at allowing players to have fun in their own way.
Within each of these game modes, you are allowed to use different cards and make whatever decks you want, which leads to even more diversity in a player’s choice on top of the game modes themselves. Do you like using big flashy combos of cards to suddenly bring foes down from full health to defeated in one turn? Do you like aggressively taking over the board with lots of minions? Do you like controlling your opponents and slowly grinding the life out of them? With thousands of cards available and 60 cards in a deck, the possibilities are endless and the experimentation is never ending!
As I mentioned in the previously, as a new player, you get daily challenges to play certain kinds of cards and as a reward, you get decks. To build on that theme, there is also a permanent system where everyday you log on and complete challenges, you are rewarded with in-game currency. The requirements for the challenges can be completed in any of the above-mentioned game modes, so it is really more just a way to improve the experience of the game for the people who play it. When I log on and play everyday, based on the challenges that are presented to me, I am influenced to play certain decks and certain game modes. If my challenge is to use green cards, I will use a deck that features those green cards and if my challenge is to summon a lot of creatures, I will use a deck that summons a lot of creatures.
This daily challenge rhythm creates a habit, unlike my workout schedule. Every day MTG Arena gives me a new challenge with a reward so I am incentivized to go online and play the game to make sure I get the daily reward. This is arguably the most important thing the product managers have done to make sure this is a successful product, yes the game needs to be fun, but the product managers want you to play every day. The idea is that if product managers can form a habit in their users and reward users for product engagement, they can create positive feedback loops that not only get players engaged, but get them more engaged over time as they fall into a pattern. At some point, quitting these daily challenge based games becomes harder and harder due to the sunk cost fallacy. The sunk cost fallacy is the tendency to continue doing something just because you have already spent money or time doing it, whether or not the current and future costs outweigh the benefits.
The Voice of Temptation
All of what I’ve mentioned above doesn’t cost money to take advantage of, however, free doesn’t keep the lights on for large corporations that design products like this. Wizards of the Coast takes advantage of the captive audience they have and works to sell people online goods in the game through piece-meal purchases that are called microtransactions. Increasing the quantity and value of these microtransactions are the KPIs these product managers really care about. Over time, product managers have come up with a lot of clever ways to increase user spending. Now I am not saying MTG Arena is any better or any worse than any other mobile freemium experience, but I want to take this opportunity I have here to talk about all sides of product management. The best way MTG can get you to begin to take advantage of microtransactions in the game is to break your mental spending barrier and get you to spend money in the first place. This is facilitated in one of 2 ways: premium currencies and the welcome bundle.
The main way you will spend money in MTG Arena is premium currencies. In order to engage with any element of purchasing in MTG Arena (besides the welcome bundle), you first need to buy their premium currency, gems. In the same way that restaurants not putting dollar signs next to the prices of food help disconnect customers from the money they are spending, premium currencies take that disconnect up to a whole other level by making you buy an intermediary currency in order to get premium items and bundles within the ecosystem. There is also an issue of “getting a deal” as well. In the picture below, it shows that you are able to get “deals” on currency where spending more money gets you a higher premium currency to dollar ratio. The amounts of currency also tend to clash with the prices of certain items (e.g. 3 packs of cards cost 600 gems vs the smallest amount of gems you can purchase being 750), which means that you will be primed to buy more currency to use it all up if it doesn’t line up with the initial amount of currency you originally purchased.
The more subtle way Wizards of the Coast try to break your spending barrier is through the welcome bundle. The welcome bundle is purposely built to be a ridiculously good deal, the welcome bundle is worth $26.77 based on the individual prices of the items, all for a total cost of $6.49! If this shows you anything, it should show you how important breaking this first spending barrier is to them, that they are willing to “lose” $20 of optimal value, just to get you spending in their ecosystem! It is even placed next to more expensive things to make it look like an even better deal!
Now that you have gems, the first and most obvious thing you can do with them is buy packs of cards. This practice within the industry is called a “loot box” where you, as a customer, are given a random box of stuff in hopes you get what you are looking for. I will give credit to Wizards of the Coast for allowing you to get “wildcards” which can be redeemed for any card you need, but when you need 60 cards to create the most basic deck, a wildcard here or there doesn’t help very much. This mechanic of randomly getting cards combined with the desire to “complete the collection” can lead to a vicious cycle, where individuals who have addictive tendencies (something I am not immune to) are slowly lured into spending more and more real life money on online products.
With cards in hand, now gets to the fun part, actually playing the game. But when you go into the game itself, there are lots of opportunities for customization, and opportunities for customization means opportunities for spending. The tie between looking good and feeling good in game is the same way as it is in real life. If you have a great outfit in real life that you think makes you look good, you will feel good, so if you have a cool character portrait, fancy deck sleeves and alternative art cards in game, you will feel good too. Jim Sterling made a great video on this topic, but the idea of it essentially boils down to, yes, it may just be cosmetic, but if it makes players feel better, it still has the same addictive qualities.
“Game play is more than killing or being killed, in online games especially, gaining the ability to visually stand apart from the rank and file players is hugely rewarding and games know that, otherwise they wouldn’t tie cosmetics so heavily into their reward systems, would they?” — Jim Sterling
A recent innovation that acts as both as a component of the habitualization flywheel as well as a vehicle for further spending is the idea of the “season pass”. The season pass acts as a secondary set of challenges that rewards you with card booster packs and special alternative art cards. This season pass lasts until the next set of cards comes out, which adds a time pressure to making sure you can milk all the rewards out before its too late! On top of the limited time nature, there are 2 tracks, a free track and a premium track. You can pay an additional $26 to get access to a rewards track that has more and better rewards.
Magic the Gathering has been around since 1993 and MTG Arena has been around since 2018. With Wizards of the Coast and Digital gaming bringing in a net revenue of $360 million a quarter with 32% YOY growth, this is a strong signal to Hasbro, Wizards’ parent company, to pump more money into MTG Arena and innovate even further. This combined with the fact that the mobile games market as a whole is worth $27.7 billion in 2021 shows that the nuclear arms race of microtransaction innovation has only just begun.
Conclusion
At the end of the day, a product is only as good as the people who design and manage it, and Wizards of the Coast has made a great product in the form of MTG Arena. While there are a lot of things that product managers can do to make a fun product, at the end of the day, products are designed to generate revenue for the companies that build them. There are plenty of tricks of the trades that product managers can use to increase their key performance indicators and hook customers in and I hope reading this article makes you appreciate all of the clever thinking that goes into designing great products.
