Magic: My Favorite App

In the great world of smart phones and ubiquitous computing, modern marvels have arisen in the form of apps, or small purpose applications. These apps provide hours of utility and fun that make our modern life a little more engaging. We have seen a transition of things once only bound to the physical world move to the digital landscape. One such transition has been games. Once solely in the domain of our physical world, they have made the transition to arcade cabinets, then to computers, to purpose built consoles, and now to the smart phone. One such game that almost seemed impossible to move was the trading card game Magic: The Gathering.

Magic: The Gathering is a game with thousands of cards, with an infinite number of combinations of their unique interactions. The game is also considered Turing Complete enabling it to make a computer by various exploitation of its rules and game states. How this game was able to be made into a mobile phone application is nothing short of a miracle. The developer Wizards Digital Game Studios has been able to achieve this impossible task. A game once left only to be played by gathering friends together, going to specialty shops, has now been moved to the phone, freeing the game from its mortal shell, and taking a life in the digital world. Magic Arena, the mobile phone version of Magic: The Gathering, is my favorite app.

One of the things that makes me wonder is how this mobile phone game can take such different interactions between various cards and resolve them quickly and accurately. The cards and interactions do not just simply battle each other, but can create new cards, negate others, change the rules of the game, or even the win conditions. This small app can account for all these interactions, make fair and accurate rulings, and do it quickly. To me it is amazing how developers were able to take such a complicated game and make it small enough to be available in a smart phone.

The marvel of the smart phone is that it brings ubiquitous computing to the whole world. This computing allows us to do tasks that were once reserved for a proper terminal. With the app Magic: Arena you can play a game of magic quickly and without hassle. In the physical form of the game, set up can be quite cumbersome as individuals will need to shuffle their deck of cards, cut them, draw their starting hands. If they do not like their starting hands, they can mulligan which then starts the shuffling over again. Then space needs to be allocated to play the game. With the app Magic: Arena, this process can take under 10 seconds to play a game instead of several minutes, and without the hassle of freeing up space. Also, games can be played more quickly as time consuming actions like reshuffling decks during a game are automated through the app. It is incredible how quickly a game can be played without having to deal with physical cards. The speed and comfort of playing a game using the app is amazing.

What makes this app good is how it’s able to liberate access to this game. Once reserved to just card shops and a high barrier of entry due to its cost, now is free to play for those who are interested. The internet has liberated information and brought the world closer. The app Magic: Arena has been able to bring the game to everyone using the principles that an open and free internet provides. What makes this app good is its ability to bring joy to those who love the game. It may make mistakes due to errors with coding or have some limitations as it cannot make an infinite amount of tokens as can be done in the physical game. However, despite these limitations, anyone can enjoy Magic: The Gathering.