Playing Magic: The Gathering amidst the Quarantine

by: MTGjaytee

We are a bunch of regular casual players at your old local game shop. Doing magic things, meeting up and grabbing take a way food. You'd find us at Grey Ogre Games every Friday night playing and test-playing our freshly brewed standard decks.

We've always enjoyed the banter - mostly dissing each other’s home brews and even with the rise of Magic: The Gathering Arena last year we've never missed coming to our local game shop (LGS) for some Friday Night Magic (FNM).

However, given the recent situation meeting physically had recently come to a full stop, my friends and I have now been stuck working from home for exactly 3 weeks now. The physical banter may have stopped, but the quarantine caused by the COVID-19 virus has not stopped us from doing what we love – playing Magic: The Gathering.

So while salivating about the new set: Ikoria release  – I’m very happy and excited to share that we’ve just finished our 3^rd Magic: The Gathering Arena tournament - virtual reality style! On the first week that the FNM was cancelled 4 of us decided to download the MTG companion app. Our LGS was still selling the FNM packs for the same entry fee, so we had gone down and bought the packs a few days before – and then finally Friday came!

First, we created a Whatsapp group – and then one of us hosted the event through the MTG Companion app  – super easy you just need to enter the code provided by the app that my friend sent to the rest of the group. And you just input that in your own app, and once everyone's joined with one click – Round 1 pairings were up. After 3 rounds we finished the game and decide to open the packs we bought from the LGS via ZOOM.

On the second week (Friday night!) – another LGS decided to host an FNM via MTGMelee – this time we were 32 players. The experience was great as well! We were able to battle it out to other players who you didn’t actually know and it was facilitated via platform.

The Saturday after the FNM – we did a standard showdown and yet again used the MTG companion app – I noticed we were getting better at this and our virtual group was getting bigger, there were 6 players now!

User Interface 

I found that the MTG companion app for anything unofficial it was super easy to use, you just need to provide a code and any player can join!

You can then see sample pairings here:

What about the prizes?

What we usually do is basically open everything – we then go via our standings and the player with the highest standing gets to pick first, then 2^nd highest players goes next and so on. Our pile below:

As someone who's pretty old school, I feel that paper Magic is still the ultimate experience - and being to acquire the actual physical cards is at the apex. However given the situation - we are on to our next FNM virtual style! Please do comment reach out if you would like to join one of our sessions!