So I've been in the closed Beta for awhile now and they just dropped the NDA today. There was supposed to be an account wipe and a switch over to the new progression system today, but that hasn't happened yet.

The old progression system was complete garbage, but it's gone now, so there's not much point in focusing on it. I'll just say that it was bad enough that literally 95% of the posts on the closed beta forums were about how much the progression system sucked. Several of us mathed it out and came up with it being approximately 13x LESS generous than Hearthstones when you factored in the differences between the two games and card pools.

Fortunately they scrapped that nonsense. The UI of playing is definitely designed to more closely resemble a physical game than MTGO does. Which is good for making things similar, and bad for letting you see all the cards super clearly. There's currently a stupid giant avatar head in the middle of your play area that makes it hard to click on your cards instead of the stupid giant head. This has been brought up frequently and hopefully it gets fixed. Cards are all "half cards" only showing artwork and power/toughness on the battlefield. Taps are at a 30 degree angle, instead of 90 like MTGO, again, I think to simulate paper, but it does make it slightly harder to tell what's tapped and what's not. They are also slightly desaturated which helps a little, but not enough.

The phases are more clunky than MTGO, and they're not very customizable yet. Like, you can select "full control" which means every possible stop always triggers, or you can click "auto" which means it will automatically skip every phase you don't have a spell to cast in. In other words, you put up with a billion click throughs or you give away a ton of info to your opponent.

The collection screen is worse than the current one on MTGO which is honestly just fucking impressive at this point. Why they can't/won't bring back the binders from the Leaping Lizards days and simply add a nice selection of filter buttons is beyond me.

Tapping mana is super annoying right now, dunno if that'll get fixed or not, lots of people are complaining about it, but we'll have to wait and see. Right now your cards reshuffle their order and location when you tap them. This goes for both attacking and blocking creatures and tapping lands. Complex combat/blocking is basically impossible in the game right now because of this.

If you've seen screenshots, you already know the game borrows HEAVILY from Hearthstone in design. Really wish they'd gone a little lighter on that, because it's not really a layout that works that great for MTG. Your screen just gets really cluttered. Lands are crammed into the bottom left corner, creatures in the center, artifacts and enchantments in the bottom right, and 'walkers go into the far right side of the screen. Emblems are far left. Honestly the play screen in general has an absurdly huge amount of wasted space on it, solely because they so slavishly copied Hearthstone's layout. This means your Graveyard (and your opponent's) basically don't exist as far as information. Same thing with Exile zone. But the use of screen real estate is just criminally bad, I'm playing on a 43" monitor and sometimes I have trouble making out the cards because they're so small. I would say only 1/2 of the screen is actually used to for playing info, and probably 1/4 of that is used for the stupid giant avatar heads and "play bar" idiocy.

Some of the animations and voice overs are cool, some are just annoying. Having flying creatures actually "fly" above the plane of the battlefield is fucking brilliant and really works.

I can't see them NOT eventually ditching the MTGO dinosaur, but I have no idea when they'll finally pull the plug on that. Let me know if you have any questions or want to know about anything specific and I'll try to answer.