The most disappointing news was that this is PC only.... i need this on my phone, i already have mtgo for the computer.
This game is 100% coming out for Windows, Mac and iOS, and very very likely Android as well. You do the initial beta for something like this on your biggest platform only as you want to focus on core mechanics and worry about the platform-specific stuff later. Hearthstone launched on Mac even though it spent a year in PC-only beta.
There's like nothing that suggests they're making less and less money off of MTGO
Events of all stripes have fired less over time and prices on lots of cards have declined. MTGO has a non-growing population and if you have a non-growing population, you're about to have a shrinking population. The Hasbro earnings reports have also hinted that digital has been a shrinking percentage of total MTG sales.
They'd have to program every single card that's in MTGO into Arena + enable trading and tickets for that to ever be a viable plan.
In WotC's view trading is basically a miserable legacy feature that they'd like to be rid of altogether in digital. The market wants CCGs with a self-contained pack/crafting economy and you can actually cover 100% of everything MTGO does from a gameplay standpoint without enabling a secondary market.
I legitimately do not understand what position you are taking here and it's particularly confusing given you were apparently on the "Digital Next is the MTGO replacement and WOTC will delete/make obsolete all existing collections" train as recently as a couple of months ago.
I think I've been pretty consistent in saying that any end to MTGO would take a long time just because there's no way to launch a new game with 25 years of cards on day one and there's no reason not to keep supporting MTGO while there are major things Arena can't do. Long-term though one of these platforms is a money-maker and one isn't so their incentive structure is gonna lean strongly on migrating everyone to the one that makes more money.
There isn't a single cogent reason I can think of to pretend this is a Duels replacement when it's secretly a MTGO replacement.
There's a reason that they basically didn't even reference Duels in the stream and all the FAQs were about MTGO -- that reason is that mostly nobody cares about Duels. This is a "replacement" in the sense that it's an onramp for new players (which every iteration of Duels was and no iteration of MTGO ever has been) but one that they don't have to abandon afterwards.
But there's plenty to suggest this? The very existence of Arena suggests that WotC feels that the MTGO zenith has long since been reached, curtailing redemption could be seen as them needing to shore up the margins, they haven't released numbers on it for years, they don't get separate advertising budget anymore, treasure chests and all the changes brought with them could also be seen as needing to shore up the margins, the list goes on and on.
Yeah, I mean, the core problem is just that the economic model is fundamentally fucked. You can get to a million players on Magic Online with a setup like they have, but paper Magic has like 25m active players and Hearthstone has 70m registered. Arena is a product that can unlock a ton of growth digitally that simply isn't possible with MTGO.
