Ok, I recently started playing Magic: The gathering for the first time ever when I bought Duels of the Planeswalkers 2013 on the 360. I really the like game and I really like the fact that's it's a one-time investment where you buy the game and start playing, period. Unlike the IRL version where you have to keep buying cards over time.

Now, I have been toying with the idea of getting into Magic: The Gathering Online. However, I know that like IRL Magic, you have to buy individual cards and build decks albeit at a reduced price. There's also the fact that just creating an account costs $10. But you do get some freebies I think.

Therefore, I have a few questions to anyone that plays Magic: The Gathering Online:

How much do you think it would cost me to play MTGO with a deck that isn't awful?

Is there anyway to get Tickets (the game's currency) and cards other than buying them? Tournaments perhaps?

I read somewhere that the minimum resolution needed is 1024x768. If I start playing it, I would like to play on my netbook when I not at home but the resolution on that is 1024x600. Would MTGO still work correctly?

Any other information or opinions on this would be very much appreciated as I'm really on the fence about this.

Thanks.

My 2 pence. These games are there to bleed you dry. They thrive on getting players hooked, then using that to sell stuff way over price. Look at what Warhammer does.

Just my thoughts - set yourself a budget if you do go, and justify that budget to someone who is skeptical.

This. It was IMHO acceptable when the cards were physical cards that people had to buy, but for an online game, it's just a disgusting money grab.

It's also not a very good way to balance a game. I much prefer the way that the folks at Serpent's Tongue are doing it where the rarity of the card has little or nothing to do with the power, the main difference is just the ease of casting.

FWIW, I still have a ton of MTG cards from the mid '90s, and I should really play again sometime.

I believe the easiest way to play on a level playing field is to not open the boosters you get when you join and enter them into a sealed limited draft where 8 players all put their cards in and 'draft' one at a time from each pack as their passed around, that way you have an as equal chance as anyone in your 8 man draft at having the strongest 40 card deck, at least in theory, if you weren't playing against people who eat sleep and drink the format and have drafted it 100 times already...

That depends entirely on what format you want to play, and what you mean by "not awful". If you just want to play casually for fun, you can build decent decks for most any format for say, 10-20 dollars. Sure, you won't have all the fancy dual lands and the top rares, but you can hold your own in the causal room.
If you want to play more competitively, enter tournaments and all that jazz, it largely depends on the format you want to play. In Pauper (a format where only commons are allowed), you can get good decks for 20-40 dollars. If you want to play Standard or Modern, you would be looking at several hundreds for the best decks. Not directly. In tournaments you win booster packs, but you can then offload them (as well as cards you get that you don't want to hang on to, in the case of drafts) to bots for Tickets.
There are plenty of people who are "infinite", e.g. they win enough product to cover all the expenses, making MTGO essentially free. One format I would recommend as it is both cheap and fun is Momir Basic. This is an online-only format where all you need is a Momir avatar - which costs 10 bucks in the store, I believe - and a stack of basic lands. You can pay X mana and discard a card, and then you get a random creature with a manacost of X.
It's fun, cheap, and doesn't rotate, so you never need to invest anything more in that particular format. There are also tournaments for it, should you be so inclined.

I played tons of MTGO when it was in beta and "free" (in reality we got an allotment of points every so often to buy cards or enter tourneys).

I've also played MTG, though I do not anymore.

I have NEVER paid full price for a pack of cards, MTGO is one of the biggest scams ever. The only thing it has going for it, and I mean the ONLY thing is that there's always someone to play. If you find it hard to find someone, sure, maybe. But you can spend thousands on that game a year just to try and be a little competitive. You can't ever buy a discounted box of cheap boosters and open them and sell the ones you don't want to pick up the few you need.

Really, imo, find a different CCG to play online, MTGO is about the worst deal you could ever imagine. The concept is cool, it's simply ruined by a level of unprecedented greed that even Zynga couldn't get away with.

And if that's not enough, MTG has kind of jumped the shark with power creep, old cards used to be just fined as long as they were allowed in your play format. Everyone I speak to says old cards are underpowered now, which they went over a decade without doing. Sounds like a crap deal to me.

It saddens me that my intuition on that was correct. I never bothered to price things out on that front. But, buying digital cards struck me as a really bad idea for the consumer.

Personally, I still have all my original cards from years back, and even though I don't play anymore, I do still enjoy looking at them from time to time and have enough cards to be able to play several people just with my cards.

Thank you very much for your replies everyone. It's convinced to not bother with MTGO. I really do like Magic but I don't want to spend a small fortune to play it. I think I'll stick with Duels of the Planeswalkers 2013.

I really like trading/combat card games in general so does anyone have any recommendations for any that can be played in digital form?

Rather than spending any money at all ever, you can use Cockatrice instead. It's got all of the cards and it's completely free. It requires you to know the rules, though. It doesn't hold your hand with timings and triggers the way MTGO does, but you don't have to buy cards, either. You just pick a format, build your deck out of all of the cards that are legal for that format, and play.
 Only for creatures. The newer creatures blast the old ones out of the water completely, but there are a lot of old spells that are never coming back, including many old staples like Counterspell, Stone Rain, and Dark Ritual. Not to mention retardedly strong stuff like Hymn to Tourach or Yawgmoth's Will or Memory Jar. The removal spells have gotten better to cope with the creatures getting better, but there aren't really any combo decks anymore. At least, not in any of the modern formats.

I know I'm a bit late to the party here. I just wanted to mention that there is a format on MTGO that, in my opinion, is very worthwhile. It's called Pauper. The format's main rule is that decks can contain only common cards. Uncommon, rares, and the ultra rares or whatever they are called are not allowed.

The two major pauper formats are classic (any common cards from any available expansion) or standard (any common cards from the standard sets). You can get a competitive deck for 10-20 bucks at most. Buying new cards is as cheap as it gets. There are plenty of opponents and the metagame in standard Pauper is literally just as competitive, diverse, and evolving as the metagame in non pauper standard.

The pauper community is active and populated. There are player ran tournaments which are completely free to participate in, and have prizes such as cards and so forth.

Check out http://pdcmagic.com/ if you want more detail, or maybe I can answer questions here. I hardly play anymore, but MTG I think is the funnest card game I've come across, and I've tried more than I could possibly count.

If you do buy an MTGO account, then for fuck's sake, don't open the "Planeswalker Deck" you get free with the account. Trust me, you will be pulling your hair out over this shit later on if you do.

Last, if you get into Pauper, in the long run you could easily spend less than $60 total on digital magic cards. Maybe a little more, but I played for a while and didn't even spend $60. Some people might have an issue with not owning the actual cardboard cards, but really, I can't see why it makes a difference, especially considering how little you'd be spending.

IMO the Magic the Gathering video games are starting to become basically Madden with card updates yearly very overpriced and little to no innovations thus people complaining they want change.