Magic The Gathering: Arena

There are lots of different formats to play: magic.wizards.com/en/formats Formats define which cards are allowed, but also the rules, like max. deck size, if a sideboard can be used, etc.

That said, the most common formats are standard and historic. Standard has kind of a rolling sequence of card sets that are allowed (yearly rotation), just recently there was an update that delisted a lot of card sets and there is a new one coming out every couple of weeks that is then added to standard. This keeps things fresh and players who want to play this format will have to update their decks when cards from older sets get delisted.

Historic is more or less the same as standard, but all cards are allowed.

I mostly play Alchemy, which is a version of standard that features some special cards that only exist digitally, not as physical cards. It's also subject to the changing card set as standard is.

At the moment, the following card sets are active in standard:
- Brother's War
- Dominaria
- Streets of New Capenna
- Kamigawa: Neon Dynasty
- Innistrad: Crimson Vow
- Innistrad: Midnight Hunt

There is also a kind of "base game" set, which is always active. I think the cards are marked with A and the year number, like A23.

For progressing I suggest doing your dailies in standard or alchemy play (not ranked, although you can if you want), and collect gold and stuff from the mastery progress bar. Then from time to time play a Jump In! event (note which decks you've already used and pick new ones), so that you can get the cards from these decks. Eventually you will have a lot of gold. You can either buy card packs with this gold (best not buy packs from the newest card set, because you will get those from the mastery rewards, but buy packs that are still within standard, if you wanna play standard).

Or you can save up the gold to buy draft tokens with, which is a mode in which you can win gems, the usually-paid-for-with-real-money-currency. With these gems you can then buy the mastery pass, which basically unlocks a second progress track in your season mastery meter that gives you lots of additional goodies such as card packs. There is also stuff in the shop sometimes that can only be bought with gems. Drafts are kind of advanced, because you have to make a deck by picking 1 card from a pack and then passing it along to the next player. You then receive a pack from another player that has already picked a card, and this continues many times until you have a full deck together. As you can imagine, it takes a bit of experience to be able to decide which cards to pick to form a deck that has a chance in this mode.

I usually go with blue + another color, because blue usually has lots of flying creatures, which is often a deciding factor in these draft matches. Also, pick some ridiculously expensive and powerful creatures as well, because those matches tend to go on longer than standard matches, because people don't have top card synergies, so often you'll have more than 10 lands on the table before the match is over.

The rest is just having fun by building your own decks with cool card synergies. Maybe start with one of the basic decks that you like, or maybe with a Jump In! deck that worked well for you, and try to understand its card synergies and then search for cards with the same keywords to improve these synergies. Then when you've played a lot of matches with a deck, you notice what it's good against and weak against, and so you can try to fortify the weaknesses. Or fortify the strengths and make it a niche deck that you only pick from time to time to have fun with.

The limiting factor when building decks is basically wildcards. Those let you "buy" any card directly by "spending" a wildcard of the appropriate rarity. You get those wildcards from opening lots of packs, and rare wildcards are always in short supply, because it's often the rare cards with the most interesting abilities.

There's a lot in MTGA that I still haven't tried out. When a new card set is release, I mostly only play Alchemy ranked until I'm in Platinum, then I switch to Alchemy unranked and do my dailies and try to amass gold to buy draft tokens. Then once a season I play the drafts and try to get enough gems to buy the mastery pass. Rinse and repeat, and from time to time, I work on my decks or build a whole new one. I have about three decks that I win more often than I lose with. The other decks are mostly shit but have funny card interactions that I play from time to time to get some variation from my powerhouse decks.

My favourite mode would actually be limited, which is what I also played most often back in the day with physical cards. But limited is very "expensive" in MTGA, so I can't play it often. So far, only once per new card set released. Also, limited events seem to be rarely available anyway.