If you’ve never tried out Magic: The Gathering’s older, clunkier client Magic Online, now might be the right time to change that. That’s because Wizards of the Coast is making every single MTG card available for free until January 16, as an apology for downtime. However, you’ll need to act fast – you only have until Monday evening to redeem the code.
This offer from Magic Online blows just about every MTG Arena code we’ve ever seen out of the water. The promo code ‘REPAIR’ will net you an all access pass that will give you permission to use every Magic: The Gathering card on the client. They’re not free to keep, but you’ll have them until 10am PT on January 16.
And, in case you’re not aware, that’s a far, far larger card pool than you’ll find in the newer, more popular online Magic client MTG Arena. Whereas its younger sibling only has the most recent MTG sets (despite recent releases that expand the back catalog for Historic formats) Magic Online has cards that date as far back as 1996. This even includes Magic cards on the MTG Reserved List: Wizards is allowed to ‘print’ them digitally, after all.
So, if you’ve always wanted to try out the more expensive and high powered MTG formats like Vintage and Legacy, but don’t have thousands of spare dollars to throw into a trading card game, this could be a good opportunity. You can play with the Power 9, and even take part in Commander games on the client.
Magic Online launched in 2002, and was the main official way to play Magic: The Gathering online until the F2P MTG Arena came out in beta form in 2017. Since then, the older client been rather overshadowed by Arena, whose ease of use and free to play economy has been very successful at bringing in new players.
Magic Online still has plenty of advocates who’ll be quick to tout its many advantages over Arena. Now you’ve got a chance to scope it out for yourself for free.
Or, if you’d rather stick with Standard and Arena, check out the best MTG Arena decks, to up your win rate.