Discussion related to Magic's digital games, including MTG Arena and Magic Online (or MODO).
Learn more about MTG Arena and Magic Online!
Online is built on decades of spaghetti. You can buy sell and trade digital cards from every era of the game and play any format. It's not pretty.
Arena only has cards from the past 10 years or so. It's pretty but there is no card economy. You grind to earn currency or use real money buy packs of trading cards that you can't actually trade with people. It's pretty and has animations.
Still both are getting all the new cards and such?
based purely on the launch page for mtgo, yes. They're both up to date.
Arena gets all Standard legal cards but supplementary decks and sets only sometimes. For instance, the Edge of Eternities Commanders are on Arena but none of the other cards from the commander decks were added. Arena did get Lord of the Rings and Modern Horizons 3 but never received any other supplemental sets (though they haven't really printed any new ones lately so that hasn't mattered).