As a life-long fan of everything to do with Magic the Gathering it really pains me to see their digital offerings in 2017. If you don’t want to play paper Magic (which is as fun as it’s ever been), your options are to either play the eternally janky Magic Online or Magic Duels (Free) which has a lot of annoying deck restrictions that keep you from duplicating your favorite paper Magic decks among other issues. Early last year we posted about rumblings of Magic Digital Next which aimed to bridge the gap between both online offerings.

Well, yesterday Wizards of the Coast released a statement from Chris Cocks, the current President of the company, further outlining their digital plans, highlighting increased investment in the teams that are building out the digital side of Magic. Here’s the part that’s relevant to our interests:

We are reimagining digital versions of Magic and other Wizards games. We recently created the Digital Games Studio, a group of all-stars led by industry veteran Jeffrey Steefel. Jeffrey’s team includes experienced Wizards game designers and industry talent from Dire Wolf Digital, Valve Corporation, Cryptic Studios, Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment, Activision, BioWare, and many others. The Magic Online team is now included in this group, as well as digital art and game design. They’re all thinking about how players might tap mana and prepare spells in the future, and I can’t wait for you to see what they’re working on.

I really, really, really hope that this means some kind of actual well-made competitive iteration of Magic for tablets. It’d appear that on the digital side of things, Hearthstone has completely stolen the spotlight from Magic. Individual Hearthstone streamers will often draw a bigger audience on Twitch on random afternoons than Wizards will on professionally produced Magic events they stream. A modern version of digital Magic the Gathering might turn that around.

I just hope they do something. Don’t get me wrong, I love Hearthstone too, but I’ve scheduled entire decades of my life around attending Friday Night Magic and other Magic events. Nothing would make me happier (and more broke) than to see a Magic Online tablet client on the overall level of quality of Hearthstone.