Magic: The Gathering Arena

What works

Playing itself works perfectly, as far as I can tell. However, many workarounds were needed to get there, and some glitches remain (see below).

The game installs with the official installer.

Then the game downloads many files.

The game connects to the game servers.

Deckbuilding, matchmaking, and playing - all work.

What does not

The installer displays several graphical glitches, making it essentially impossible to read anything. However if you've done the installation previously (e.g. on Windows), you can figure out to just click Next a lot, at the bottom. The early check box is "create a desktop icon?", which I declined. As far as I know there is no workaround for these graphical glitches.

When the game downloads files, for example right after the initial installation finishes, intermittently the program will crash, displaying a "gcThreadContext" error. This is apparently a known bug (https://bugs.winehq.org/show_b...). See below for a partial workaround to this.

Workarounds

In order for MtgaLauncher.exe to run, I had to install dotnet 4.7.2. This in itself is a process, which you can google for more details. But the basic procedure is:

- create a 32-bit wine prefix;

- uninstall mono from it;

- set windows version to XP;

- install .net 4.0 (download from Microsoft);

- set windows version to 7;

- set mscoree.dll to native in winecfg -> Libraries;

- install .net 4.7.2 (also download from Microsoft).

Alternatively, you can use the latest winetricks to install dotnet472 (download the latest winetricks from the winetricks github - it's just a single file: a huge shell script). But for me, doing it with winetricks took much longer, because it installs many more intermediate versions of dotnet.

To get around the gcThreadContext crash while downloading files, you can just restart the game when it happens, and it'll continue downloading where it left off. However, if you'd like to go do something else while it downloads, you can minimize how many times the crash occurs, by running like this:

WINEDEBUG=+relay,-debug wine MtgaLauncher
This makes the game run much slower, but it steadily makes progress downloading, and can do so unattended. Sometimes it still crashes, but it's much, much less. Once it finishes downloading, exit the game, and run normally, without WINEDEBUG=+relay,-debug.

In order to connect to the game servers, I needed another workaround, and this one I couldn't find with google. The game was giving an error: "Unable to connect. Could not establish connection to environment: An exception has occurred while attempting to connect. wss://client.arenagame-a.east.magic-the-gathering-arena.com:9405/Prod/WS" (the exact address may vary). To fix this, I had to turn on IPv6 in my Linux kernel.

What was not tested

In game shop

Major game version changes

Hardware tested

Graphics:

• GPU: AMD
• Driver: open source

Additional Comments

Many thanks to DarkShadow4444 from FreeNode irc #winehq, who helped me produce and understand the wine debugging output, which helped me figure out that I had to turn on IPv6 in my kernel.

Make sure you use a wine version > 5.9. Prior versions suffer from a bug that causes the client to constantly crash when downloading the initial assets (https://bugs.winehq.org/show_b...). This has been fixed in wine versions > 5.9.

Other wine versions with known issues for MTGA:

• 5.15 suffers from a regression that cause a connection error on startup (https://bugs.winehq.org/show_b...)

After you moved your mouse outside the client or switched to a different virtual desktop, MTGA will not regain focus if you get back to the application.

To fix this focus issue you can  add a registry key by running:

wine reg ADD 'HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Wine\X11 Driver' /v UseTakeFocus /d 'N' /f