I started playing MtG back in 1996. Two years later MicroProse released M:TG aka Shandalar. To date this is still the best digital version of Magic. It had an incredibly fun campaign mode where you picked a starter deck and your character roamed over a map battling enemies, doing quests and trading cards. For some bizarre reason no other Magic game seems to have had such a mode.

You could also play quick games against the AI with constructed decks. This was a ton of fun. Playing a game of Magic is also what Shandalar excelled at. The UI is quick and clean. There were no pointless annoying animations or sounds. Instead of having a timer for various steps you manually decided where the game stopped. You could skip your entire turn in a second with a single click.

Newer digital versions of Magic are, for some utterly insane reason, all inferior. Magic 2015 has a truly truly terrible UI. It's menus are amongst the worst i have ever encountered. Gameplay is incredibly sluggish. There's awful timers and animations and sound effects. The freaking timer has a sound effect, do you know how annoying that is? It also has a hilarious badly designed playing area. It emulates a real game, so your opponents cards are far away and... upside down. It's mindboggling that anyone thought that would be a good idea for a computer game.

The game also refuses to let you tap manually. Instead you scroll through all possible combinations... which takes more time. And in the deckbuilder all filters are in a dropdown menu. Because this is 2003 and there wouldn't be enough space on my 17" monitor to show them all. I guess that's also the reason why they can't just show all textword abilities next to the card like every single digital cardgame does. Instead you have to click "more info"... and they still make you scroll through each ability. Dear lord.