Today at Gamescom, Wizards of the Coast announced that Magic: the Gathering Arena would be coming to the Epic Games Store on PC this Winter, with a Mac version of the game coming “shorty after.” Neither release was given an exact release date.
The Epic Games Store
Epic, the company behind Fortnite, launched its own video game storefront called the Epic Games Store in December 2018. It is a competitor to Steam, and similarly offers games for both Windows and Mac.
Wizards says that Epic will be the exclusive third-party PC download partner for MTG Arena and that the game will still be available for direct download from MTGArena.com. Existing players will not be required to create Epic accounts in order to keep playing.
Magic on a Mac
Since the release of Magic: the Gathering Online (neé Magic Online with Digital Objects) on PC in June 2002, one of the biggest community complaints about Magic’s digital form was that it was only available on PC—not on Mac. That trend continued when MTG Arena was announced in 2017 as PC-only to start.
But a few months later, in an interview with Hipsters of the Coast, Wizards CEO Chris Cocks said that they were intended to bring MTG Arena to Mac eventually. “We will support other platforms like Mac,” Cocks said. “[T]hat likely won’t be until either the later stages of the Beta or around when we declare it as a launch game, but Mac will be a platform that supported as well as all the other platforms you would expect us to do.”