Hey everyone! Long time Magic fan here - I think a HUGE weakness of Arena is that there are almost NO ways for me to onboard other people into the game or to maintain interest among friends. One of the reasons this game still exists in general is the social component of playing in paper which allows players to keep each other interested (and invested) in the game.

Here are some basic social functions that would give us ways to interact with friends and therefore maintain broader interest in the long term:

• Friend people you meet
  This is a basic way to let people start building that social component which can keep them coming back; why can't we make friends IN the game? Sometimes you play someone who is fun or you liked their play, why can't you choose to connect with them in any way? This makes the game feel empty and lonely.

• "Well played" / "Nice deck", other more expressive emotes
  It's insane that there's no way to commiserate with someone if they are having a rough draw. There's nothing you can really signal. If someone has a great deck you haven't seen, or makes a great play, why can't you complement them on it? It's so basic and I frequently wish I could have just this little extra bit of communication.

• Private player lobbies
  Why is the only functionality for private games a single 1v1 match that's not even observable? The fan made website to play Netrunner (a card game with a much smaller community) lets you make lobbies and have people join as spectators. There is no way to interact with a group of friends on Arena, not at all.

• Spectator Mode
  No brainer, and even beyond the social aspect of being able to involve more than one friend, this is just basic for the esports scene. It looks very unpolished to have at the official esports events a janky screenshare of the individual players (sometimes with issues too).

• Pod draft / sealed?
  This is huge! You could sell so many more packs if people could play limited formats in a social way (with friends). This would be such an easy way to get friends into the game / maintain hype over the course of a year. You underestimate how many non magic regulars would pay to draft once just for a fun game night.

• 2v2 / Two headed giant, etc.
  Again, any way you can add to the game for players like me to involve more than one friend would be amazing.

There's much more social functionality to desire from Arena, the important thing to remember is that this has a very real long term impact on the community of a game. I want to get friends involved and experience the game with them, but I right now I can't do pretty much anything to that effect.

In the words of Tom Cruise in some movie "Help me help you"

With the latest Ban/Restricted announcement (https://magic.wizards.com/en/articles/archive/magic-digital/mtg-arena-announcements-july-14-2021)

The card "Book of Exalted Deeds" will be banned in Standard 2022.
Per the announcement, "Note that wildcard grants are not used for bans in Standard 2022. The Book of Exalted Deeds can still be used in both Standard and Historic play on MTG Arena."

This does not make sense. There is a ranked queue for standard 2022 and Book of Exalted Deeds was a competitive deck. Many players used their extremely rare mythic wild cards to get copies of this card, which will now become useless.

This does not seem fair to players of the game, especially when there is already the precedent of refunding wildcards when cards are banned in competitive formats.

I am on a PC. I opened the game it seemed to initiate fine then instead of leading into the Home page it went to the Log In page. I hadn't logged out. My username was already populated correctly. I put in the correct password and the game accepted my password but it would only get so far into the start up before going back to the Log In page. I tried a few other times with the same result.

I also tried with a past password. The system recognized it as an incorrect password immediately and did not try to finish loading the game.