Instructions on how to install Magic the Gathering Arena on macOS with Retina support.

installing_MTGA_on_macOS_with_Retina_support.md

Installing MTGA on macOS using Wine, and making it look pretty!

The following instructions are heavily inspired by /u/uhohohdear. I modified uhohohdear's instructions and then added support for Retina/HiDPI displays and instructions about how to update MTGA.

Dependencies

0. Your macOS/OS X version must be 10.8 or greater
1. Your Mac must support OpenGL 4.0 or greater (you can find out whether it does here)
2. You must download the Magic the Gathering Arena Windows executable
3. You must download a custom Wineskin wrapper [mirror]

Note: If you're like me, you may not trust unofficial Wineskin wrappers. Unfortunately, the Wineskin project is way behind and only supports Wine 2.x. We need at least Wine 3.0 to run MTGA. If Wineskin ever gets around to updating, you can get the official download here.

Installing MTGA

0. Drag the custom Wineskin wrapper to your /Applications/ folder.
1. Right click/Control click the Wineskin wrapper (MTGArena.app) and select "Open"

Note: If you have a newer Mac, you may need to click "Screen Options" and then uncheck "Auto Detect GPU Info for Direct3D" and check "Use Mac Driver instead of X11". If you complete installation of MTGA and are getting DirectX 11 errors, come back to this step and give these toggles a try.

2. Click "Install Software"
3. Click "Choose Setup Executable"
4. Navigate to and select the Magic the Gathering Arena Windows executable you previously downloaded ("MTGAInstaller.exe")
5. For some reason, the text is broken for the installation prompts (it's fine in game!). To install, click the lower right rectangle and, on the next screen, click the "Accept and Install" button.
6. Wait for MTGA to install and ignore any warnings (hopefully you won't have any!). When complete, click "Finish"

Note: The installer never successfully closes for me. So, either manually close Wine in the macOS menu bar or force quit Wine.

7. Back in Wineskin, a "Choose Executable" window should be available. Select "MTGA.exe" and not "MtgaLauncher.exe".

You can now click "Quit" and start playing MTGA! If you'd like to add Retina support, carry on.

Adding Retina/HiDPI Support

0. In Wineskin, click "Advanced" and then select "Tools"
1. Click "Registry Editor (regedit)"
2. Navigate to HKEY_CURRENT_USER -> Software -> Wine -> Mac Driver (if Mac Driver doesn't exist, navigate to HKEY_CURRENT_USER -> Software -> Wine and then use Edit -> New -> Key to create a new key named Mac Driver)
3. Select Edit -> New -> String Value from the menu and name it RetinaMode
4. Double click RetinaMode, set its value to y, and click "OK"
5. Close the Registry Editor and then click "Config Utility (winecfg)" in Wineskin's Advanced -> Tools menu
6. Click on the "Graphics" tab, enter the correct dpi under "Screen resoution", and click "OK".

Note: You can find your screen's dpi on Apple Support or via DPI Love.

You can now close Wineskin and start playing MTGA in high resolution!

FAQS

I'm getting a DirectX 11 error and it's making me sad.

Repeat steps 0 and 1 under "Installing MTGA" and trying unchecking "Auto Detect GPU Info for Direct3D" and checking "Use Mac Driver instead of X11". If you're still having problems, use TextEdit to create a plaintext file (use shift+command+T to toggle between rich text and plaintext) with the following information:

REGEDIT4
[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Wine\Direct3D]
"DirectDrawRenderer"="opengl"
"UseGLSL"="enabled"
"MaxVersionGL"=dword:00030003

Save this file as d3d.reg. Go to /Applications/ then right click/control click the Wineskin wrapper (MTGArena.app) and select "Show Package Contents". Open "Wineskin.app". In Wineskin, click "Advanced", select "Tools", and then click "Registry Editor (regedit)". From the "Registry" menu, choose "Import Registry File..." and select the d3d.reg file you just created. Close regedit, exit Wineskin, and try running MTGArena again.

I'm playing MTGA in windowed mode and, after switching to another program, it stops responding.

Everything is fine. Just grab the MTGA window and wiggle it a little bit. Everything should be back to normal.

There's an Arena update and nothing works anymore!

Yeah. It's annoying. This appears to work:

0. Right click/Control click the Wineskin wrapper (MTGArena.app) and select "Show Package Contents"
1. Double click "Wineskin"
2. Click "Install Software"
3. Click "Choose Setup Executable"
4. Navigate to and select the Magic the Gathering Arena Windows executable you previously downloaded ("MTGAInstaller.exe")
5. Install as normal.