Magic the Gathering Arena tricks

These are some tricks to save on bandwith and compute when running Magic the Gathering Arena on Linux.

These tips are transferable when playing on Windows as well. In this case replace the $wineprefix with the corresponding installation folder.

Caching media assets

MtG Arena stores its media assest (manifest, card images, audio data etc.) in Wizards of the Coast/MTGA/MTGA_Data/. You can use a symlink to this directory in order to save the downloaded files for a potential reinstall. First move the directory to your cache location:

mv "$wineprefix/drive_c/Program Files/Wizards of the Coast/MTGA/MTGA_Data/Downloads" "$HOME/.cache/mtga/"

Then link this new directory to its original location:

ln -s "$HOME/.cache/mtga/" "$wineprefix/drive_c/Program Files/Wizards of the Coast/MTGA/MTGA_Data/Downloads"

When reinstalling you first relink this directory and save on redownloading the media assets. This will accumulate over time. If space is a concern then cross reference the manifests in the download directory:

jq -r '.Assets[] | .Name' < Manifest_* | sort > /tmp/manifest
find AssetBundle/ -type f -printf '%P\n' | sort > /tmp/assets
comm /tmp/manifest /tmp/assets

On how to parse comm ouput read the corresponding man page.

AI_RecycleBin shenanigans

Unity seems to use the AI_RecycleBin diretory in the C: drive to do some expensive downloads and some computation. In order to suppress this make the AI_RecycleBin diretory inaccessible:

chmod -wx "$wineprefix/drive_c/AI_RecycleBin"