Is Magic the gathering Arena fun to play?

I've seen posts about whether MTG Arena is F2P friendly or if its expensive or grindy and people debating this. Seems like a silly debate because really what matters is: Are you having fun playing this game?

If the way you play MTG arena doesn't fit with the economy of the rewards, then you won't have fun and you'll think its expensive or grindy. I suggest you try out one of the many, many other card games out there that are much accessible in the sense that you can become a pro player quickly without grind or money.

For me, this MTG arena has been a blast! I played MTG many years ago and did MTG online and later on Hearthstone, Solforge, PVZ Heroes and other mobile card games, then I paused my online gaming due to needing more time to spend with my family and at work. Now my life has settled down a bit so I can spend a few casual minutes and Wow! has this implementation of MTG impressed me. It's by far more intuitive than MTG Online and even though its not originally designed for online play like Hearthstone and all the others, Wizards has done a great job of streamlining things to make it fit.

I was surprised at how easy it has been to do well. After redeeming all the unexpired codes, I was able to open enough boosters to get a mythic and a few rares. From the base decks you get in the beginning and, a few MID drafts and a handful of Jumpstart or Jump in buy ins I was able to create an effective version of the white aggro deck that has easily gotten me to Diamond. I was even able to go 7-0 in a bo1 standard event! Obviously there was some luck involved and I do have experience so a more newbie player would likely take longer to ramp up, but I still found it very accessible.

I'm thoroughly enjoying jumping between drafts, standard ranked, brawls and whatever additional events are happning and the game interactions are as gratifying as they were when I was playing on paper. I will admit that I did put in a $20 buy-in to get the starter and the adventurer packs and then used the gems from that to get the mastery pass, but seeing as I'm getting a nice income of gems from drafting and the mastery pass itself, I don't think I'll need to spend much more.

I'll use this thread to report how my experience as an experienced MTG player but new to MTG Arena goes, and maybe I'll be able to later understand some of the negativity about MTG arena in these forums.

In the meantime, here is my starting state for this report: I have 7000 gold and 4020 gems.

My first goal will be to collect all MID Rare cards. I don't need to worry about commons and uncommons since they come naturally through drafting and rewards. Collecting mythics seems more challenging than the economy allows so I'll focus on the rares.

My plan is to save up gold and use it on drafting or on effective events like the current Jump-in event which has a fairly high value for zero risk and a relative high chances of getting usable rares for my white Aggro deck.

I indend of saving up 10,000 gold and 5000 gems so I can always have that amount available if a cost effective (for my skill level) event comes up.

I also calculated that the mastery pass is great value so I plan to always have 3400 gems reserved for each pass and just spend gold on drafting until I make up that value again (the pass itself does refund 1400 and gives potentially very valuable premier drafting token so that makes it easier).

I'm confident that I can draft my way into a mostly complete collection of MID cards and eventually move on to the next set like that and be able to build full tier 1 decks by next year.

The most important thing is that it shouldn't be a grind. I don't want to be feeling that I have to play or that I'm not enjoying the games. Wish me luck