Mage training arena provides a place to make money and gain magic xp, however the kinetic and enchantment room are especially slow xp and boring. However, if you focus solely on the alchemy and graveyard room you can gain cheap xp at a decent rate.
All you need is nature runes, water runes, fire staff and earth staff (and a few food to speed up graveyard room). I did a test starting with 200 nature runes to see the xp rate and cost.
Start:
In the graveyard room you get 1 point per nature rune so I did the alchemy room until the amount of points I had equalled the amount of natures I had left (54). I then went to the graveyard room until I had 54 points of each. I then traded in the points for 54 nature runes upstairs.
End:
In 22 minutes I gained 29k xp, giving me an xp per hour of 79k
I lost 127 nature runes, and gained 8 deaths and 11 bloods giving a total cost of 27k giving a rough cost of 1 gp per xp
If you compare this to alching yew longbows which give an xp rate of about 65k /hour and 3gp per xp this provides a slightly faster and considerably cheaper alternate to alching although you have to pay more attention.
If you've not done MTA before zybez and tip.it have decent guides explaining how to do the rooms
http://www.tip.it/runescape/pages/view/mage_training_arena.htmhttp://www.zybez.net/guides/909/mage_training_arena/
