Steam is both Best Thing Ever and Evil Incarnate. The convenience and ease at which I am able to buy games is great and terrible in equal measure. So a few weeks ago I noticed a buddy of mine had pre-ordered "Magic: The Gathering 2014 Duel of the Planeswalkers" for $10. Intrigued, I plunked down my money and pre-ordered it myself. It was released on June 26th, and I've been playing it off and on since then. This is my review.
Back in my ill-spent youth I was a pretty big fan of Magic: The Gathering, though I was never a "serious player" by any standards. I bought them regularly for a number of years, played in a few local tournaments, and stopped really playing shortly after Visions was released. I still have a large box full of them, and I played the heck out of the old Microprose computer game. Could I recapture the fun of my youth in a $10 video game? I decided to find out.
This game is clearly a piece of "promotional" software. Give the people a taste of what the game is like for a small sum of cash in the hopes that they will seek out "the real deal" and become steady customers of the crack that you are dealing. That said, it's a pretty slick piece of software. The game is a "no frills" sort of affair with a fairly intuitive interface. The game revolves around pre-packaged decks and unlocking cards to tweak them with through gameplay or with a microtransaction. You start off with one deck to play with, and unlock more through the single player campaign, as well as unlocking up to 30 cards within a specific deck. Because I pre-ordered through Steam, one deck (a mono-red speed deck called Firewave) came fully unlocked...though it is the first deck you unlock after the tutorial. Having all 30 "unlockable" cards already unlocked was nice for tweaking.
The Single Player campaign is a modicum of story bolted onto a series of fixed "encounters" with AI opponents. The campaign is divided into 5 Planes with 4 encounters each: 3 plane-themed encounters and a planeswalker encounter at the end. Winning an encounter unlocks a card from the deck you used to win (if any are left to unlock) and beating a planeswalker encounter unlocks that specific deck for use in future play. There are also some general Planeswalkers you can choose to fight for more deck unlocks. Other single player modes include Free-For-All, with up to 3 AI opponents and Two-Headed Giant, where you and an AI partner battle an opposing AI team. Winning here will unlock a card from a deck.
Multiplayer has the Free-For-All and Two-Headed Giant modes, along with a "Quick Match" randomized game from the waiting queue. You can host private games and invite-only games, or host/join public matches. There may be some sort of Tournament play available but I have not poked around too much in the multiplayer yet.
The "hot new feature" for this year's edition is Sealed Deck Play. The way this works is as follows: You open 6 virtual packs of cards and assemble the best deck you can from them. If you really hate the cards you get, tough, though you are given two "slots" with new cards in each slot. More slots are purchasable via micro-transactions. With your Sealed Decks, you can go through a single player campaign of 6 encounters to unlock up to 3 more virtual packs, play random AI matches, or take on others in multiplayer matches against their deck slots. Slots cannot be "reset" to get a new batch of cards.
The interface is pretty clean and easy to understand, though the timing for certain things (like creature abilities) takes some getting used to. The tutorial section does a pretty good job of teaching you how the game works, especially for us veteran players who might not be up on the current rules. Card animations are minimalistic, but the card images are crisp and easy to read (at least when zoomed in), though you might have to adjust the resolution from the defaults.
The Sealed Deck feature is generating a lot of "Pay to Win" complaints given that the only way to "redraw" cards beyond your 2 slots is to pay for additional slots and hope you get a "godly" set. There has been clamor (on the forums at least) to allow "slot resets. I think it's fine, given you pay $10 for the whole game, which is less than a single Sealed Deck tourney buy in. If you want to play computer Magic with a full range of deck building options and "true" Sealed Deck rerolls, well, I will point you to Magic: Online, which is the virtual equivalent of the physical card game.
On a scale of 5 frowny faces to 5 smiley faces this game gets a solid two smiley faces. It's a perfect game for the casual Magic fan, and while it would be nice to have full deck customization, the ability to jump in and play quickly is a boon to time-strapped people like myself. For $10, it's a great value. If you like Magic: The Gathering.
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