Overall this is a good treatment of MTG. The card artwork is beautiful and the "table" you play is attractive enough. MTG has very complex card interactions and they all seem to be handled faithfully. The AI even uses all the nasty card combination that experienced players HATE to be on the receiving end of (but we love it when we can use them). Unfortunately, the game does have a couple Overall this is a good treatment of MTG. The card artwork is beautiful and the "table" you play is attractive enough. MTG has very complex card interactions and they all seem to be handled faithfully. The AI even uses all the nasty card combination that experienced players HATE to be on the receiving end of (but we love it when we can use them). Unfortunately, the game does have a couple of medium-sized problems as well as a few annoyances. The biggest issue by far is the lack of a true deck builder. The included decks (which you "win" by beating the AI) represent a decent range of playing styles, but you can only customize them by adding/removing cards that you also have won through play. Neither land cards nor the "stock" cards that the deck starts with are customizable. Want extra Giant Spiders in your green deck? Sorry. Want to go land-heavy so you can afford all your Craw Wurms? No can do. I understand that they need to prevent users from stocking a deck with tons of ultra-rare, game-changing artifacts (which IRL would be quite expensive to collect), but they can handle that with rules (no more than 4 rares per deck, etc.). Hopefully a true deck-builder will be added in a DLC patch, though it's going to irk me to pay for it. The other medium-sized issue, IMO, is the mandatory timers in online play. More than once I have been prevented from calculating an effective attack or block (which calculations can get very complex!) because the stupid timer expired. Even the "pause" button (which you have about 4 seconds to press) only slows the timer down. When the host sets up an online game, he/she should be able to specify which timers, if any, are active. I understand that they want to prevent players from indefinitely pausing a game to force the opponent to quit, but when I'm playing with a known friend I should be able to disable all of that and have a relaxing game that lets me take 2 or 3 minutes to figure out the best way to whack the other guy's stupid forestwalking flying pixies with +11/+11. Grrr. Minor quibbles include challenges with impossible starting conditions (how could a card with the effect of "if this card is not played from your hand, you lose" already be on the board?), an apparent bug regarding playing of instants during the block phase (it only allows one?), and no way to over-allocate damage on multiple defenders (for example if you have 4 damage to allocate between two 1/1 defenders, there's no way to allocate 2 and 2; you must choose a defender and allocate exactly 1 damage to it, then the other 3 goes to the other defender). The "campaign" mode is kind of silly, but that's how you unlock decks and cards so you gotta go through it to get the good stuff. None of these issues is a dealbreaker in any way - the game is well worth the $10 and all MTG fans should buy it. If they add a full deck-builder, the game will be 9/10, and if they allow the host to set game & deck rules (including shutting off the timers), it's 10/10.… Expand
Magic: The Gathering - Duels of the PlaneswalkersYour Score0 out of 10User Score
