Magic Duels: Impressions 2

When I recent­ly and briefly dis­cussed the his­to­ry of dig­i­tal and online card games, I men­tioned that a new Magic: the Gathering game was com­ing out. Magic Duels, as it’s called, has recent­ly arrived on PC, and I’ve given it a whirl to see if the game as a whole can still get my juices flow­ing.

Liliana cer­tain­ly gets her necro juices flow­ing in this game.

In what fol­lows, I com­pare Magic Duels to Hearthstone quite often, not just because the lat­ter is the card game I’ve been play­ing most the past months, but also because there are par­al­lels between the two games in terms of design and pre­sen­ta­tion. It is also quite like­ly that with­in dig­i­tal card games at least, Hearthstone is Magic Duels’ main com­peti­tor for time and atten­tion right now, and the most obvi­ous com­par­i­son for peo­ple to make.

So, what was my return to Magic like, more than ten years after I last played a land card?1 Well, good, most­ly. Magic is still an impres­sive­ly clever game, and it only took me a few turns to get back into the swing of things, sum­mon­ing sol­diers, magi­cians, out­landish crea­tures, and sling­ing spells. Sure, with Hearthstone fresh in my mind, I was remind­ed that unlike in that game, Magic does­n’t let you have your crea­tures direct­ly attack­ing those of your oppo­nent. In hind­sight, this rule seems a bit arbi­trary, and there are actu­al­ly sev­er­al spe­cial cards in Magic Duels that do allow you to have two crea­tures fight each other. A coin­ci­dence? I’m not sure.2 Magic has addi­tion­al com­plex­i­ty in the pres­ence of “instant” spells, which can be cast not only dur­ing your own turn, but also in response to your oppo­nen­t’s actions in their turn.3 This gives the game a love­ly poten­tial for sur­pris­es and traps that is approached only vague­ly by Hearthstone’s “secret” cards.

Supposing you don’t have my (some­what remote) expe­ri­ence with Magic, how do you start out with Magic Duels? Well, the object of Magic: the Gathering is to deplete your oppo­nen­t’s life total by sum­mon­ing crea­tures to attack that oppo­nent, and by cast­ing spells that deal addi­tion­al dam­age, make crea­tures stronger or weak­er, etc. The game does a swell job of teach­ing you the rules — and not a watered down ver­sion either — through var­i­ous mini-quests that focus on spe­cif­ic rules in iso­la­tion: “what do I need to do to sur­vive this turn?” In addi­tion, there is a story mode focussing on the back­sto­ries of five famous planeswalk­ers — the multiverse-traversing wiz­ards who have become the main pro­tag­o­nists of the world of Magic. Each of them has five mis­sions, so that comes to 25 match­es that teach you the basics of the game, famil­iarise you with a lot of the dif­fer­ent cards, as well as the basic feel and flavour of each of the five colours of magic.

Fiery Chandra is anoth­er of the game’s Planeswalker pro­tag­o­nists.

Thematically, the story mode is nice, but the dif­fi­cul­ty level can be a prob­lem depend­ing on your expe­ri­ence. Even know­ing the rules of the game, some mis­sions are prac­ti­cal­ly impos­si­ble to win should you start out with a bad open­ing hand. If your oppo­nent gets the drop on you, there are few ways of catch­ing up again. For play­ers who are new to Magic, there’s the risk of frus­tra­tion and unfair­ness here. My advice is to restart a match if the open­ing turns go badly, since with a lucky ini­tial hand, those same mis­sions can be extreme­ly easy. With some per­se­ver­ance, play­ers will soon be famil­iar with the rules and a slice of the cards that are avail­able later in the Magic Origins set.

The unnamed por­traits and land­scapes you can tie to your indi­vid­ual decks also have a great aes­thet­ic.

That set of cards, which also hap­pens to be the lat­est set in the phys­i­cal card game, is cur­rent­ly the only set avail­able in the game for mak­ing your own decks, apart from a small­er selec­tion of basic Magic Duels cards. It seems log­i­cal to start small and see how well the game per­forms, but part of me gets all warm and fuzzy inside imag­in­ing what it would be like to play around with all the cards from MtG’s 23-year his­to­ry. That’s a ton of cards, I know, but at the same time, it would go a long way to make the game feel like ‘true’ Magic, rather than the phys­i­cal card game’s dig­i­tal lit­tle sis­ter.

A more seri­ous gripe with the game lies in its design. Again, Magic is more com­plex than Hearthstone, and there can be a lot going on on the table any given moment. In that respect, every­thing on screen feels a bit small; even when zoomed out, cards are shown as whole cards, lack­ing the recog­nis­abil­i­ty on a crowd­ed table of Hearthstone’s crea­tures, who are reduced to por­traits. To make things worse, there is a slow­ish zoom ani­ma­tion for each card that needs to be scrolled to acti­vate. Why not a sim­ple mouse-over? Especially in the begin­ning, when most cards are new to you, you’ll want to look at them often, and the delay in zoom­ing is a hin­drance. The ani­ma­tions in gen­er­al are nice, but very slug­gish on my work PC, which does rough­ly the same things in Hearthstone with­out so much a hitch. I had to set the ani­ma­tion lev­els to a min­i­mum to keep the game mov­ing along at a man­age­able pace. For a game that is all about the inter­ac­tion of many dif­fer­ent cards, I don’t want the pseudo-physical manip­u­la­tions of cards to slow down that some­what elu­sive flow of thought-and-play.

Especially in 2v2 match­es, the table can get quite crowd­ed.

That said, there is great poten­tial in the dig­i­tal ver­sion of the game. Of course, it’s not the first dig­i­tal Magic game, and to be hon­est I’m not sure what the pre­vi­ous Duels of the Planeswalkers games were like, but the new Magic Duels gets a lot of things right. It cou­ples a bal­anced and the­mat­i­cal­ly inter­est­ing new set with a play envi­ron­ment that takes some of the bet­ter cues from the Hearthstone model. Enthusiasts with a big wal­let can hap­pi­ly spend real money to quick­ly buy packs of cards, but for those who can’t or don’t want to spend, you can get every­thing in the game for free sim­ply by play­ing match­es and doing daily quests for vir­tu­al gold. Popping in for a few games every other day will be enough to pro­vide you with a con­stant trick­le of new cards.

Am I hooked again like I was as a lit­tle teen? Not yet. For now, Hearthstone’s snap­py play — not to men­tion its pres­ence on my phone — is win­ning out over Magic Duels’ styl­is­ti­cal­ly more mature but unwieldy exe­cu­tion. However, I’ll pop in now and again to see what’s hap­pen­ing, or maybe to answer some­one’s chal­lenge to an online game. You know where to find me.

1. At the time, they had only just lost the text “tap: add X to your mana pool”. [↩]
2. Additionally, I’d for­got­ten that in Magic, unlike Hearthstone, crea­tures auto­mat­i­cal­ly heal at the end of each turn. It’s those lit­tle dif­fer­ences that’ll mess you up at first. [↩]
3. [grand­pa mode]In my day, we even had “inter­rupt” cards, which were faster than instants still.[/grandpa mode] [↩]