Magic: the Gathering Duels of the Planeswalkers Review

Let me preface this review by saying that since it is a timely review, I'm not going to bother to evaluate this game in a long term sense. This review focuses mainly on whether or not you should buy this game. If you want to save yourself some time, I've copied and pasted the final three sentences of the review here for your convenience:

Although in several areas it can disappoint, overall it is impossible to argue with the value proposition of Duels of the Planeswalkers. Whether you are new to the game, playing for the first time in five years, or already play in local FNMs or PTQs, if you own an Xbox 360 there is no reason you shouldn't also own this game.

This week, I was sick as a dog, which gave me a good opportunity to play Stainless Games' new Xbox Live Arcade game Magic: the Gathering Duels of the Planeswalkers. Right now, the game costs 800 MS Points, which is the equivalent of $10. At that price point, this is a fantastic game that should be in every gamer's collection. This is especially true if you also play Magic: the Gathering in paper, since you get a free $15 card (my friend's estimation of the value, not mine) with purchase.

Singleplayer Campaign

The singleplayer campaign for this game is pretty straightforward: challenge each of the decks to two duels and beat them over the course of the campaign. You will be playing against the AI, which is reasonable but nowhere near perfect. After each win, you will get a card to add to your deck. The confusing decision that the designers made here is that they allow you to grind victories against the same AI-controlled opponent over and over again. While you have to beat all of the opponents in the ladder in order to unlock all the decks, once you have unlocked all of the decks you can just play the same easy-as-pie opponent over and over again, depending on which opponent your deck is strongest against. Although I did not beat the entire campaign with all of the decks, I did beat all of the opponents with the Elf, Jund, and mono-green decks, which were the only three I attempted it with.

AI

The AI is probably one of the poorer parts of the game, overall. It is difficult for me to criticize it entirely, since I'm sure it is very substantial. It does make good decisions most of the time. However, there are many areas it could definitely improve:

1. Mulligans: I'm not sure that it actually takes mulligans. I've seen it missing its second turn land drop before. It may take mulligans, but I've never seen it go to 6.
   
2. Attacking, causing it to be dead on board: I can't tell you how many times I have three guys in play, and the AI has three guys in play with a few meager points of life left, but one of them is phantom warrior. In this case, regardless of my life total, or his, he will swing with it. In many of these circumstances, the AI literally causes him to be dead on the board, regardless of any tricks I may be holding. It seems like there should have been a line or two of code telling it not to attack if the extra creature that gets through deals lethal damage.
3. While getting in for an extra 3 with giant growth is nice, its much better to 2 for 1 with it by making your attacking or defending creature 2/2 a 5/5, which is bigger than the other guy's 4/4, thus making him down a card while you are up the creature (which you would have normally lost) or the damage (4 points of life ~1 card) and down the card in hand. 2 for 1.

Magic: the Puzzling

Another play mode of the game is Magic: the Puzzling. This gameplay variant is interesting and definitely showcases some of Magic's potential. Unfortunately, certain considerations (like card drawing) convinced Wizards and/or Stainless games that all of these puzzles should be a "can you find a way to win this turn, after drawing your card" question, which to me reduced their complexity. A few of them took me a couple tries, but most were fairly easy. I beat them all in a single sitting. I wish that I had earned a deck unlock or something more substantial than simple achievement points doing this, though. Overall, this was a quick addition to the game that didn't add any long-term value to me.

Multiplayer

The multiplayer modes are, in my opinion, the highlight of the experience. As of the second night after release, there were already a fair number of people playing the game online, although actually joining a game is a bit finicky (this may change as more people begin to play online). There are several multiplayer modes available:

• Coop campaign (not online)
• 1v1
  
• 3 player FFA
• 4 player FFA
• 2v2 2 Headed Giant

One of the reasons that the multiplayer stands out as the game's best mode is simply because it feels like the Magic I know. I'm the kind of guy that would rather win big occasionally than win consistently and multiplayer is, as a result, one of the formats that my playstyle is particularly suited for. The use of headsets also makes multiplayer stand out, because it gives you that sitting around a table feeling that not prior Magic virtual game has done before. It also fits better with the cards, which tend to be on the not constructed playable side of things (i.e. you would never see most of these cards at a PTQ in paper Magic). My favorite mode, specifically is probably the 2v2 2 headed giant mode, which is a nice combination of teamwork and slow paced play (yes you get to see both player's hands, so you can help your partner play).

Coop Campaign

The Coop campaign is also awesome, because it's a great way to get your friend to play with you without having to worry about them being intimidated by your prior experience with Magic. While you can't play it online (to my knowledge), a friend and I played through most of it and it is quite a bit of fun. The elf deck is absurd in this mode, btw. One interesting thing to note is that you can unlock cards for decks in the Coop campaign, so you can use this to approximately double your unlock rate vs. single player play.

Deck Construction/Balance Issues

Deck construction in this game is not what you would expect given that you are playing Magic: the Gathering. While in the paper game, you have almost complete control over everything you play, in this game each deck has a core deck which you can unlock additional cards for, and then you may choose which of those unlocked cards you wish to play. Since most of the decks' unlocked cards are of the bomb variety, you end up playing almost all of them. The notable exceptions, however, are the "tooth" cards which basically all give you an additional point of life whenever someone plays a spell of a specified color. While these cards are alright in multiplayer (particularly 4 player FFA), in singleplayer or 2v2 they're atrocious and should almost never be played.

My theory for these deck restrictions is this: Stainless wanted to delicately control the balance of the metagame, and the best way to do that is to have all of the decks' potential under control. Because there are a couple of bad/undesirable cards in most of the decks, it is basically impossible to modify the decks into unstoppable, efficient killing machines. If everyone could take the elvish warriors from the elf deck and put them into the green deck in the grizzly bears slot, or move the grizzly bears into the dragon fodder slot in the Jund deck, you could risk improving one deck too much and throw off the balance of the metagame.

However, if this was the reason, or even if it wasn't, Stainless should have done a better job of balancing the metagame. Some decks simply seem to be much better than others, particularly the elf deck, with which a decent draw can destroy almost any deck in the metagame. The blue, black, and red decks barely seem to be in the game at all, and the white deck is basically a FFA only affair, since its bombs are basically Serra Angel, Wrath of God (I'm told, haven't seen it yet), and Mass Calcify. The Naya deck seems to be completely trumped by the green deck, which simply trades some creature efficiency (no 3 mana 5/4) and removal for no mana issues and Overrun.

Expansion Opportunities

The most promising aspect of the game are the expansion opportunities it seems to present down the road. Adding onto this game should be fairly simple: just release a new deck for another 100-200 MS Points. Assuming that enough people download the base game, I'm sure future expansions are in the works. Heck, there's already a deck in the campaign that player's can't unlock yet. (Maybe I need to beat the double Tezzeret decks at the end of the Coop campaign, haven't done that yet).

Overall Impressions

Duels of the Planeswalkers is simply an outstanding value for 800 MS Points. While it's not perfect, it is certainly the most attractive Magic: the Gathering client ever, and gets most of the important aspects of Magic right. It is also easy to learn, beginner friendly and generally a rewarding first Magic experience. While it has its faults, these are more than made up for by the innovative, streamlined experience it provides and the enormous amount of content that you are purchasing for ~$10, even before you include the promo card which is worth the cost of admission alone. If you've always wanted to learn Magic, or even if you simply want to see how much better Magic Online's interface could be, I highly recommend that you take a look at this game. Although in several areas it can disappoint, overall it is impossible to argue with the value proposition of Duels of the Planeswalkers. Whether you are new to the game, playing for the first time in five years, or already play in local FNMs or PTQs, if you own an Xbox 360 there is no reason you shouldn't also own this game.

-Jon

Elegance in the Free Realms TCG

So last week I got my first comment on my blog in my Elegant Game Design article. In it, I was discussing elegant games and game systems, and I included the destiny/gem system from the Free Realms TCG in my list.

Now, this inclusion hardly compares to some of the other systems I listed, as my commentor duly noted. The gem system is certainly not as complex as most of the other games that I've included. Yet, I feel it is worth including simply because how the gem system plays into every aspect of the game, is a key consideration in deck construction, and presents interesting design space for future releases of the game, should Topps and SOE ever wish to release additional expansions.

The basic gist of the Free Realms TCG is as follows. Skip the next two paragraphs if you just want to read about the destiny/gem system. The Free Realms TCG is played on a normal game field like Magic: the Gathering but there are only spaces for each player to control three creatures at a time. Players play cards from their hand to their "inventory", which is basically land in Magic, except that it has no color. Any card can be played as a land, but most players play "resources", which are similar to quests in World of Warcraft. These can be played face up as land, and there is generally some benefit which can be harvested from turning them face down. In addition, resource cards generally have good "destiny", which I will get to in a bit.

The cards in your inventory, give you coins every turn that allow you to play more powerful creatures. When you play a creature, you put it in one of the three slots on your side of the board. Once you have spent all of your coins for the turn, or wish to spend no more, the remainder is lost. Then you can attack with your creatures. Creatures either battle the creature in front of them or attack the opponent directly if there is no creature in front of them (so in the above picture, if the red player was attacking, if he chose to attack with the Mauthe Dog it would battle the Chicken Bomber, and if he chose to attack with the Forest Troll Archer it would "hunt", which basically means hit the opponent). When a creature hunts or wins a battle, it scores a card. When a player has scored 12 cards, he or she wins the game.

Destiny draws come into play whenever two creatures are battling. In battles, the attacking creature's attack is compared to the defending creatures defense. Tricks, the game's equivalent of instants, can be used to augment a creature's abilities in battle temporarily, but the attack/defense values are also temporarily increased by destiny draws. In its simplest form, players simply reveal a card from the top of the deck and add the number of gems on the revealed card to the relevant combat stat of their creature. However, the color of the gems also commonly matters, as creatures frequently have text in the form of : Effect; where G is a gem color. In this case, if a required gem is green, and the player reveals a green gem, the effect will trigger. In many cases (such as on the above troll and chicken cards), a proper revealed gem will further increase the attack or defense of the creature. However, there are many creatures who cannot be destroyed if a combination of gems are revealed, who draw a card if the correct gem types are revealed, or untap if the appropriate gem types are revealed.

Therefore, destiny does a number of things for Free Realms:

• It makes battles more exciting and random.
• It enables the designers to put exciting abilities on creatures while simultaneously reinforcing the need to battle with those creatures.
• It allows the designers to add color restrictions to the game without making it difficult for decks that are "off-color" to actually play their cards, since gem color is (at least for now) strictly affiliated with a color in the game.
• It unlocks a great deal of design space without significantly adding to the game's complexity.
  

And, like any other elegant system, it is very easy to understand.

If you haven't tried the Free Realms TCG, and you enjoy examining well-designed game systems, you owe it to yourself to visit the Free Realms virtual world and participate in its Trading Card Game. I do not need to qualify the statement 'The Free Realms TCG is a very well-designed game.'

-Jon