Recently Magic Duels was released from Stainless Games studio, the newest of the many Magic the Gathering MMO titles to finally come to Windows (through Steam) after initially being released through the AppStore for iPad and iPhone. We took some time out to give the game a run through for a few hours and put it through its paces, as expected there’s hundreds of Magic cards to collect, the ability to build decks and a variety of game modes to check out; but what did we think?

We’ll start with one of the worse launches of a game we’ve ever seen, straight out of the gates the game wobbled like a three legged donkey and fell over at the first hurdle; plagued with disconnects and desyncs it has been pretty much unplayable for a few days (or playable but pointless as desyncs means you would lose your progression). The developers were on the case from the beginning and keeping the players up to date with the “server issues”, but even after a week we were still suffering issues with not being able to complete content. Any players who were thinking of switching from one TCG to another, or considering Magic Duels for one of their options, would no doubt have been forever put off by the mess.

Okay, so let’s forget the bad launch and focus on the actual game itself. Starting off we have to say that we hate the graphics, they are completely bare bones and were clearly designed with the iPad in mind and repurposed for the Windows client version; huge big gradient filled buttons, oversized icons, general GUI; it felt like a lazy import and lacked even the minute details that a score of other TCGs have had. Given that the card artwork is identical from the already existing cards there is very little unique artwork, apart from a few still in the Story Mode, avoiding any cinematics at all and Story Mode with its narrative doesn’t even have any voice overs. The music sounds great, but it’s often on 20 second loops that get very repetitive very quickly. Again, it all just lacks effort.

Whilst we haven’t played this particular game, but are experienced with the system and that of other TCGs, we have to say that in spite of this the tutorial portions are extremely unnecessarily and treat players like morons. Everything you try to do results in a popup that takes you out of the story mode or your PVE match, every time you see a card with a new type of ability such as Vigilance or Flying or First Strike, a popup asks you if you want to see how that ability works…. even though it says on the card “First strike allows you to deal damage to your enemy before they deal damage to you” (paraphrasing) it still feels the need that this should be demonstrated. What is more is that it sets up little scenario matches where you have to use a particular card with that ability to defeat the enemy general, going through the various turns, like it’s so difficulty and such a great accomplishment. Magic the Gathering is very much a more complex system in comparison to more casual games such as Hearthstone, but the tutorial seems to have been design with the fear that the developers don’t want players to think the game is too complex and so hold your hand and break it down to the bare bones. The bigger issue is that pulling you out of the game, going through the rounds to see how an ability works, it means going through the various stages in a round (attack, blocking, and instant stages), which in itself takes time and results in a really slow pace overall.

One of the strongest elements of the game is the deck builder which allows a wizard to automatically build various decks for you using the pretty decent collection of starter cards that players are given. The best feature is that, for players who are a bit overwhelmed or unfamiliar with the numerous cards and possible strategies, players can select a few choice cards that they really want in their deck and then wizard will add the rest (up to 60 cards) basing the extra cards around your choices. How well this system works we’ve no idea as we’re not exactly knowledgeable about the different strategies and possible cards; but it’s a good idea nonetheless.

The weakest elements of the game are the various modes, for different reasons. Story Mode lets players play out the story-arc of five infamous Planeswalker characters that are part of the Magic lore, unlocking each of them in turn. Starting out with the first character we were given a set deck to use with set cards, representing that particular characters abilities, then put against five different battles for the full story-arc. The story is pretty lacklustre, a few bits of narrative and some still artwork, the matches are all semi-predetermined in that the decks are arranged in a specific way to always draw the same cards each round, so the strategy is more about making the right play from turn to turn as there’s not actually any way to know what cards are in your deck before playing so you can’t make any long term strategies…. Again, not that that it matters as the skewed fights are built in a way to punish players for not making exactly the right play and so you don’t typically get that far into the deck anyway before either winning or being humiliated. It’s a poor system.

Away from that you have AI matches and ranked play in the Battle Mode, which are fairly simple but we didn’t get to play the ranked matches too much given the amount of disconnect the game was having. Other than the differing skill levels playing against AI or players is generally the same kind of thing anyway; the AI isn’t all that intelligent and probably because of this players aren’t rewarded all that well for playing against it (less Gold coins for AI battles). The issue with the bad AI is that if playing a ranked match and a player loses connection or forfeits then the AI steps in so you still have to play the fight out, this becomes an even bigger issue in the “Two Headed Giant” (2HG) mode.

In 2HG players can play in 2v2 matches with two players taking on two others, or two AI, or an AI and a player; however as ever if a player loses connection then they are replaced by the AI… even if it is one of the players on your team. So mid match they could lose connection and you’re forced to keep playing or you’ll lose rank, even though you now have the shoddy AI fighting in your corner and no cohesion between them to communicate with each other and make fantastic plays..... however, that’s not an issue because there’s no way to communicate with teammates in the game to make those kinds of plays anyway as the game lacks any chat system. Yeh, I can’t imagine a bigger oversight of having a co-op mode in a game where you rely on being able to tell each other what your plans are with your cards, or even what cards you have in your deck, and not actually having the facility to do so.

Next up we have the cash shop, our final “feature” in the game (that’s all there is, 3 PVP/PVE game modes and a half-asses story mode). Players have to part with 150 gold to purchase a booster pack of 5 cards, which for Magic the Gathering standards is a really low number of cards; some of the expansion packs having up to 16 cards in a booster pack. Dollar for dollar the amount you can spend on purchasing game gold as opposed to earning it, then the number of digital cards you get versus spending the cash in a shop and buying physical cards, your physical cards work out cheaper… and the digital cards are just cards that already exist in the current games. Okay so you don’t have to spend money, but earning it is a real chore; 2HG is pretty broken and you rely on other players, the AI games don’t churn out that much money, and the PVP Ranking games only give gold to the winner.. you don’t even get anything for participating. Clearly the developers don’t want to give players something for nothing as whilst you can buy 1 Booster Pack, 2 Booster Packs, 10 Booster Packs and various other amounts inbetween, the cost is still always 150 Gold per pack (ie. it’s still 1500 Gold for a 10 pack bundle). Whilst the more gold you purchase with real cash shows a discount the more you buy, players who are playing on an F2P account get no bonus for stockpiling their earned gold, which is a shame because we always enjoyed saving up cash and purchasing lots of cards to open them all in one go; but now it just doesn’t seem worthwhile as there’s no financial benefit.

Fundamentally the game has some really serious issues that just make it frustrating or just simply not fun, it adds literally nothing new to the game that we haven’t seen in other TCGs, or outright lacks them (no crafting, no trading, no dungeons, no hero gear, etc.); the game even lacks features from its previous online titles. Whilst we see the introduction of Two Headed Giant, something that wasn’t in their last Magic MMO “Magic: Duels of the Planeswalkers 2015” title, it’s at the expense for other features and honestly feels like the developers don’t have anything new to add… they just recycle and rearrange the small handful of features they have but still manage to publish a new Magic game every year using the same cards from the base physical game, though we expect expansions will be released periodically to keep players engaged. There’s just too much wrong with the game and not enough that is different, if you love the other Magic games then there’s nothing particularly compelling about switching to Magic Duels and we definitely don’t think in its current state it is enough to pull players away from other TCG titles. When you consider that, aside from Hearthstone, the game’s biggest rival is probably Hex: Shards of Fate (who were sued by Magic the Gathering designers Wizards of the Coast due to the game being so similar) for everything that Magic lacks Hex has done a great job of implementing and they had to actually design all the new cards and artwork.
SCORE:

• Graphics: 6


• Gameplay: 6


• Performance: 3

• Pros: The core Magic system is still one of the best and the developers have stayed true to it, the deck building wizard is a really useful feature.


• Cons: Nothing new to the previous Magic titles, broken gameplay, bad AI, no chat system to communicate in Co-op, heavily restricted number of cards considering how many are available in the physical game.

Rating: 5

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This entry was posted on Friday, August 7th, 2015 at 12:32 pm and is filed under Articles, MMO News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.