Magic Duels

For a long time it was a fun game with a lot of little flaws; great for scratching that itch to play MtG when I hadn't for about 10 years. The one thing that finally made me quit was the introduction of daily quests with very specific requirements that only work in PvP. Even with a daily quest refresh, this often ends up requiring you to use decks in PvP that are substandard either because they don't fit the meta or you don't have enough cards unlocked to build them.

So, in short, the best way to unlock cards now often depends on already having cards unlocked. In PvP.

I understand this was probably an effort to get people to buy boosters. The game does need to make money or it gets shut down, of course. And while there are things I would pay for, boosters are not one of them. I started playing Duels specifically to get away from having to pay for boosters. If Stainless wanted to get money from me there are some things they could charge for:

• Access to older blocks (i.e. ~$5-10 for a block that comes with a few boosters, then you have to unlock the rest with earned or purchased coins)
  
[*]Access to alternate game modes like Sealed (where you don't keep the cards), Vanguard, Commander, etc.

I recently started getting back into magic after being inactive for around 15 years. However, other than standard tournaments, I don't have many opportunities to play against other players, so I figured I needed an online version of magic to practice. Magic duels is OK to get back into the mechanics and see what other people play, but other than that, it's a HUGE disappointment:

- Insane grind. buying boosters as a poor kid in the 90ies (p2w in its pure form) was more fun.

- Stupid deck restrictions: rares 2x, uncommons 3x (to keep serious players away or p2w low?)

- Strange format: not pure standard, balance seems off ( banned smuggler's copter still being played, too many cheap removal spells...)

- Terrible connectivity: connection losses all the time, dropped players get replaced by AI and most of the time, you have to beat the AI in order to not receive a loss, alt+tab is all it takes to get disconnected, possibly lots of room for exploits. Lags are so hard that often you can't hit the stop button to react to your opponent, which defeats the whole purpose of playing magic.

- No possibility to interact with other players: no chat, no trade, nothing. Which might be wise, because...

- The duels community equals the bottom of the magic community. You won't find many good matches, real magic fans are probablly somewhere else to be found. Often enough, playing a removal spell is all that it takes for your opponent to pull the plug and let the AI take over.... which surprisingly often leads to the AI coming back hard and winning a lost match... and then there are these assholes just waiting everytime as long as the timer allows (playing a land after waiting for 1 minute) to make YOU unpatient and disconnect, giving them a default win.

- Always playing against the same decks. Right now: red burn, topters, green ramp, sphinx tutelage. boring.

- The campaigns are a joke. The way they try to tell stories is just unworthy of the magic universe. It's nothing but still images and written dialouge, combined with a muted 90ies-style render-cutscene at the end of each campaign. And the stories are just boring. It rather ruins the unvierse for me...

- Presentation is rudimentary at best. Graphics are just the cards, a boring table, generic FX like fireballs and lightnings... even tablets could do better. There is only 1 music track playing throughout the whole game and it will drive you insane after the 2nd loop.

I honestly can't find a reason to play this other than getting a very blury first impression of what magic the gathering is and that it's probably best to stay away from it lol. Do yourself a favor and play real magic or Xmage. I honestly can't understand the people giving this a thumps up. Probably the kind of people going to McDonalds when they're hungry and liking every shit on facebook...

Magic The Gathering is an easy game to learn and a very difficult game to master no matter what version you play (original physical collectable card game or any digital rendition that has been made over the years).

MTG Duels is a free to play game, and even if you stick to playing just the story mode and completing the challenges that the current 7 stories which complement the 7 decks available in the game, it will offer you a good few hours of enjoyable gameplay.

To be honest it offered just as much enjoyment and gameplay as some of the other MTG: Duels of the Planeswalkers games that you have to pay for on Steam.

If you are new to MTG then this is a great way to learn the game and get to grips with the mechanics of the game, and if you are like me and have played MTG on and off for over 18 years, it was a great way to get back up to speed with some of the new abilities introduced in newer decks. The game offers Skill Quests whenever you encounter a card with a new ability and guides you through a simple scenario where you get to see how that ability works.

By playing through the story modes and completing the Skill Quests you will accumulate a reasonable number of in game coins that can be used to purchase booster packs of cards for you to build your own decks from. You can then venture in to playing against friends or matched opponents online, solo battles against AI, and two headed giant duels. This is where the game does encounter some issues. Playing solo against the AI is fine and you can earn more coins depending on the difficulty level of the AI player. The online matched duels unfortunately has issues. The matching is very poor and novice/new players with only a few cards/boosters and relatively weak decks frequently get matched against players that have either played for a considerable time and earnt a significant amount of coins, or bought coins in game and then spent them on lots of boosters and built fast, powerful decks.

Overall if you take the game at face value and view it as a free to play game that will offer several hours of enjoyable gameplay working through the story mode without having to spend a single penny then it’s well worth installing. If you are looking for a challenging game that rewards you for spending a considerable amount of money to be able to purchase new booster packs and build powerful decks with a collection of virtual, digital cards then you may be better looking at playing MTG Online. For me, if I am spending my money on collecting cards then I would much sooner buy the real things, sit around a table with my friends and play a real game of MTG.

Pros:

• Free to play
  
• Great tutorials/Skill Quests that help you learn the game and advanced abilities
  
• Enjoyable story mode
  

• UI could be better
  
• Online “matched” game very poor at finding a matched player
  
[*]Some bugs still exist in the game (but sure they will gradually get ironed out with future updates)

The game is great, the app is poor

- The animation is pretty time consuming. Even if you turn off all possible animations, there are still some animations left which are really really slow. That is pretty exhausting if you play the whole evening.

- It is still pay to win. The story mode gives you the illusion, that there is a possibility to earn enough good cards to create a good deck, but its still an illusion. Even if you spend some money, it will not be enough. You have to spend a lot or your money is wasted.

- A booster has only 6 cards for a real price of 1.79€. Thats pretty expensive for a few virtual cards in comparison to a real card booster. The only advantage is, that you cant get cards double. Because of this, it is best to focus on one edition to get at least all good cards from one edition (if you spend tons of money).

-The battle interface is poorly designed. If the developers would have spent half the time they took for animations to create a good battle interface, the gameplay experience would be much better

-You even have to buy your Avatar from a limited selection. There is no possibility to personalize without paying (except you pay the little coins you get from story mode, but then it is guaranteed that you will loose fights without spending money for boosters)

+ It is still magic. The rules are implemented well and the cards look good

The game as a whole is slow and frustrating. Animations take forever, card placements are glitchy (several equipment on top of each other) and the interface is confusing. There's also a pretty huge paywall as well. Diddn't enjoy at all.

A little background, I am both a big fan of the 'free to play' model as well as the Magic The Gathering card game.
I've been playing Magic for about four years now.
I've owned a few of the other digital game versions as well as having a few competitive decks in real life as well.

It's been no secret that many people have found the digital series to be pretty hit or miss. I don't know what Wizard's of The Coast does to miss the boat so hard. But I'll first put this review into a technical and then a business sense:

What works about the game:
-Bare bones, the game launches, plays, has a GUI and from what I've seen as of February, very little bugs. It's a smooth experience to start and once you get into the interface it's an enjoyable segue into the game.
-The music as always is top notch. I have yet to see anyone lodge a complaint against the music
-Fair art direction. The cards already have art that they have on file so it's hard to say that they really go out of their way with the art on the cards. However, the 3D cutscenes don't quite match the style of the cards and come off more as a Nickelodeon spinoff of Magic; which, depending on your preference, may be a good thing.
-The deck builder that everyone's been asking for is here. People complain about it not featuring a 'search by name' function. But I truly don't care. If you can remember the picture it takes all of about two seconds. And even if you unlock all the cards, it doesn't hurt to give your other options a browse while you flip to the card you want.

What doesn't work-
Now, before I get into the blemishes, it should be said that I generally enjoy the game but a review in my book is to tell people whether or not the product is worth investing in.
-The RNG. The point of the RNG being so poor is obviously an incentive to get you to buy more and more boosters. Hopefully with your own money. An easy way to observe this is to play the story mode decks. The 'challenge' often doesn't come from having a winnable deck and being forced to outthink your opponent's cards. It's redrawing, and restarting the duel over and over and over until you get a really good hand, (Hopefully with good draws afterward) and sometimes even then, some duels I found were almost impossible to win unless the opponent suffered from several bad draws.
-The Free To Pay model. Now, as I said, I love Free to Play. That's an awesome step forward with games with a competitive environment. I'll talk more about that in a second. But the problem here is that in the competitive side of the game, there's a huge incentive put on buying better cards than everyone else. Keep buy buy buying and hope your RNG gets you better cards than the other guy. A little RNG isn't bad, it keeps things interesting. However, when the incentive is to force the player to spend money when they would rather play with skill, then it's a waste of development time as you'll be seeing diminishing returns on your usage of those features.

What's just in the middle?
Well, between good and bad there's a few things that just sort of fall by the wayside.
-The free cards you earn are not very competitive.
Grinding for better cards can be fun. However, it shouldn't be done in the multiplayer against people with better cards, or at the very least not left to RNG boosters. Not neccessarily saying that the cards offered from the story should be perfectly competitive, but at least enough (if you've completed the whole story) to be able to play against starting level duelists.
-Lack of dynamic matchmaking
As far as I can tell, there's not really any matchmaking algorithms in place to match you with people at your skill level. You seem to be matched with just whoever happens to be playing. This results often in playing against other players with much better or much worse cards than you rather than someone who offers a challenge and a fun game.
-Lack of players
I don't know how many people actually play this game. But I'm judging that not a lot do from how long it can take to matchmake. I guess many people would just rather play the hard-format card game.

Ways to fix it really simply-
1.) First fix and probably most important: specifically two modes that I think will make the game even worth installing-
-Team battle: Basically, five players on each team (5v5) or (4v4) or (3v3) duel it out with premade competitive decks (similar to picking a hero in Dota, each deck has unique themes and abilities and once picked, can't be picked by the enemy team).
This is going to be the main draw of the game. Teams can use game chat to speak to eachother, and make tactical decisions. Suddenly there's a team dynamic, and it's even better than just playing 1v1 with a friend.
-Free battles: These are the current gametypes but reworked. #2 will talk about how to improve this mode. These are duels using decks that you've assembled yourself using the cards that are in the game. However, there can be certain rules applied:
Legacy, Modern, etc.

2.)Observe functioning Free to play systems: perhaps some of the best and most marketably viable free to play models are actually on Steam. Team Fortress and Dota 2 come with their own brand of users and you take them or leave them. Magic is much the same. However to make Magic work as an online game, all the content of the game needs to be free and readily available with balancing patches to control the meta game.
The reason why this works: players can spend more time on the game getting better, and more competitive with the game. Switching the content you want to buy to cosmetic, makes the game more worth playing.

3.) By switching the focus to cosmetic, people invest more time into the game. As they invest, they spend more. I hate to say it, but Dota found the magic formula. You spend X amount of hours and as X+fun=Financial investment.
Now you may say, but that still applies to this game! However, consider that because it's also pay to win RNG, you've got to face facts and admit that you've also got, X+fun-(loss x loss conditions)=fincancial investment. The greater the amount of losses, the less likely that user is to spend money on anything in the game. Nobody except a very small handful of people with huge egos will buy boosters just to compete in a pay to win game. It's very niche. The rest of the people willing to buy are hardcore magic fans who are already likely to just buy hard copies of cards.

Ultimately Wizards is in no financial trouble. However, they are walking away from a lot of money with this particular online game. By tweaking their approach by a bit, their financial rewards could be greater.

Players however, if you are a huge Magic fan then you'll love that the game is free to play, but may grow tired of the monotonous grinding for boosters and long loss streaks in attempts to get better cards with less frustrating outcomes.
If you're not a fan of Magic, but a fan of card games looking to install one on steam, then try it out.
If you're not a fan of Magic and can take or leave a card game, then pass. There are plenty of other, (better) free to play games out there.

If the game is updated to a state where it adresses some of its core issues, then I will happily update this review.

Game constantly getting updates unlike the Duels series, tonnes of active players in PVP.

My only complaint is that PVP is being really forced on people, even those who start out if you're trying to just complete dailies. Bulk of the daily quests are "In Versus Battles" which a newbie couldn't really stand a chance against.

The Grind.....

The most you can win at a time after the campaign is a measly 30 coins per match, playing other players. Yes, you get quests to gain a bit more but these are daily and really make a small impact on coin gain. And each "Booster pack" costs 150 coins which only has 6 cards... yes 6. In comparison, you get 15 when buying real packs.

The main problem with this game is new players start with a very small card pool from finishing the campaign and the starter cards.This makes it VERY difficult to compete with other players who have either payed a ton of money to unlock cards or have grinded for months. The game has a ranking system on how many wins you have NOT the strength of your decks. I have been playing ranked matches against 1-7's and i'd say 90% of those "LOW" ranked players I'm matched against have unlocked most of the cards in sets. Because too many of them seem to have a lot Legendarys and Plainswalkers.


So say you want to pay around how much the previous DOTP games cost including their expansions(around $40) you'll have enough to buy roughly 50 "Booster packs". That's only HALF of one of the 7 sets.

So final verdict:

I can't recommend this to anyone that wants to pay around the same as the last games in the series and get their moneys worth.

And for those that don't want to pay: Hope you have a lot of time on your hands fiend.....

Because At the time of this review I had logged 57 hours and In that time I've only unlocked 27% of one of the 7 sets. Good luck.

Could be a good game, but the bugs are fixed every 3 months...
-IF- they are fixed, anyway :(

Why don't just charge $$$ for the game and keep a dedicated team to attend
the bugs and servers???
... I wonder...

I appreciate this game being free. I spend a LOT on physical cards and get the chance to play very little. This game helps keep me into Magic. Thanks a bunch! Would like a drop down menu to quit, nd manipulate the options without having to press escape.

The game is great. I started playing magic long time ago and now I'm back enjoying it. The only problem is that for new players now you can't get enough coins for buying card boosters from old expansions and create nice decks is really hard.
I payed like 100€ or so but still not close to get 50% of current cards.
Why old boosters don't get a discount? It's a pain

A few things I would Like to point out about this game:
I absolutely enjoy playing magic, and getting to try out different decks is my thing. However, when I try to play with friends, it becomes extremely difficult to connect, especially in Two-Headed Giant. Until this gets fixed, I feel like the game isnt living up to expectations for such an esteemed gaming company

So I beat the tutorial campaign which is supposed to reward me with 3 packs, and it just doesn't. I play the final enemy again to see if that procs it, but again it doesn't. Those packs are just gone. Then I start another campaign and it crashes just as I'm about to beat the first encounter. I saw a lot of complaints in the reviews talking about crashes, so clearly this is common. Wizards of the Coast makes plenty enough money to fix these problems, and especially for a game with a business model like this one it's way more important to fix these issues. However, a trip though Google search tells me that there were people with these same problems over a year ago. I wouldn't invest my time into this, since it doesn't look like they will invest into making it worth your time.

I barely recommend this game but to be honest - it's really good for newbies like me. The Story Mode and Skil Quests are great to introduce MTG's mechanics. But some issues ruins all game:
- Turn will complete automatically if I have nothing to play. Do you realize that it gives too much info to my opponent? Especially if I am playing control deck.
- UI is awful. Did you try to rename your deck? As a gamedeveloper myself I can't imagine how did you manage to hide this so good
- UI is still awful. When a spell in a stack you can zoom it to read some information from the card. You have to right'click it and select "Zoom in". My God, it's the only item in this context menu! Why should I select it when I have no other options?

Anyway, all this problems can be fixed and I hope you will do it, community will be thankful (just kidding, community is never thankful)

"Magic Duels is kinda like your hot crazy ex. She looks good and smells good, so you talk with her and start remembering why you loved her in the first place and want to try it again, and everything is great until she stabs you in the hand with a fork because you were chewing or breathing too loud. But sooner or later, you'll want to try it again."

ACTUAL REVIEW

Let's say until the recent update the game was "good", but now it's a crap.
Let's analyse this. I'm going to win the duel. I'm cast an istant, the opponent cowardly quit, the game crashes, and I lost the duel. This happened today three time....
What the f*ck???
Until they don't solve this problem, the game is an unplayable sh*t.

Good so far, great graphics and soundtrack. Crappy learning a new game.

What I hate is you constantly asking me to rate your game....enough already!!

I'm trying to learn the game...this phase sucks..stop diverting me to this stupid feedback page and let me play!

I'm rating the 'No' recommending this game based on this. I don't know the game yet. Stop asking me to rate it as a new player.

UPS

1.- Magic Duels is an interesting Game of Magic The Gathering that also provides the excitement of opening new boosters.
To get the boosters, you earn coins fulfilling part of the story of the Multiverse of Magic, from the Magic Origins expansion and so on.
I really like how the game is presented, although there are several important differences between this game rules of deck building of the paper card game.

2.- Except for the basic lands, you can only have 4 cards in the deck with the same name if they are Commons; 3 cards if they are Uncommons; 2 if they are Rares; and 1 if it is Mythic Rare. In the proper card game you may have 4 cards of the same name in the same deck.

3.- The good thing about purchasing boosters is that you will get, at most, those many cards, so you can manage to get a collection complete if you purchase enough boosters. One booster is 150 coins. You will not get too many copies of a card and you will not get to use them. From Time to Time, there are boosters "on sale". So dsaving coins for those moments can be useful. They cost 1000 coins on sale.

4.- The way to earn Coins is interesting: Complete the story mode.
Then, you have several quests to do while playing games. you get a new quest each day if you have completed the ones you have, so you can play each day to get more coins.
You can also play the computer to earn small amounts of coins.
If you win online against another human opponent, you get more coins than against the AI; so that encourages facing people online.

5.- You are usually paired with people with the same rank you have (Rank is obtained by the games you win minus the games you lose online), so you should face people with the same skill as you have. You can also play against your friends.

6.- There are many cards and you can make interesting decks, although not that many. And Tribal decks are not that much supported.

DOWNS

1.- The bad thing about the game is the VERY HIGH requirements for a card game. It does not require that much 3D acceleration or anything, I can only play this game on my main computer, but not on my laptop. It crashes. It should require less power for this kind of game, from my point of view. Why does it need that much memory? For the AI?

2.- This encourages new Deck Building skills, and that is interesting in some way.

3.- It is quite slow to obtain the boosters. You have to win coins each day from the quests, you usually have too many quests if you do not play each day. The booster sale is not that often, and it does not promote getting coins more often, because you do not know when you are going to get boosters cheaper.

4.- Most of the Times, quests require to play online. But you have to play in a non-optimal way to fulfill those quests.

5.- The pair system only pairs you with people in the "Win - Lose" ratio, even if they have many cards and you are starting. So it is difficult to balance.
You have to WIN to get coins. That does not encourage playing online. Sometimes, you get so many lost games you do not want to keep playing.
I believe that, to encourage playing with anyone, you should get coins even when you lose. If you win, you get 30 coins. Then, if you lose, you should get at least 5 coins. That would encourage you to play with other people online, people you do not know.
Also, playing with a friend of yours is not encouraged. You do not get any amount of coins for either wining or losing against your friend.
I believe that you should get some coins from that, from playing with your friends. Get, at least 5 coins each. And, if you wih another 5, making a total of 10 coins. Then, you should play a game with your friends 30 Times to get a booster if you do not win any game. THIRTY TIMES. Ok, maybe that it seems that it is too much Time to get one booster... But you earn something from just playing your friends, and that encourages you to play the game, and get more friends into the game.

6.- There are MANY interesting cards that have not been added to the game and that would make it more fun. Most are equipments. Some of those cards are:
Alhammarret's Archive
Archangel of Tithes
Brawler's Plate
Sword of the Animist
Village Messenger
Ulvenwald Captive
Falkenrath Gorger
Drana, Liberator of Malakir
Clash of Wills
Demonic Pact
Goblin Piledriver
Jace's Sanctum
Managorger Hydra
Captain's Claws
Munda's Vanguard
Eerie Interlude
Markov Dreadknight
Odric Lunarch Marshal
Relentless Dead

Maybe they are not the best, but were left out and are interesting to play with.
They could replace other cards that are not even fun to play with. Like:
Dauntless Cathar
Emissary of the Sleepless
Extricator of Sin
Inquisitor's Ox
Paranoid Parish-Blade
Survive the Night
Drownyard Explorers
Stitched Mangler
Crow of Dark Tidings
Rancid Rats
Devil's Playground
Scourge Wolf
Clan of the Waxing Moon
Equestrial Skill
Stoic Builder
Invocation of Saint Traft

Among others

TO SUM UP

If you want to keep in touch with Magic and have lots of Time to spare, you can use that Time opening boosters in this game
But the pace of the game is quite slow and you cannot get your hands on the total combination of cards that you would like to (For instance, with those cards)
The game only encourages winning, not enjoying playing the game; and enjoying any game is a must, even more than only winning.

But this is only my point of view.

Thank you for reading.

This is by far the most comprehensive and fun to play Magic game aside from the game in real life. Even for beginners, the guide can be accessed at any given point during a duel through the menu. Graphics are good and the story mode is fun; the online capabilities as well as the deck building will make this game last a very long time. This is the only game I will give 10/10 in its category and I highly recommend!

I WOULD recommend this game to others. I've been playing Magic The Gathering (with real world cards I mean) since 1995 or so. Going into Magic Duels I was worried that it would be too "pay to win". It's not. Yes you can pay real world money to get more coins to buy cards but you can also earn coins from just playing (only when you win a match of course) and the speed of coin gain isn't too slow. I'm a firm believer in not paying for microtransactions so I'm grinding away at the free path, and it's pleasently reasonable about the pace. You can play against other people or against an AI, 30 coins for beating a person or 15 for beating an AI, and 150 coins will buy you another booster pack (6 cards with 1 guarenteed rare). If your deck isn't good enough to play against real people at first you can just battle the AI until you have a good enough deck for fighting real players. It's got 7 different expansions to choose from, with each having it's specialities (I often pick the one that specializes in werewolf cards).
And the thing that really seperates it from earlier Magic video games is there's no end goal. In previous ones if you had unlocked every level and unlocked all 20 locked cards for each deck you were basically "done". No such thing here. There's no set decks (maybe there is for people who pay real world money), there's just "build your own from the starter boxes and the cards you get from boosters". Which is how Magic is supposed to be anyway, so it's a welcome change. But it means decks are completely open ended, you'll never feel like you're "done" making that deck. Or if you are there's always new decks to make ("hey I don't have an elf deck yet").
One other thing: since it never feels like you're working towards completion you never feel pressed to have a marathon session of the game. This game works great as a breather between playing other games. "Ok enough Minecraft for today, I think I'll play 2 hours of Magic, then switch to Borderlands 2". Maybe at the start you're hard pressed to get your deck good enough to play real people but other than that you can just play for the fun of playing rather than to work towards a goal. Which, once again, is how Magic The Gathering should be.

I have enjoyed playing Magic The Gathering online. I love the ease of play and everything is calculated for you. I enjoy the updated online play which is now inline with the card play at the stores, so I can practice and play online for the in-person games. Thank you! I will continue to play and enjoy the on-line play!