Magic The Gathering Duels Of The Planeswalkers 2013
Roman Bayramdurdiyev
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The venerable fantasy card game, Magic: The Gathering, has just made its debut on mobile by way of an iPad app titled Duels of the Planswalkers. The closest we've had to a Magic game on iOS so far has been Shadow Era, which admittedly did a decent job, but it's awesome to see the real deal available.
The core mechanic for Magic is fairly simple: you and your opponent each have 20 life points, and the goal is to reduce them to zero using offensive spells and creatures summoned to your command. In order to cast spells, players must use lands under their control to produce mana points. That mana is colored based on the land type, and powers equivalently-colored spells from your hand; for example, islands produce mana to be used in blue spells, which tend to revolve around illusion and the mind. White, blue, black, red, and green spells all have their own themes and cooperate well with some other colors (such as white and green for light and healing) and oppose others (white and red for order and chaos).
Each player takes turns, which involve drawing a card, playing a land, attacking with creatures, casting spells, and if there are too many cards in your hand, discarding. Lands and creatures indicate that they're in use by being "tapped" sideways, and are "untapped" at the beginning of every turn. There's a detailed and helpful tutorial and lots of pop-up tips built into the game for those that are new, but veteran planeswalkers can skip it and get right to the action.
For every game you win in the campaign, you earn one of 20 unlockable cards per deck for added customization. There are rare foil cards available too, but you can skip the whole rigamarole of earning your cards and just buy decks outright through in-app purchases. I would have really liked to have the ability to build decks from scratch, but the game seriously streamlines things and only unlocks cards for specific decks. It sure would be nice to have trading capabilities over multiplayer to complete the experience.
There are a bunch of game modes. First, there's the single-player campaign, where you chew out AI planeswalkers. Between campaign games are Encounters, which are themed battles with consistent strategies that you have to defeat. There's also a standalone Challenges mode available later on that provides particularly tough scenarios to play through. After defeating a planeswalker the first time you earn their deck, but you can always go back to the campaign to unlock more cards from their color. A new mode to the series is Planechase, whereby game conditions randomly change based on a third deck's draw; the story goes that you and your opponent are battling across multiple magical realms, each with their own properties. Revenge games are the last campaign type, which pits you against AI with highly-optimized decks. Custom single-player games and online multiplayer games have a few more modes, including Two-Headed Giant (2 vs. 2 with shared health) and free-for-all. That said, there is definitely enough variety in gameplay to keep you coming back.
Controls are generally smooth and ripe with swipe gestures to flip through your hand and play cards. At first, subtle techniques are hard to figure out, like activating creature abilities. Even with a great help system with all of the rules plainly laid out, I feel that new players will be quickly overwhelmed with the mechanics and even slight control mishaps might turn them off from Magic altogether. Aside from that, the visuals and audio are really good for a card game.
There are cutscenes, 3D effects, and extremely high-quality artwork imported from the tabletop card game. Unfortunately all of that high quality comes at a hefty cost of nearly 1 GB of room, which can be a lot to ask for if you're using a 16 GB iOS device.
In Duels of the Planeswalkers, you get access to a red, green, and blue deck and a single campaign game for free. You have to pay $9.99 in order to unlock the full game, which includes special challenges, new decks, and online multiplayer. There are a wide variety of achievements and leaderboards available, both of which are tracked in-game as well as through Game Center.
Magic might have a bit too much of a geeky vibe for some players, but Duels of the Planeswalkers is a real treat for those of us that loved the game in high school or are still regularly playing. Shadow Era has shown that a free-to-play model for trading card games is fairly viable. With such a massive backlog of cards to use, Wizards of the Coast should have been able to deploy something similar, or at least rely enough on in-app purchases to not resort to a $10 pricetag.
As I saw at PAX East, Magic The Gathering: DOTP 2014 has been re-skinned from the ground up, starting with a brand new menu UI. Instead of the swivel picture menu that has been used in the last three DOTP games, 2014 uses a standard list style menu, which makes going through menus just a bit faster. The achievements/trophies section has been given its own menu selection rather than being found in the Player Status section, as it was in the last 3 games. Chandra Nalaar dominates the screen in these menus, as she is the main protagonist for this games story line, besides yourself that is. The game features your standard campaign and challenge game modes, and features a Sealed Play campaign as the unique game type.
Sealed Play is a game mode where you open booster packs and create a deck from the cards granted by these packs. You begin by selecting a Sealed Deck slot and opening 6 14-card Booster Packs. You are then taken to a deck building menu where you can build a deck from the cards you received. The cards in the booster pack are random, so whatever cards you get aren't always the same as someone else playing. You can build the deck your own way, or have the game build a deck from your cards on its own. You can also select some cards you want in the deck and then use the auto build to complete the deck for you. This feature is of great use to both new and experienced players alike. The auto build will take the best combination of cards from your pool and also add a corresponding amount of mana. You are given two deck slots for sealed play. Each deck slot will have different booster packs for when you open them. You can also purchase another deck slot if you wish. Each deck slot will have its own Campaign process and completing matches may grant you new booster packs to enhance your sealed deck with. Your decks will show the strength of your built deck next to it and you can also change the name of your deck to your choosing.
The deck manager in game has been changed to allow you to control almost every aspect of the deck you are playing with. While you still cannot add cards from other decks or the massive library of cards in the game, you can now control how much mana is in your deck, and what color mana you are using. Which means if you are using a green deck, you can add blue mana to it if you so choose, even though that won't really be much of a good idea as you won't have any blue spells to cast. But it's great to know the option is there. Unfortunately you will only be able to use your fully customized Sealed Decks in Sealed play games, and must stick to the standard decks in Two-Headed Giant matches and the main campaign.
The Campaign story line for Magic The Gathering: Duels of The Planeswalkers 2014 follows Chandra Nalaar in her quest for revenge. After learning of an ancient fire scroll from another Planeswalker, Chandra sets out to steal it and follows a map on it to the plane of Zendikar. She is ambushed on this plane and decides to seek revenge on the person who guided her into the trap. The campaign begins with a duel between you and Chandra. After defeating her, Chandra enlists your help to track down Ramaz, the planeswalker that led her to the scroll. She speaks to you about 5 leads that she has to find Ramez. The first being a pendant she was given by Ramez that came from Innistrad. In previous DOTP games, you were not required to play some of the duels in order to advance the campaign. You only needed to win certain duels in order to advance the campaign. Because of this, each chapter of the campaign would have 6-8 duels with only 3 specific duels needing to be played. The other duels were there to help you earn more cards for decks, since you unlock one card at a time for the deck you are using by winning a duel. DOTP 2014 only has 4 duels per chapter, but you must complete each on in order to unlock the next duel in the sequence. After fighting the planeswalker at the end of the chapter, you unlock the next chapter of the campaign as well as the chance to duel one of the 5 main planeswalkers, in order to unlock their preferred deck. The results will allow you to unlock a total of two new standard decks per chapter, with the second deck unlocked being whichever of the five main planeswalkers you choose to face: Garuuk, Adjani, Chandra, Jace, or Lilliana.
The game's look and feel is still familiar to players who have been enjoying the DOTP series, yet still new and highly polished. The game allows you to choose which mana combination you use to summon creatures when you have multiple colors of mana. If you choose to play a creature that uses less mana than your full amount. You can choose the combination from a set of pre-defined combinations, allowing you to put more strategy into your game play. This also opens up the possibility for players to mess themselves up if they aren't paying attention to what they are doing and use the wrong mana combination.
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