So I was looking for a quickie strategy-ish game to play and saw this thing for ten bucks on Steam; I was a Magic addict back in the 90s, got rid of my cards when I moved overseas, and have occasionally missed the gameplay but not so much the endless new expansions and so on. I downloaded the demo and was a bit dubious; the two decks you get access to in the demo are both pretty mindless - a Green summon-stompy-creatures-and-kill deck and a Red burn & goblins deck; it led me to wonder if there was going to be some of the more interesting reactive & combo-oriented gameplay that I find interesting about Magic.
Fortunately, the full game proved more fun: I beat the game with the blue deck, which did play as one would expect an environment-controlling blue deck to work; in some games I slowly pecked my opponent to death while sitting on a hand full of counterspells, while in others I won by running my opponent out of cards. Since then I’ve been playing with a green-black Elf horde deck, which basically involves trying to hold off my opponent’s superior creatures until I can get one of my global elf-boosters down on the ground, then turning around and smashing him into oblivion. I’m also looking forward to messing with a black discard deck.
The lack of deck-building I think is a net plus in the game; it helps keep the duels reasonably balanced; otherwise, at least in single-player games, you’d either (a) have to ruthlessly optimize your deck to have a chance, which takes some of the variety out of the game, or (b) an intelligently optimized deck would just run over the computer opponent unless you deliberately gimped yourself, which would be boring. The AI has some problems, but combined with the luck of the draw it’s good enough to beat me 1 out of 3 or so, which is about ideal for this kind of game for me. I like a challenge, but not TOO much of a challenge.
The one thing that bugs me about the current setup is that while you can add cards to your deck that you unlock as you fight duels - and the balance is not bad there; for the most part the cards added make sense and improve the deck’s capabilities - the only cards you can remove from your deck are the added ones. I’d love to remove my Walls of Spears from my blue deck for duels with opponents who use only flying creatures, but I can’t; I’d like to drop out a few of my weaker Elf cards from the Elf deck to make room for the better ones that you unlock, but I can’t do that either.
Also irritating are a few artefacts of the game’s origin as an Xbox game: the co-op mode is only for local co-op, and requires that I have an XBox-style controller, and moving among the menus involves some loading screens that seem excessive.
Tried the demo and the user interface grated on my nerves pretty badly. If I’d blow 10 bucks on a card game thingy I’d buy Spectromancer … except I already have it, of course. Way uglier but the gameplay is good, and that’s what counts.
The AI still has some issues; it doesn’t understand about Giant Growth or waiting for a blue player to tap out; but it isn’t bad and occasionally does clever things (such as waiting till I assign my blockers and then terroring my Elf Champion :mad:).
Also, some of the timing issues really irritate me - I need to put my mana in to regenerate BEFORE damage is dealt??? but that might reflect an actual change in the rules of the card game itself.
Of course, those are some of the trickiest aspects of the actual card game, too. When I’m playing green, I’ll often try to sneak some attackers through by hoping my opponent will assume I’ve got a Giant Growth in hand, or try to kill something by hoping my opponent does block and growthing the attacker. Unfortunately, the guy I play against most often knows me too well, and is really good at reading faces: He always seems to make the wrong (for me) play.
Blue, of course, is even more so, but I find that enough of a headache to play that I don’t usually play blue myself.
Yes. To explain in more detail, it was a consequence of the elimination of the “damage prevention step,” an unwieldy and unnecessary bit of phase that, IIRC, caused rules problems of its own.
The change to damage sequencing (which primarily occurred in M10, last year, not in 1999 - see item 5 here) is one of two notable changes to the way turns are sequenced since the 90s version of Magic.
The other is that all fast effects are Instants, with a more formally defined Stack used to resolve them in LIFO fashion. If you recall playing with Interrupts, those are gone now*. Tapping lands is instantaneous, because it would be annoying otherwise.
Damage no longer uses the Stack, as noted in the link above. The consequence of that is that it’s no longer an event that can be responded to (or to put it another way, nobody gets priority between assignment of damage and resolution of damage). This winds up much cleaner from a rules perspective, but is weird for those of us who are used to being able to respond to lethal damage by regenerating a creature. Once you get used to it, it’s quite logical; you just need to learn to activate Regeneration at the Assign Blockers step in combat instead of waiting for the Damage Resolution step, since you can’t do anything during that step.
Outside of combat, it’s almost identical from a player standpoint, although a bit different from a rules engine standpoint. You respond to the casting of the effect (or activation of the ability) rather than to the creature taking damage. This means that the Regeneration effect is in effect before the damage gets to the creature (yay LIFO), so it survives.
It’s like this:
I cast Lightning Bolt on your Drudge Skeletons
(Drudge Skeletons have not yet taken damage; we are waiting for the effect to resolve)
You activate Regeneration on Drudge Skeletons
No further actions, so we begin resolving:
Drudge Skeletons get Regeneration Shield ability
Lightning Bolt resolves, doing 3 damage to Drudge Skeletons
We pop into a damage resolution phase immediately
Drudge Skeletons take 3 damage, killing them
Regeneration Shield returns Drudge Skeletons to play tapped
(I think they actually leave play and return, but I’m not 100% sure - I haven’t run across a play situation where that mattered yet)
*Mostly. Cards with the Flash keyword function like old-style Interrupts, in that they can be played at any time and create a new Stack that can only contain cards with Flash, resolved in LIFO fashion.
Flash - a keyword on a Permanent that allows it to be played at the speed of an Instant. (A Creature can have Flash; A Sorcery cannot - because a Sorcery with Flash should just be an Instant. Instants, obviously, do not have Flash because they do not need it.)
Split Second - seals the stack, until the card with Split Second has resolved.
Thanks for this thread. I just started playing this game and I wasn’t aware of the changes to the damage resolution since I haven’t played since 4e. I was getting pissed at the UI for not letting me stop the play to regen my critters after they got damaged.
I’ve been mostly playing the big and mean green deck. Fun times.
The change to combat damage resolution was mostly because people were doing silly things like sacrificing creatures that were about to die anyway. You can still sacrifice a creature that’s in combat, but now, you have to choose between using the sacrifice (if you do it before damage is assigned) or the creature dealing combat damage (if you wait until after damage is assigned, at which point it’s too late to sacrifice).
I had a long green vs. green battle that froze my PS3. During that game I learned that there’s a software limit of 50 creature tokens from whatever that card is that gives you a 1/1 token during every upkeep. After it got to 50 they stopped getting created. Then that wolf card that creates a wolf for each land. We both had lots of life and lots of creatures but the game couldn’t handle resolving the inevitable all-out attack. It just froze, not even the PS button did anything. I let it sit for 30 minutes just in case it was doing a lot of processing.
I did finally beat that green deck using my white, thanks to a convenient Wrath of God. The AI just plays every creature it can, even if it’s not necessary, and I counted on that.
Anyway, playing this PS3 version makes me realize I actually DON’T want to get back into the card game. I enjoy a few games now and then, but couldn’t commit to the level of effort it would take to stand a chance against decks like the ones in the game.
To add to Brainiac4’s summary, it’s important that anyone can add stuff to the stack at any time during resolution of spells and abilities already there (as opposed to the “old days,” where you could only add stuff atop stuff already played, and were barred from adding new stuff once everything started resolving).
OK, I’m clearly misunderstanding the concept behind those decks. The one for Rhys the Redeemed, for instance, doesn’t seem to have Rhys himself in it, and it only has 2 or 3 cards in it that produce creature tokens (it looks like it’s mostly a landfall deck). What, aside from the colors, does that have to do with Rhys the Redeemed at all?
Someone with fresher memory can correct me if I’m wrong, but IIRC the opponent who uses that deck is Rhys the Redeemed, but the name of the deck is Heart of Worlds.