14 DAY TRIAL // 
Magic is back for another year, with the usual, expected improvements, and some all-new content, ready to be once again crowned the king of trading card games. Only this time around, although nothing can truly steal Magic: The Gathering’s position as the top dog of TCGs, Magic 2015 won’t have a hand in it.
Magic: The Gathering – Duels of the Planeswalkers 2015 continues the tradition of positioning itself as the gateway for would-be card slingers, a product aimed at a more casual market that is interested in what Magic has to offer without taking it too seriously.
The game’s high-wire balance act is attempting to offer enough of the core action that makes Magic the best, without having a negative impact on either the cardboard trade or on Magic: The Gathering Online, which frankly is a pretty daunting task.
Magic is a very complex game where you take on the role of a wizard that can control arcane energies divided into five flavors across many planes of existence, to and from which such wizards, dubbed Planeswalkers, can gracefully hop in their quest for power, vengeance, solace or salvation.
You get a very large assortment of cards, embodying creatures, spells, artifacts and locations that lend their energy to you in the form of mana, and you can craft a 60 card deck with cards that share traits (either very aggressive or powerful mana generation and large beasts, or powerful spells that allow you to control the pacing of the game, and so on and so forth). Then, you duel fellow mages, hoping that you can deal them 20 points of damage before they can do the same to you.
The title draws on twenty years’ worth of lore and intricate mechanics, and aims to offer a bite-sized version of the game that is much more palatable than the full gargantuan scope of the cardboard variant, but still retains the core elements that make the game so popular.
The magical forces are divided into five different main ideologies, that are neatly color-coded for convenience, with white being the power of justice, healing and protection, black the power of corruption, sacrifice, death and undeath, blue the color of subterfuge, illusion and manipulation, red the unabashed primordial savagery of wildfire, while green represents the force of nature, of growth and untamed beasts.
Magic 2015 sends you on a journey across several different worlds from the extensive MTG universe, starting with Innistrad, the gothic realm of horror, and moving on to Theros, the land of gods, heroes and mythic beasts, Ravnica, a sprawling city divided between ten guilds, and finally Shandalar and Zendikar.
Although this was one of the much sought-after features to be added to Duels of the Planeswalkers, it unfortunately also marks a dip in the product’s quality. DotP’s fanbase wasn’t exactly overlapping with MTG’s competitive scene, and while the ability to craft your own deck sounds groovy on paper, in reality, it is well hidden behind a sturdy paywall.
While previous games allowed you to tackle their campaign with a series of pre-made decks, Magic 2015 asks that you make up your mind in the beginning, and then stick to that for the remainder of the game, or at least until you grind enough cards to build a different deck.
If you find yourself unable to beat a certain opponent (and they’re by no means difficult), you will simply have to grind until you get enough cards to create a new deck on your own, as opposed to how you could just pick another pre-made one in previous iterations.
This does offer more flexibility, as former Magic 201Xs only allowed you a certain degree of liberty when it came to what cards you could put into what decks, but it does so at the cost of everything else.
Wizards of the Coast, the creators of Magic: The Gathering, can’t create a much cheaper product that offers the same experience as their cardboard game, and thus, Magic 2015 will allow you to unlock heaps of bad cards, while holding the ones that are any good up for ransom.
If you factor in the fact that you won’t be able to get four-of-a-kind (the maximum allowed number of copies of the same card) rares and mythics in order to create truly consistent decks, like you can with the cardboard version, usually for the cost of several hundred dollars, that means that you’re left with a casual product that attempts to do something impossible, and thus inevitably fails.
Having thematic pre-built decks meant that someone not interested in spending time deckbuilding could simply pick one up and enjoy the game, but now you’re stuck with the one deck, with the grind being much more monotonous, and your only other option being to pay more in order to win.
Furthermore, there are some cards you won’t be able to get no matter how hard you try, because they’re “premium” items that can only be found in premium booster packs, which are paid versions of the packages of random cards that you earn while playing the campaign, the only way to expand your card pool.
The good part is that if you find the challenges too difficult, you can always fight some additional, infinite, optional battles set in the same plane, in order to get new boosters and thus more tools to upgrade your deck with, but they can only get you so far.
That is probably the game’s biggest sin. That being said, it’s still Magic: The Gathering, still a solid game and one of the best ways to introduce someone to the hobby.
The game has a lot of beginner-friendly options that take care of some of the more complicated systems, such as mana management and the order in which you assign damage to multiple defenders, which players can turn off once they get a better grasp of the mechanics in order to take advantage of more subtle tactical opportunities.
Unfortunately, the way mana is used cannot be controlled in any way, which means that there will be many occasions where you will feel like setting your computer on fire because it decided to use all the available mana of one color, leaving you unable to cast the second spell you were planning to fling at your opponent.
This, along with the fact that once you click on something it’s gone, there’s no going back, and the fact that the cards in your hand have a tendency to sometimes move a little while you’re hovering over them, will cause you to erroneously cast creatures sometimes, potentially costing you the match.
In addition to this, you would do well to start writing your will if you haven’t already, because by the time all the animations are done, when you’re attacking with a lot of creatures and there are a lot of blockers on the other side, odds are there will be buzzards circling over you.
The unbearably slow pace that the game crawls at will severely test your patience, especially if you’re an experienced Magic player that favors a more brisk play style.
When you factor in the fact that you are playing with very bad cards and with mostly basic lands that can only generate one type of mana, and you are thus heavily relying on luck to win games, along with the fact that you have to start over at the same breakneck speed when you become mana-screwed and can’t cast half your spells, the game becomes a veritable source of irritation.
The lag in the interface menus is here to stay, as the obvious fact that they are designed to cater to touch screens and swiping makes navigation sluggish and unpleasant.
Once you get used to that though, and to the seemingly awkward manner in which you interact with various items on the screen, the game gets much better. It is, after all, Magic.
If you’re topping the FNM’s, Magic 2015 doesn’t have all that much to offer you. But if you’re new to the game or like to keep things fun and casual, there’s a lot of fun to be had with it.
There’s a bit of a story featuring prominent characters that you might have seen in the past, such as the angel Avacyn, and there are also a lot of battles that will test your mettle ahead of you. Although as with any card game, Lady Luck can severely alter the outcome of a duel, there is also a lot you can learn when it comes to which cards go together with which, and judicious use of your resources will, as always, be the principal factor in your victory or demise.
Unfortunately, some of the most popular features of the past have been stripped from Magic 2015, such as the ability to play duels cooperatively with a friend, in 2-Headed Giant mode, or the very interesting and enlightening Challenges.
Furthermore, the game does not feature any of the unorthodox but very fun special game types that its predecessors offered, such as 2013’s Planechase or 2012’s Archenemy, and 2014’s Sealed is also nowhere to be found.
The Good
- Magic: The Gathering is a very solid TCG
- Unrestricted deckbuilding
- Polished visual experience
- Replayability
- Good entry level product
The Bad
- Microtransactions act as paywall
- Uninspired and limited card selection
- Sluggish UI
- Lacks 2-Headed Giant and other interesting multiplayer modes
- Some technical issues detract from the experience
Conclusion
It is still a pretty good entry-level product that will likely get people interested in joining a Friday Night Magic event at their local game store, but it feels somewhat disappointing when compared to previous titles in the series.
While the addition of full-fledged deck building is something that Duels of the Planeswalkers fans will certainly greet with excitement at first glance, the actual implementation is lacking at best, starting with the fact that the game doesn’t tell you that you’re stuck with your first choice of deck, continuing with the uninspired and limited selection of cards, and ending with the microtransactions that hold some of the better cards hostage.
While Magic: The Gathering is still fun and still the best trading card game there is, Magic 2015, in spite of its visual polish, is hard-pressed when competing with the likes of SolForge, Might & Magic: Duel of Champions, Hearthstone and all the other strategic card games that have popped up lately.
