Geekery: Duels of the Planeswalkers
By now, XBOX 360 owners should have already noticed that the latest edition in the game marketplace includes this quaint little title called Magic: The Gathering Duels of the Planeswalkers. Yes, you are correct if you think that this game is based on the huge franchise of the Magic: The Gathering CCG.
To those living under a rock, Magic: The Gathering is originally a collectible card game (CCG) where players buy numerous packs of cards and build a nice, solid deck comprised of one or more colors from the 5 main elements in the game (black, white, blue, red and green). The main objective of the game is to defeat your opponent via the use of creatures, enchantments, artifacts and spells.
I admit to the fact that I considered the ‘Magic hobby’ very nerdy (not to mention bloody expensive), so I did my best to steer clear from it during high school and all throughout college because of my meager allowance and limited attention span. So imagine my surprise that after 10 years (or more), it was waved in my face — digitally. I decided to finally succumb to the evil and pay up the 800 MS Points to download the full game. What’s $11 and hundreds of hours from your life, right?
There are five main game modes in Duels of the Planeswalkers, namely:
- Campaign (beat all 16 stages and unlock new decks — I’ve already beat everyone but I haven’t unlocked all the cards yet)
- Challenges (play the 8 pre-made card puzzles and defeat the other Planeswalkers — I already beat them all!)
- XBL mode, either casual or ranked matches (play against another player via Live)
- Two-Headed Giant (co-op play in one XBOX against a pair of AI planeswalkers)
- Custom Duels (I don’t know; haven’t tried this mode yet)
Same as how you’d play M:TG in real life, this XBLA game follows the same format of gameplay. You will start off by choosing a deck of your own to play (either red or green which are the first two of the available decks). You then play land cards which will provide you with mana to enable you to cast spells. Spells can either be creatures, instants, sorceries, artifacts, or enchantments.
At first, I chose to play Garruk Wildspeaker’s deck because his creatures are teh awsm. Up till now (after unlocking all of the 6 other decks) I still preferred using the green deck over the other colors (at times, if I just wanted to play a quick round) because of its humongous creatures.
While most veterans gripe about the lack of customization of the decks in DotP, most noobs (like me) are content with playing the pre-made decks and its interesting choice of cards. It’s actually quite a challenge making these limited sets of cards work against each other. After playing for more than 10 hours of the game (I played through 6 hours in one sitting — from 11 pm to 5 am, oh god), I have learned to love Nissa Revane’s contrasting green-black deck. This deck is known to tear even Garruk’s biggest creatures to shreds — that is if you get lucky with building an army of elves. Although now I’m playing the Lilliana Vess (black) deck and I’m finding it pretty interesting.
One of the gripes I have in the game is that the AI tends to be stupid sometimes. I haven’t tried playing the game online with the other real players (only for three rounds with the boyfriend — where I won at least one round, hooray), but the AI sometimes lacks the foresight of passing up in order to block for the next round — which then leads to their death. Also, I get a lot of freezing whenever a card gets played up — but this is easily fixed by turning the view of the card table, at least. Another bug that we’ve noticed is that the game hangs a lot whenever we play the Two-Headed Giant game. Hopefully, this gets patched soon.
After spending a few (understatement) hours more, unlocking new cards and beating the other opponents in the campaign series, it has dawned on me that the game is an actual advertisement for the real Magic CCG. I now have this irresistable urge of buying the actual cards and starting my own deck while researching on the other cards available in the new expansions. OMG, I’m finally a full-blown Magic geek.
Magic: The Gathering Duels of the Planeswalkers is a pretty good effort to get players interested in the Magic CCG with its easy to get into tutorials and explanation of gameplay, eradication of the complex deck building which discouraged a lot of noobs before by offering pre-made decks, and by giving players a slew of other game modes to get their feet wet. All in all, I’d say that this game is worth it at 800 points as it provides hours and hours of geeky fun. And that if you’re looking to get your gamer significant other to understand your Magic: The Gathering obssession, this is your golden ticket :D
