I haven’t played Magic seriously in quite some time, but am always happy to play a ’casual game’ of it. Magic the Gathering: Duels of the Planeswalkers 2012 ("Magic 2012" from here on) is meant to enable this sort of behavior, offering a variety of pre-made decks and a streamlined version of the full Magic card game experience at a much more wallet friendly price of $10 USD/800 Microsoft Points. A previous game in the series offered basically the same thing, but Magic 2012 offers a variety of improvements to entice you. Despite a few snags in at least one new feature, it is for the most part a worthy update.
As a collectible card game, Magic has two or more players face off by taking turns playing cards from their deck in an effort to reduce their opponent’s Life total to zero or less, though there can be other ways to win. These cards interact with one another to represent all sorts of spellcasting fantasy themes; one card might represent an elf warrior or skeletal monster, while another card might behave as a fireball that can strike down an enemy creature even as another card lets its owner gain great benefits if certain other cards are in play, and another still might change how the typical rules work. It’s very much a mental game, one defined by your ability to understand the basic plan your opponent’s deck wishes to implement while making best guesses about what’s hidden in his hand, and similarly you have to keep your own intentions hidden until you can implement your plan.
While that serves as a basic summary, Magic’s real fun is in how it allows you to use different styles of play through different decks. Magic 2012 offers about ten, each varying in complexity and planning. On one hand, you have ’fast’ decks such as a Red one focusing on a constant stream of escalating creatures backed by ’direct damage’ cards to clear their path of opposition, while a White deck focuses on several inexpensive creatures that are upgraded by equipment cards to meet your needs and supplemented by cards that ’lock down’ your opponent’s most important assets. Or perhaps you would prefer a Green deck, that focuses on laying down an early defense and then spending lots of resources on getting huge ’Timmy-style creatures’ in play to obtain an crushing and decisive win. Other decks pursue a variety of less conventional ways to win, ensuring most play styles have at least some representation.
Magic 2012 encourages you to keep playing through two different methods, urging you to go through its single-player content as the most efficient means of unlocking some content while still rewarding you for playing a variety of online and multiplayer modes. If you get tired of conventional one on one ’duels’, there are free-for-alls, Two-Headed Giant (a two against two team format where each team shares a life total and can help their partner in combat phases), and Archenemy. Archenemy bears special note since it is a format only recently introduced to Magic, pitting three players against one other player armed with both a normal deck and a series of ’Scheme’ cards that give him enough of an edge to put up a fight against otherwise overwhelming odds. Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem that a human player can be the ’boss’ player in this mode; that role always goes to the AI, which will either put up a very good fight or make astoundingly bad decisions and lose despite its advantages. This omission is very unfortunate, and one can only hope it will be corrected in a future patch.
Though the new modes and decks are perhaps the biggest things going for Magic 2012, they’re hardly the only ones. Deck editing has been significantly improved over the previous game, now allowing players to even swap out cards that would have been considered part of the ’core of the deck’ if they wish; perhaps you have discovered a weak card or learned something else about how to improve your deck and now you can act on it. Loading times and other minor interface tidbits seem to have been improved as well, and there are a variety of new puzzle ’challenge’ events to test just how well you understand Magic.
Despite some problems, Magic the Gathering: Duels of the Planeswalkers 2012 is a ’good faith sequel’ that is well worth checking out. Yes, they’re asking you to cough up full price again for a game similar to the last one, but the developers have made clear efforts to resolve complaints about the previous version and add enough new content to be worth your time. About the only people I wouldn’t recommend it to are those with no interest in a more cerebral game or those who have already had their fill of Magic, but for everyone else this $10 USD/800 Microsoft Point cost should be a very nice deal.
