Review – Magic: The Gathering – Duels of the Planeswalkers (XBLA)

Magic: The Gathering has amassed a fan base of over six million players originating from over seventy countries since its debut back in 1993. One of the first collectible card games to ever be produced, Wizards of the Coast’s Magic: The Gathering features a library of over ten thousand cards to choose from, each with their own purpose and flavour. The amount of variables can be overwhelming to even veteran players of the game, and when coupled with the expansive and sometimes complicated rules, the game can be rather intimidating to new players. Hoping to enable newcomers to overcome their fears, and to entice those that have always fostered a curiosity for the game, Wizards of the Coast and Stainless Games have created Magic: The Gathering – Duels of the Planeswalkers for the Xbox LIVE Arcade service.

Aimed primarily at beginners, Magic: The Gathering – Duels of the Planeswalkers does a great job of introducing the concept of the game. The game offers a comprehensive tutorial that will teach players both how to play the game of Magic: The Gathering and how to use the Duels of the Planeswalkers graphical interface. There is also a unique Mentoring feature in the game that allows more experienced players to assign themselves a role of Mentor. At any time during the game, players may choose to locate a Mentor over Xbox LIVE and watch them play. Players will be able to see the Mentor’s hand of cards, and can even speak with them privately about their strategies. This great feature not only teaches new players about the intricacies of the Magic: The Gathering rules, but also helps establish the social environment that the real world game thrives on.

Magic: The Gathering is played with a deck of cards known as the Library. Each player assumes the role of a Planeswalker, a powerful wizard capable of creating life and shaping worlds, and engages in a duel using the creatures and spells found in his or her Library. Creatures will form a line of defense in front of their respective Planeswalker, attacking their opponent whenever the opportunity arises and defending their master from incoming attacks. Creatures have a wide range of powers and abilities and each varies in toughness and power – the numbers that represent their strength and vitality.

Spells, on the other hand, are typically one-time affairs that will produce a helpful effect on behalf of the caster. Spells are capable of destroying enemy creatures, damaging your opponent directly, bestowing special effects and abilities upon allied creatures, and can even bring creatures back from the dead.

Each card in Magic belongs to one or more colours, and each colour represents a different kind of magic. Red cards are often chaotic and aggressive, blue cards are mischievous and manipulating, black cards are capable of controlling life and death, white cards offer healing and protection, and green cards represent nature and the powerful forces found therein. Duels of the Planeswalkers offers players with two mono-coloured starter decks to choose from at the beginning of the game: a red deck focused on speed and damage and a green deck focused on producing massive creatures. As players progress through the game’s campaign mode, in either local co-operative or single player modes, they will unlock new cards and decks to use.

Unlike the real game of Magic: The Gathering, deck customization in Duels of the Planeswalkers is actually rather limited. Each of the eight available decks start with sixty default cards, and these cards can never be changed or removed. Whenever a player wins a match in campaign mode, they earn one new card to add to the deck that they just won with. Each deck can earn up to seventeen cards in total, and the cards are rewarded in a pre-determined order. The first win with the red deck will always earn a player the Shivan Dragon card, for instance. Cards earned in this manner are added to a deck’s Sideboard, and can be added to or removed from the deck at any time prior to a match. Unfortunately, only Sideboard cards can be added or removed in this manner, so the deck will always retain its original make-up and theme, but with the addition of a few more cards to add some extra muscle. While this may be beneficial to teaching new players the themes found in each of Magic’s five colours, those used to building their deck from scratch may find the lack of customization very disappointing.

The campaign itself is rather bare bones. Presented as a linear list of matches, there is no adventure or role-playing element at all present, and the only choice a player needs to make is which deck to use before each match. Furthermore, the order of matches in the campaign mode never changes, so progressing through it a second or third time to earn cards for another deck could become terribly repetitive. Thankfully, players also earn the next card in their deck progression via wins in the co-operative campaign and online against other players as well.

The online mode features matches that support up to four players in a variety of configurations. Players can play free-for-all matches involving two to four Planeswalkers, or compete in a match of Two-Headed Giant: a co-operative battle in which two teams of two duel to the death.

The visual presentation of Duels of the Planeswalkers is good, but has its flaws. The cards found in the game use the artwork from their real-world counterparts and look gorgeous, but the graphical interface can feel a little busy at times. Whenever cards target each other, lines are drawn between them to show that they are interacting, but if too many cards are present in the play area, it can sometimes be difficult to determine where they are pointing. Additionally, each of your opponent’s creatures will feature power and toughness and creature ability icons hovering above them for quick reference. This works great when there are a few creatures on the table, but they tend to overlap each other when many creatures are forced to sit side-by-side. Some visual cues, however, like flying creatures hovering over the play area and the noticeable glow of creatures with activated abilities, are quite welcome.

The sound design in the game isn’t quite as redeeming. The game features very little variety in music, and hearing each track over and over again during the sometimes lengthy matches can make Duels of the Planewalkers painful to listen to. Additionally, the sound effects themselves are generic and dull, and due to the variety of recorded bit rates, often play back at varying and seemingly random volumes. The best thing that can be said about the sound design found in Magic: The Gathering – Duels of the Planeswalkers is that it supports Microsoft’s Custom Soundtrack technology. Listening to Placebo’s new album throughout campaign mode made the experience a much more pleasant one.

Overall, Duels of the Planeswalkers is a difficult game to review. With the lack of customization and limited selection of 280 cards, the game may have little or no appeal to Magic: The Gathering veterans. However, the Mentoring feature, comprehensive tutorials, pre-made decks, and a comparatively low financial investment required to start playing the game make it fantastic choice for beginners. The graphical interface could use some polish, and the terrible sound design is unlikely to change, but Wizards of the Coast and Stainless Games have created a great introductory product. However, those Magic: The Gathering veterans that care more about playing the game than agonizing over deck lists and the latest combos may also find a great deal of value in Duels of the Planeswalkers.