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Magic: The Gathering: Duels: Origins

J1M

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May 14, 2008
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After the atrociously greedy Magic 2015 Duels of the Planeswalkers, Wizards has smartened up and took a page out of the Hearthstone playbook.

In July a new Magic Duels game called Origins will launch. It will be F2P with a hearthstone model for card acquisition.
http://magic.wizards.com/en/content/magic-duels



I don't really understand the intensive focus Wizards has been placing on the Planeswalkers themselves and "story" over the past few years, but I suspect it has to do with their female marketing department that doesn't understand why people like the game.

In any case, this new version promises booster packs and full deck customization. The more complicated resolution mechanics of Magic, in particular the ability to play a spell on your opponents turn, remains a double-edged sword. It allows for a game with more depth, but at the expense of online game speed.

I liked the older Duels games, but skipped 2015 when I read about its pricing structure. Looking forward to this one.


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spectre

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Oct 26, 2008
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I don't really understand the intensive focus Wizards has been placing on the Planeswalkers themselves and "story" over the past few years, but I suspect it has to do with their female marketing department that doesn't understand why people like the game.
Well, the decline's been there since 2000 when they decided they want less powerful wizards blasting powerful spells and more send your armies of creatures to duke it out with other armies of creatures.

So, you can actually deckbuild and play it solo. That's a good start. Unfortunately noone's interested in making a new Shandalar.
 

Snorkack

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Shadorwun: Hong Kong
Brofist for the thread's title. I would not have been surprised at all if that had been the game's actual name.

Also, that game doesn't look at all like the Magic I quit playing after Ice Age/Alliances.
 

J1M

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Is this out yet?
This would be an easy question to answer if we weren't talking about Wizards/Hasbro.

It is out for iOS, but the game doesn't have cross-platform play or accounts. I also see complaints that it doesn't work on apple products from 2012. (Not sure why apple users are using the date they bought something to indicate its model number?)

Also, according to http://magic.wizards.com/en/content/magic-duels-download the android version has been scrapped or heavily delayed.

TLDR: It won't really be out until the Steam version launches. That is supposed to be on July 15th. Looks like apple got a one week exclusive.
 
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Jaedar

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Project: Eternity Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 Pathfinder: Kingmaker
This game seems very grindy.

Seems you'll get like ~10 6 card boosters for doing the single player, and then its like 1/3rd of a pack in daily quest.

I am not yet sure how much, if any, gold you get for online games.
 

vampiregrave

Educated
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Jun 19, 2015
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This game seems very grindy.

Seems you'll get like ~10 6 card boosters for doing the single player, and then its like 1/3rd of a pack in daily quest.

I am not yet sure how much, if any, gold you get for online games.

You have to take in consideration that, if you reach the maximum number allowed for a card (4 for commons, 3 for uncommons, 2 for rares and 1 for mythic), you won't find that card anymore when you open boosters. In other words, you need a fixed amount of boosters to get all cards (around 80-85).

About the gold cap:

There is a daily cap to the number of coins that an individual can earn through Battle Mode wins, and that cap is 200 coins.

Players earn coins for each Solo Battle or Ranked Versus Battle (multiplayer) win in Battle Mode. Additionally, players earn a 20 coin bonus with their first Ranked Versus Battle win each day. This bonus does not count toward the daily cap of 200 coins.

Coins earned in Story Mode or from Skill Quests do not count toward the daily cap either.

If you do reach the daily cap you can still continue to play Solo or Ranked Versus Battles, but you will not earn any coins this way until the next day.

For the purposes of determining when a day starts or ends, the game clock is based on Coordinated Universal Time (UTC).
 

Jaedar

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Project: Eternity Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 Pathfinder: Kingmaker
You have to take in consideration that, if you reach the maximum number allowed for a card (4 for commons, 3 for uncommons, 2 for rares and 1 for mythic), you won't find that card anymore when you open boosters. In other words, you need a fixed amount of boosters to get all cards (around 80-85).
Yeah, only need 12k gold for all the cards.

Except they'll be adding more when Battle for zendikar rolls around.
 

vampiregrave

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Jun 19, 2015
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Yeah, only need 12k gold for all the cards.

Except they'll be adding more when Battle for zendikar rolls around.

Yes, you'll have to keep updating your collection, and yes, the barrier of entry to new players will increase with every release, but that's not exclusive to MTG.
 

Andhaira

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I'm playing it, but right now Hearthstone blows this out of the water presentation wise and slickness wise, from everything to the interface, card art and most importantly for me, card effect art. Not to mention turns take much longer in this. Still, I will play this for a few more days before deciding if I want to continue.

vampiregrave It is pretty sweet to know you can own the entire card collection (until expansion) by opening a limited number of packs. In Hearthstone you could open 1000 packs and still not have a complete collection. And that's just with the classic set.
 

FeelTheRads

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Hearthstone beats Magic in card art? Bitch plz.
Otherwise I agree. I don't care much about "presentation", but the interface is pretty annoying. Probably will get used to it.
 

vampiregrave

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Jun 19, 2015
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Well, considering the differences between both games, it's hardly unexpected that Magic games are longer.

vampiregrave It is pretty sweet to know you can own the entire card collection (until expansion) by opening a limited number of packs. In Hearthstone you could open 1000 packs and still not have a complete collection. And that's just with the classic set.

Yes, I prefer this system. The only disadvantage is the lack of crafting, if you plan to build just 1-2 specific decks that is.
 

J1M

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These 'character origin stories' are even worse than expected.

Later:
"Duels Origins exceeds expectations" -Kotaku report
 

Phage

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I played an obscene amount of paper magic during the end of 2012, all of 2013, and most of 2014. I actually got good enough to place at a 5k and constantly placed in local events. Anywho, I'm downloading this shit and I'll give you my opinion as a competitivefag.
 

Phage

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holy fucking shit this forced tutorial/campaign for coins is so boring im gonna blow my goddamn brains out
 

J1M

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Btw, if anyone completes the first story campaign and finds the rest locked out it's because you need to complete the battle mode and deck builder tutorials first (and the tooltip for telling you that isn't reliable). :lol:
 

Phage

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I'm honestly surprised the game was released in this state. It's bad. Really fucking bad.

- Awful music
- Hilarious stock/corporate sounding sound effects
- Interface actually slows games down to a crawl even more than MTGO since you can't manually pass priority
- Banal campaign that I'm pretty sure has preestablished hands/draws for you :lol:
- Deck wizard is so stupid that it made a deck that can't beat the easy AI :lol: (For context, I told it to make the G/R archetype out of curiosity and let it autofill. The resulting abomination could not get past the summon a 2/2 token when you play a land enchantment)

this is just... fucking... what.
 

FeelTheRads

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Apr 18, 2008
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Yeah, deck wizard is teh dumb. Called it then when I saw it in a preview.
And there were some reports (before the Steam release) that you can only complete the quests with decks made with the wizard. Dunno if that's still the case, I did my two quests so far with the deck from the tutorial.
Speaking of stock assets... that crack on the portrait of the defeated player is :lol:
But yeah, whatever, what I care about is they fix the goddamn connection issues.
 
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vampiregrave

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Jun 19, 2015
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65
I'm more worried about oversimplification of game rules, and connection issues. Sound and visual effects are far from perfect, but what really matters to me is the game mechanics, other multiplayer modes and new card set releases.
 

Phage

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Played for a couple more hours. Finished Liliana's campaign. The final battle was kind of interesting, killing the big demons and stealing them from the graveyard. Then I learned you only get bonus packs for finishing Gideon's campaign, none of the others. lol. I'm surprised they bothered making shitty CGI scenes at the end of each campaign. I'm just imagining Mark Rosewater jerking off to the story mode, deluding himself into thinking they've created some amazing literary masterpiece. "THE VORTHOS CROWD IS GONNA LOVE THE FINAL BATTLE WITH THE DEMONS" - I would be surprised if he hasn't said that on his blog already.

Anyways, this game is just bad in its current state. Even beyond all the cosmetic shit. You can't even choose what lands you tap. The game defaults to ordering your blockers unless you scream at it not to. The game teaches bad play habits (screams at new players to play out their land if its the last card in their hand, when in real life, if you have no use for the land, and it's your last card it's better to hold it in case you can bluff an instant, provided you have no mana sinks/landfall shit)

The daily quest system has me scratching my head. It seems that as FeeltheRads said, you can only complete the daily quests with decks made with the deck wizard. Problem is, even if you manually choose the cards, it'll force you to make fucking stupid choices. "Okay, so for this Black/Red deck we're going to put in 7 cards with a sacrifice effect teehee, this game is sooo flavorful!!" "Okay, now I'm going to force you to put 4 treason effects in your deck! lol epic, right? xDD" Why? That's just stupid. Instead of focusing on a shitty mechanic that prioritizes subpar cards, just do something similar to what hearthstone does and try to build a decent mana curve. Like, Hearthstone's deck builder sucks, but at least it doesn't force you to pick 6 return from graveyard effects because "muh flavor". Or better yet - don't make retarded daily quests like that.

While this is easier to get into than MTGO, it's actually worse. That's a huge fucking accomplishment because MTGO is one of the worst pieces of shit I've ever used. The fact that you have to slam the "stop turn" button to react to anything is ridiculous. I'll take getting spammed with "DO YOU WANT TO RESPOND" over this stupid QTE shit. On that note, in MTGO you can setup auto-yields to specific effects, and there are hotkeys to manually pass priority, so the games actually go far faster there.

And all of this underlines a huge, throbbing issue with this game: it's just not very fun. Magic is at its best when both players are wielding powerful decks, or are using a deck they just created in a limited environment. This game forces you to use extremely weak cards unless you grind out god knows how many hours facing banal AI, or throw $50 at them. I'm not opposed to paying for a game, but with no crafting system, it makes it harder to justify spending money. I understand that you can own all the cards with 85 boosters or whatever, and that's cool, but let's say you do that: Now what? What do the top-tier decks in this game even look like? I have a suspicion they're basically Block Constructed. That's fine, BC is an alright format, but it's still not as fun as standard (when standard doesn't suck) or other metagames.

The battles really should be moving like twice as fast, and not because of the nature of MTG, but because of this inane STOP CLOCK system.

If you guys want to waste your time with this that's fine. I just want to make it clear that this is a terrible representation of what MTG can be. (and even then, I'm duly reminded of some of the reasons why I got sick of the game, like land drops sometimes solely dictating who wins matches)
 

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