First released way back in 1993, Magic: The Gathering is a rare bastion of stability in our mercurial times. That was the year of games like Doom and Mortal Kombat II; of memorable films like Jurassic Park and that abominable Super Mario Bros. movie, and the year that Rick Astley finally deserted us for retirement. In other words, the stuff of nostalgia and bargain bins--maybe, on occasion, antique stores. Yet somehow Magic continues to get better and stronger despite the passage of years. That’s especially apparent in Duels of the Planeswalkers 2013, which presents a welcome improvement over the previous releases.
If you’ve never played Magic before, the basic concept isn’t really too complex. In most cases, two players (or “planeswalkers,” if you prefer the lore term) sit opposite each other with a customized deck of cards, using it to build up mana and unleash powerful creatures and abilities on their opponents. Each player has 20 health points, and they do their best to whittle the other guy’s points down to zero. Occasionally, as in Duels 2013, you’ll have the chance to play against multiple players, but the one-on-one duel to the death has stood at the heart of the Magic experience since the very beginning.
As with chess, though, such simplicity masks a rich and rewarding tangle of strategies that someone could devote their lives to untangling. After nearly 20 years of expansions and rule tweaks, Magic has built up a dizzying arsenal of cards that's become so complex that even the series' most fanatical adherents have trouble keeping up with them all. The ideas behind the five basic deck colors haven’t changed over the years (red is for brutal in-your-face-tactics, for instance; blue is more about control) but the abilities on the cards allow everything from simply removing an opponent's cards to intricate actions that damage both the opposing player and their cards in play. The result is a game that’s about 20% luck and 80% skill, and it’s frankly intimidating if you’re approaching it for the first time without a friend.
That’s why you won’t find a better introduction to the franchise than Duels 2013. Indeed, it’s not much of a stretch to think of the Duels series as an entertaining and adequate tutorial for playing the physical game. You may never have the chance to fully master things such as the sideboard with Duels alone, but you also don’t have to worry about exasperated sighs from veteran planeswalkers when you try to use an Enchantment at the wrong time or play a Creature card before you have the required mana. In Duels, the computer helps you master all that with hints in the “mage” mode, which prepares you for the online free-for-all mode that will likely pit you against someone who’s been tinkering with Wizards of the Coast’s famed decks for longer than some of us have been alive.
Duels 2013 doesn’t stray too far from its two predecessors, but there are still enough changes here to warrant a look. For one, Duels 2013 features manual mana tapping (or the ability to choose which “land” card you put into play), which is a must when using a deck composed of more than one color. In the past, Duels usually chose the card for you, and it created needlessly complicated adjustments when it chose the wrong one and the occasional loss that should have been a win. It’s also filled with other tweaks that enhance the whole experience, ranging from trackable stats that help you size up your opponents in the multiplayer to a rating system that lets you see how one deck fares against another. It’s all still a little slow owing to the lack of a button that allows you to skip through all of the steps if you don’t have much to play on a particular round, but the rest of the gameplay is so refined that it seems like a minor concern.
The decently sized single-player campaign also does an excellent job of demonstrating the abilities and general strategies associated with the decks in play (10 of which are new), which more than makes up for the absence of any real storyline aside from some brief cinematics with the evil dragon Nicol Bolas. After you've defeated all the bosses, you can undertake the same campaign in “Revenge” mode with tougher AI that more closely resembles the decisions real players make. That's important if you plan to play in any of the multilayer versions, and I found I learned more from the specialized secondary scenarios that teach you how to deal with tougher tactics instead of the bosses themselves. In my case, I had the hardest time fighting a blue deck that consisted of little more than mana cards and blocks, and I learned enough from the encounter that I’ll probably know what to do if someone ever tries that cheap but challenging strategy in a multiplayer game.
But nothing sets apart Duels 2013 quite like the tradeoff of 2012's Archenemy mode for the multiplayer “Planechaser” mode, a free-for-all affair for four players featuring a six-sided die and the chance to uncover planar cards that can force the removal of all cards in play. It's fun when it works, and dodging the threats from three other players at once adds a welcome dose of urgency that was missing in the more objective-based gameplay of Archenemy. When it doesn't work, it's a snoozefest. Other players either take too long to play their hands or constantly use the die to reveal new planes, which means you usually end up tossing your cards just as a good strategy was forming. Duels 2013 also allows for Planechaser campaigns against the AI if playing well with others doesn't come easily, but the tradeoff of quicker gameplay comes at the cost of questionable decisions on the part of the computer. No human player, for instance, would ever ignore an enemy player with one point of health left for the chance to attacking another with 19 points, but my AI opponents tried that twice.
As a person who’s always wanted a workable version of Magic for my mobile phone, I’m pleased to say I had just as much fun with the new iPad version as I did with the PC and console versions--perhaps even more so. It’s essentially the same game from the PC or consoles (down to one-on-one multiplayer, which connects through Apple’s Game Center), but with the difference that you can play through most of the content for free. The controls are intuitive for the most part, and using your finger to select lands or drag creature cards into play capture some of the feeling of the physical game. As the recent explosion of imitation collectible card games on the iPhone, Android, and iPad suggests, mobile devices are uniquely suited to Magic’s 15-25 minute matches, and it shouldn’t take long for Duels 2013 to claim its rightful place over its competitors.
Even so, it feels regrettable that we still can’t design our own decks in an advanced mode of some sort, particularly since I love playing with a green, blue, and white deck that’s impossible to recreate with Duels’ predesigned decks and limited customization options. Players have begged for this option ever since Duels came out, but it's unlikely that we'll ever see it because it would put Duels in direct competition the existing Magic Online, which allows the ability to buy and sell individual cards much as if you were playing the physical game. The income reduction would probably be devastating. But even if Wizards of the Coast can’t or won’t allow us that degree of customization, it would be nice if we weren’t required to have 24 land cards when we’re trying to cram as much power as possible into a compact but efficient deck.
Source : ign[dot]com
