Review: Magic: The Gathering – Duels of the Planeswalkers

I’d like to think that I’m a pretty cross-genre gamer: you’re just as likely to find me scrubbing toilets in The Sims 3 as you are to see me scrambling across the ruins of Moscow in Metro 2033 with an assault rifle in hand.

One type of game I’ve never really tried is the Collectable Card-based variety: the concept popularised by 1993's printed-card game Magic: The Gathering.

Being an obsessive-compulsive former programmer and data analyst, you’d think a game of statistics and logic developed by a mathematics professor would be right up my alley. Unfortunately for MTG, I have little love for Fantasy – the Sword and Sorcery side of gaming.

I came to MTG’s latest PC release, Duels of the Planeswalkers, not only ignorant of the games that preceded it, but without any experience with the genre as a whole. As such, I’ve reviewed the title on its merits as a video game and its appeal to the gamer-in-the-street: if you’re a seasoned MTG player, my opinion is the last one you’ll want.



Duels of the Planeswalkers originally launched last year, on Xbox 360. It’s been a successful title and at the time of writing, it was the sixth best-selling game on Xbox LIVE Arcade. Almost a year later to the day, it emerged on PC via Valve Corporation’s Steam platform.

On the surface, Duels of the Planeswalkers is a simple game, you select a deck of cards and throughout the game, draw cards to acquire mana (magical energy), cast spells or summon creatures to attack your enemies and defend yourself. The last player with any hit points (health) left is the winner.

There are no fancy animations – cards are drawn and tossed around the board in much the same way you’d play the “real” game. A few glowing lines indicate which cards affect which others, but it’s all very understated. There are a fair few sound effects, which perhaps accounts for some of the download size.

The complexity is introduced by the sheer number of cards, potential interactions between them and the way that any card can potentially override the basic rules of the game. I found the enemy AI to be extremely challenging – I may be new to the genre, but I know “hard” when I play it. The difficulty can be lowered if you’re overwhelmed, but I’m always up for a new gaming challenge.

You have the option of playing a single-player story campaign – comprised of a series of duels with various computer opponents – or online against other MTG players. There’s a huge online community out there, and I’d wager that most players who get heavily into the game will end up there. The single-player campaign serves more as a training stage – considering you’d be training to duel with some very clued-up individuals online, the high intelligence of the computer players is probably a good thing.

At $14 (US$10) it’s a budget buy for a recent release, and the 516.3MB download is small by modern game standards. If you want to try something different, it’s a relatively minor investment for a great wealth of potential gameplay. If you’re an existing MTG fan, I suspect this game is already in your Steam or Xbox LIVE collection.