The recently released Magic Duels is coming to Steam next week, bringing with it the newly released Origins core set. Released on iPad earlier in July, Magic Duels seeks to put an end to the yearly Duels of the Planeswalkers franchise. Moving forward, Magic Duels will be the go-to game client for anyone who wants to play Magic online away from Magic Online (MTGO).
While we recently scored Magic Duels as fairly average, a large part of that was due to the game suffering from some gamebreaking bugs and server issues. Since the iPad release, Wizards of the Coast have been fairly forthcoming about the problems the game is suffering, promising fans that issues are being worked on - in fact Wizards gave out 400 Coins (2 and a bit booster packs) as an apology for the server issues within the first week of launch. It’s nice to see a company taking these post-launch kinks so seriously, and even though I scored the game 5/10, I am both intrigued and hopeful to see where this game will go on PC. I still play the game on my iPad for about half an hour every day, and there improvements being seen. While I don’t see the PC release of Magic Duels rivalling MTGO due to the simplified gameplay options and limited card list (MTGO is seriously in-depth), Wizards does plan on releasing extra sets for Magic Duels in real time, so perhaps there is life in this game yet. Perhaps we will even see a duality form, with the most hardcore players leaning towards MTGO, with the more casual players leaning towards Magic Duels. Either way, this is just speculation at this point.
The Origins set of Magic: the Gathering cards brings 5 of the most famous Planeswalkers back to their roots, telling the stories of how they ignited their Spark, letting them travel between the various planes of the multiverse. While it was fun to play with these cards in advance of the prerelease, and the cards are still fun to play with now (as long as my iPad can stay connected to Wizards’ servers), I’m still holding out for the Tarkir block. Gimme that sweet Dragonlord Atarka, Wizards.
Nic Bunce
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