John Zeitler

Back in December I went over my impressions of the demo for Magic: The Gathering: Duels of the Planeswalkers. It had been a little harsh, I realized, but at the same time I was aware that there was a good game underneath the flaws. This week, its $5 price tag as part of the Xbox Live Gold Deal of the Week caused me to go back and re-examine my position. At a most basic level, customizable card games face big problems of balance when being translated to electronic versions. I’d mentioned last month that the lack of deck creation could reasonably be accepted in the name of balance, but at the same time I wished for a way to tweak decks. I also complained about the game’s pacing, citing the obtrusive “go/no-go” timers as annoying and inconsistent.

To address the first point, something that isn’t conveyed well at all in the demo is that winning victories with each of the preconstructed decks earns you cards for that deck’s sideboard. You start with two decks available, also, and can earn whole new decks by defeating opponents in the campaign mode. While you still don’t have the ability to pull off a complete deck recreation, you can drop cards that don’t perform up to your personal spec and replace them, provided you’ve earned the requisite sideboard cards. A point that is also worth considering is that each of the preconstructed decks is, if not explicitly, presented as an exemplar of the different styles of deck philosophy. The default deck offered is a green-fattie deck, relying on taking some early hits to build up mana and bringing out heavier creatures. Considering I was able to use this to rip the first opponent to shreds (earning the achievement for dealing 20+ points of damage to an opponent in a single turn), I’d say it’s a decent example of the deck type. The second opponent’s white-weenie deck (focusing on overwhelming opponents with lots of cheap creatures, some with flying) gave me a little trouble until I remembered how to counter it. My only complaint about decks now is that multi-color decks seem to be woefully underrepresented in the primary game and campaign opponents.

As for the second point, yes, the pacing is a serious problem. The timer mechanic, in theory, sounds good, but it goes by too fast in some cases, and is completely unnecessary in others. The game is, on the other hand, smart enough to know when to skip the attack and block phases of a turn. So, then, at least for single-player, skipping unnecessary uses of the timer– such as the “end of turn” mini-phase– when the player has no playable cards in his or her hand makes sense, but is inexplicably not there. I can see why you would want to keep that functionality for multiplayer situations, where making your opponent think you’re always holding a Counterspell or Disenchant card is vitally important, but in the solo campaign maintaining the timer serves no purpose but to annoy the player.

In my play sessions, though, a new issue has come up, and that’s DLC. An expansion pack was made available, and runs $5 (equal to the game’s cost at the time of this writing). However, there’s a free DLC pack labeled almost identically, intended for players who are not going to buy the expansion, allowing them to play against opponents who have. This is patently ridiculous. The non-paying support for the DLC cards should have been included as a title update, not as a second, confusingly-named and optional DLC pack. (This also highlights a major beef I have with Microsoft refusing to slipstream title updates in with new purchases from the Marketplace, but that’s a different issue.) To add insult to injury, the only other paid DLC for the game takes the form of useless reskins of the in-game tabletop or characters, or the now-expected, never-purchased Dashboard Themes and gamercard pictures. Adding in a few more optional decks for a buck or two here and there would have been a nice touch and hewing a little closer to the original model of the game, with the strict proviso that the DLC decks were as balanced and well-constructed as the standard ones.

My opinion of the game hasn’t changed all that much. If you’re reading this past the end date of the sale, the $10-15 spent on the game is put to far better use on a booster pack or three, or if you’re a new player, a preconstructed deck and dues to the local game club where you can learn the ropes. However, for the $5 of the Deal of the Week price and ignoring the expansion DLC, Magic: Duels of the Planeswalkers becomes a much better value, especially if you’re interested in learning your way around a few new deck types. It’s no replacement for the cardboard crack, of course… think of DotP as electronic methadone.