Magic Duels

[Stan]

so, I've been playing around with Magic Duels. It's a "free to play" version of Magic the Gathering online. It's a good way to learn the game. If you go through the story modes, you experience some of the basic deck types and learn how all the basics work. The game tracks the current stats of all the creatures and has symbols for special abilities like deathtouch and first strike so it's easier to keep track of the status even if you're not familiar with all of the cards. The one thing I hate is it can be hard to play instants at time as the game lags and then goes straight to the next step before you can play a card at the time you want.

It has prebuilt decks or build your own. The easy building path lets you put in cards you want then it finishes building the deck. The more complex version has a filter system to find the cards you want. You start with a few cards and you earn enough to get some booster packs through story mode and playing, but it's hard to get many cards unless you grind for a long time or spend money. There is no card trading system but there seems to be a mechanism keeping you from getting >4 of the same card.

It has an AI to play against with 3 levels of difficulty against a random deck or you can play against people. Playing against random people is ok but nearly half the time, they drop right away. Some of the people with low ratings (so I get paired against them) have decks that far outclass mine.

I still play paper with my son. If I stay with it online, I'll probably move to the full version of Magic Online where you can trade to get what you want and play in a specific type of game. But Duels is a good way to get a taste of the game.

[DMDarcs]

It's a great way to learn to play the game. I really enjoyed Story Mode.