Magic Duels: The Good & The Bad

November 26, 2015 9:00 ( Articles, F2P News ) 1

The digital version of Wizard of the Coast’s popular trading card game Magic the Gathering, Magic Duels, brings the classic Magic gameplay into the digital world, allowing the game to be played for free on multiple platforms. Collects hundreds of cards, build up imaginative decks, theorize on strategy and put it into practice against players and AI for rewards and rank.

The game had a bit of a messy launch and has seen its share of troubles since then, but in its current state here’s what we think is the good and bad of Magic Duels.

The Good

• Traditional TCG Mechanics – Players can experience the same mechanics as seen in the original physical trading cards game including the turn phases, land building and more.


• New Player Friendly – With a PVE campaign that guides players into the game and a number of tutorials during matches, the sophisticated mechanics are explained well enough for players new to the genre.


• Deck Building – Players can choose a single card and have the Deck Builder Wizard create a deck for them based around it, incorporating cards that have good synergy and strategy potential for the player.


• Well Designed GUI – the user interface is extremely clean and stylish yet remains simple to suit the various platforms such as PC and Xbox as well as touchscreen iOS devices.


• The Two-Headed Giant – We see the return of 2HG and now players can once more play co-op with friends in 2v2 battles.


• Completely Free – The game has a lot of issues, however, it is at least completely free to play.

The Bad

• PVE Campaign is Difficult – The difficulty level of the PVE campaign is set at a single difficulty setting, players are given pre-made decks for the campaign which change between matches, but they cannot be edited and players don’t get to learn what is in the pack, and so a single wrong action is severely punished.


• Surrender Is Not an Option – It doesn’t always take long to work out if you are going to win a match, however if your opponent sees the inevitable and forfeits the game the AI takes out and you have t play to defeat them instead.


• Forced Deck for Questing – Oddly when you want to complete quest (that give coins for buying packs) it can only be done with a deck created by the Deck Building Wizard, which usually aren’t all that good.


• Base Cards Are Bad – The Origin deck itself is pretty bad, some of the cards are poor, don’t have much strategy to be implemented so players always seem to have bad cards whilst even the easy AI will have some of the best cards available.


• Technical Issues – The game is extremely buggy with constant game crashes and freezes that never seem to get resolved, the multi-platform has no compatibility between between Xbox One, iOS and PC.


• Two-Headed Giant Chat – The game has no chat options in match period, even between players on the same team in 2HG, so there is no way of communicating in game what cards and strategy your ally should use…

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