A buddy of mine told me “I’ve started playing Magic: The Gathering again”.
Inside, I did the “long no” and told him “Dude, I appreciate that, but if you need to scratch that itch, you should pick up Magic the Gathering Duel of the Planeswalkers 2012, 2013, and/or 2014. Probably about $20 each with all the expansions and you will scratch your Magic itch without spending a mint.”
Then I felt like I had done my good deed for the day and quickly re-downloaded 2012 and played the heck out of it. Then I played some more 2013. And then some 2014.
They’ve got straight up deck vs. deck games that you know and love.
They’ve got challenges that ask you stuff like “how will you survive this next turn and then beat your opponent on the next?”
They’ve even got games like Archenemy where it’s 3-on-1 (but the 1 gets an overpowered boon every turn… like free lands or make an opponent sacrifice a creature or stuff like that).
I got every single achievement when I played it back on my XBox 360 and so I failed to get every single achievement on Steam (yeah, I bought it twice…) and it was fun to get achievements that I had failed to get the last time I played.
I was having so very much fun playing these games again that I thought “I will need to write about this for Saturday” but when I started writing about it, I realized “HOLY COW THEY DON’T SELL THESE GAMES ON STEAM ANYMORE!”
It’s like they figured out that people would purchase these games so they could get all of their Magic itches scratched for only around $20 instead of buying a deck and 10 boosters and shelling out for that rare that really ties the deck together.
So you can’t get this game on Steam which is a real bummer because, seriously, Magic has a lot of really cool nooks and crannies in it and building and playing and tuning decks is a lot of fun but, seriously, the game is a money sink. Getting all of your decks at once for only about $20 is the right way to play.
On top of that, you’re playing against the computer and so you can play the decks that are absolutely *NO* fun to play against to your heart’s content.
I wish that Steam still sold it. Because, seriously, *THIS* is the way to play Magic: The Gathering. If you can find it out there somewhere, you should give it a shot.
So… what are you playing?
(Featured image is the splash screen from Magic: The Gathering Duels of the Planeswalkers 2012.)
Seriously, though…I like the feel of the cards in my hand and the banter at the table. I’ve only played Commander, which is a multiplayer format, and at this point I have zero desire to build or curate my decks. Maybe that’ll come with experience, but right now it’s just fun to play. Heck, I’ve even won a few games.Report
Hasbro, which owns Magic: The Gathering and Dungeons and Dragons, announced layoffs of nearly 20% of its staff recently.Report
It feels like they’ve been flooding the market at the same time as eating their own seed corn.
But I’m old. Maybe they released stuff on this schedule back in the day.
I do know that my most hardcore gaming buddy is still a Pathfinder guy to the core. Any improvements made by 5 to 3 isn’t as good as the improvements made by 3.5 to 3.
(A heck of a lot more accessible, though.)Report
Both products cost a bit to publish, but are nearly free to put online. Hasbro would like them both to be primarily or solely online. I’d like strangers to give me cars.Report