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If you’ve ever played Diablo, Torchlight, Path of Exile or any fast paced action based RPG, you have a good idea what to expect here. The camera is placed at an isometric angle from top to bottom, and you will spend time getting ready and preparing for city points, before tackling the game world and embarking on dangerous tasks. Unless you’re doing a dedicated story mission, you can run into other players in the world or in the city center, but it’s not quite on a ‘massive’ scale. This is similar to the concept of how Destiny sends players together for content. You start by choosing your own, personal Planeswalker with three main character-determining choices: your load of equipment and artifacts, your class, and your deck. Your class determines your innate abilities, such as your primary attack, secondary special attack, and utility, such as dash-jumping as a geomancer. And then you serve ‘deck’ like your actual CCG card. You will choose a variety of spells (each ‘card’ in Magic is a spell) and you must build it with a mixture of spells you create, magic / arcane spells and spells.
From what I’ve seen, just like in the real Magic, deck building is a big part of Legends and it comes down to how your hand is rocked. Before looking for a quest, you need to adjust your deck (12 cards at a time), as this directly affects which cards are drawn in your hand at random (4 at a time). A unique curveball used to confuse things is that the buttons for using your playing cards are randomly assigned each time. For example, a Magma Burst spell could be the B button at one point, but after you cast it and finally show it again, it could be X this time.
Another interesting aspect is how they chose to deal with mana costs. In the CCG you have a limited amount of mana resources that you slowly build up over the course of a game, but in Magic: Legends the manapoel starts to get big and is split between colors based on the color ratio in your deck. If you have an exact 50/50 split between white and blue, this is also your mana pool. But if it’s 8 white and only 4 blue, the mana pool will reflect that, so the available mana is proportional to the types of spells you’re ready to use.
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There are a lot of strategies that are going to define the right character formation. Since your class itself can have a very different color than your game, you can get very creative once you consider all the different progression waves and build varieties. Two players using the same class can play completely different characters based on the deck colors they use.Similar to how you can switch decks between games in Magic if you want, you can also very easily and quickly swap the decks and drawer swaps in Magic: Legends. Cryptic has done a remarkable job of combining the concepts of a game like Diablo with the core rules behind Magic: The Gathering.
However, not all card game mechanics translate directly. In a magic game, the turn order usually states that when you take turns, you ‘declare’ which creatures the player wants to attack, and then the other player chooses which attacks to block with which creatures. Abilities such as trampling, blocking and provoking, of course, further complicate the core idea, but that is always the core. In Magic: Legends, however, once you summon a creature, it usually follows you around and he fights his side based on his powers – you do not really do much management, because the ‘gap’ of the call, the outreach of new spells, and the recall is so fast.
At the moment there is a basic 1v1 version of PvP, but the focus certainly seems to be mostly on the collaborative side of things and experimenting on how the different classes and deck combinations can work together. The gameplay flow is very different, but the Magic flavors are still there. Bringing the amazing, iconic artwork of the cards to life in an action game rather than just another digital CCG is truly amazing.
That said, I definitely have my reservations about the monetization plan. Since Magic: Legends is a free game, you choose a single class to use, with all the others behind a pay wall. Then use a currency in the game that you slowly build up by playing the game “plana mana” or by spending money directly in the cash shop, and you can unlock the other subsequent classes. Other types of items available in the cash shop include convenience items and random card amplifier packs, but you can’t buy specific spells directly or upgrade a specific game in your deck.
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It does not sound like a ‘pay-to-win’ system, which is good, but it certainly makes me curious what type of content would be for paying customers only. There’s also a Fortnite-style Battle Pass, in which you enter seasonal content for a low fee, usually $ 15 or so, and when you play and rank, you unlock new cosmetics, boosters, and so on.
After seeing the demo in action and seeing the funny details about how deckbuilding in Magic: Legends works, I’m very eager to try it out for myself. The extra layered nuances transplanted from the CCG seem to give Legends a strong sense of identity that games in this genre are often lacking, so that’s all right.
David Jagneaux is a freelance writer for IGN. Chat RPGs with him on Twitter at @David_Jagneaux.