All the Fun of Magic for a Surprisingly Affordable Price

Magic: The Gathering: Duels of the Planeswalkers takes the popular Magic collectible card game and puts it in digital format.  Players can either take on computer-controlled decks in a series of battles similar to a fighting game, and can also battle other players over X-Box Live.

This game is pretty much what you would expect from a computerized version of Magic: The Gathering.  It does have a very nice table setup, and allows the player to watch the action from a variety of conceivable angles, even zooming in on individual cards to read them in more detail.  The game also does a very good job of enforcing the rules of the game, and online play works fairly smoothly.

This game does have a few flaws, however.  I experienced a couple crashes during the game, which is something I have never encountered in an X-Box 360 game.  Also, the selection of cards in this game is very low, especially considering the creators had over twenty years of cards to pick from.  Of the 16 battles you fight in the single-player game, four or five of them are slightly harder versions of decks you’ve already fought.  You can’t tell me that this game’s creators couldn’t come up with more than one deck for each of the five colors of magic cards.   The game also has issues with its difficulty curve; rather than the fights in the single player campaign escalating gently from easy to hard, I found most of the battles to be very easy, with the occasional fight that was insanely hard.  This resulting with me cruising the game at a nice clip, only to run headfirst into a brick wall every two or three fights.

That having been said, I strongly recommend this game.  It’s not for everyone; if you don’t like collectible card games, you should definitely avoid this title, as you will most likely hate it.  However, if you like Magic, or collectible card games in general, pick this up.  You could do a lot worse for $10.00.

	System:	Xbox 360
	Genre:	Collectible Card Game
	Experience:	Finished the main campaign

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