For those who want to hone their skills, the online competitive play and the puzzles are pretty nice. Nothing quite tests your ability to think under pressure like racing against a one turn clock between victory and defeat. I’ll look forward to purchasing future expansions of the game.

And that kind of folds in to what we’re talking about. To me, each deck included with the game was built to highlight the strengths of each color. Need Life and lots of monster buffs? Use White. Need big offense? Use Green. Like counterspells/cancels? Use Blue, etc. Yes, there are equivalent cards in each color if you broadened the scope of cards to choose from, but for an essential version of this game, I think this approach works really well.

There were a lot of expectations from experienced MTG players for what this game should be. It’s a representative sample of what playing MTG is like. And as that, it succeeds.

But mostly I’m annoyed that I can’t do any direct damage with the blue deck :

I initially had the same impression as you when I first played the game. It felt like I had been given a starter deck and that was all I was allowed to use, regardless of how crappy it was. I can also understand the frustration behind the construction of the included decks: personally, I hate the Green deck because of all the fucking Wurms in there that always seem to come out when I’ve assembled my finishing strategy with White. It’s easier for new/inexperienced players to get carried away with summoning giant monsters and use the brute force approach, which almost always wins. This is frustrating for the veteran, who wants to play a more thoughtful or challenging game.

But to say that deck building takes away half of the point of this version of the game? I’d disagree. In some tournaments, players are given sealed decks that they must assemble the first day, and they play with it for the remainder of the tournament. Duels short circuits the deck building process and just gives you a few that have a very good chance of winning, and sets you on your way. In the Single Player mode, the initial challenge is learning these new decks and what they can do. Then, later on in the campaign, taking advantage of the ones that have been unlocked to suit your opponent.

Indeed, Duels relies heavily on luck, but as I said about the Challenges in the original post, there always seems to be a way to pull off a victory at the last second because you just drew that card you needed. I think the biggest problem is with the initial draw, because I found I was getting either too much mana or too little. This usually decided the outcome of the game (ie. I would LOSE). If Stainless tweaked that with a patch, I think it would be in pretty good shape.

I like that Duels is pre-packaged, and cannot change. My biggest worry about this game is that there is potential for DLC that contains more cards, or new decks. I doubt there is much money in it (how much staying power this game has remains to be seen), but for players that go online it has the potential for the same problems I mention in the post. I’m sure there’s a way to match players that are playing with the core decks versus DLC decks, but then again, how much architecture is Microsoft and Stainless willing to put in place for this game?

@thesimplicity

Really? You’re going to namedrop Ajani Goldmane and Chandra Nalaar to a non-Magic player that has played the XBLA game? Somehow I doubt this proclamation carries the same weight as beating a boss or level in what would be considered a “standard” video game. You’re fighting the deck, not the avatar – there’s no need to disguise it, especially if someone is already familiar with the CCG. I still think a vanilla AI that selects a deck at random out of the cards available in-game would have made the Single-player mode more satisfying, because you wouldn’t know what you were up against. Plus, no dealing with online matches that end early because someone is losing.

Also: pixie dust on a Canadian strip club? Nice.

I have to disagree with your opinion on Planeswalkers… I think they actually add interest to the game where it is needed (trying to conquer the single player campaign). It’s like Ridley or Kraid in Metroid: you drop the name so that other players will know what you’re up against. Telling someone you fought a black and red burn deck just isn’t the same.

I tried playing Magic Online when 9th Edition came out and found it unbearable. It waits for confirmation from both players after every single phase? It was like pulling teeth.

And if my impressions of Magic were solely through this, they wouldn’t be all that positive. Besides, none of the available decks suit my playing style and, I find, they are (partly because how they’re all balanced) a little too luck dependent for my tastes. Newcomers might be frustrated by that, I think. While luck is a factor of the game, good deck building can minimize that and not having ability makes the actual games more of a crapshoot than they should be.

Coincidentally, since I have no interest in sitting in a dungeon with smelly nerds to play M:TG, this game IS a good promotional item: it makes me want to play a competitor, Culdcept, again. A game in which I *can* customize my deck and I can still find something new to do after the initial novelty wears off. Unlike Duels.