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If you’ve played Diablo, Torchlight, Path of Exile, or any other fast-paced action RPG before, you’ll have a good idea of what to expect here. The camera is positioned at an isometric top-to-bottom angle, and you’ll spend time getting ready and preparing for downtown locations before venturing into the game world and completing dangerous quests. Unless you’re doing a dedicated instanced story mission, you may encounter other players in the world or in the center of town, but it’s not quite on a “massive” scale. It’s similar in concept to how Destiny brings players together to get content, you start by selecting your own personal Planeswalker with three main choices that define the character: your gear and artifacts, your class, and your deck. Your class will determine your innate abilities such as your primary attack, secondary special attack, and utility abilities such as board jump as a geomancer. And then your “deck” acts like your actual CGC card deck. You will select an assortment of spells (each “card” in Magic is a spell) and you will need to build it with a mixture of summon creature spells, sorcery / arcane magic spells, and enchantments.
From what I’ve seen, just like in Magic, deckbuilding is an important part of Legends and it all depends on how your hand is shuffled. Before embarking on a quest, you will need to customize your deck (12 cards at this time) as this directly affects which cards are drawn randomly from your hand (4 at a time) during combat. A unique curved ball used to mix things up is that the buttons for using your spell cards are assigned randomly each time. For example, a Magma Burst spell might be the B button at one point, but once you cast it and it respawns, it might be X this time.
Another interesting aspect is the way they chose to deal with mana costs. In the CCG, you have a finite amount of mana resources that you slowly build up over the course of a match, but in Magic: Legends, the mana pool starts out big and is split between colors based on your color ratio. deck. If you have an exactly 50/50 split between white and blue, so is your stash. But if it’s 8 white and only 4 blue, the mana reserve will reflect it so the mana you have is proportional to the types of spells you are ready to use.
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There’s a ton of strategy that will go into defining the right character build. Since your class itself may be an entirely different color than your deck spells, you can get extremely creative once you’ve factored in all of the different progression paths and built varieties. Two players using the same class can play entirely different characters depending on the deck colors they use.Similar to how you can swap decks between matches in Magic if you want to, you can also swap decks and loadouts very easily and quickly in Magic: Legends. Cryptic has done a remarkably efficient job of combining the concepts of a game like Diablo with the basic rules of Magic: The Gathering.
However, not all card game mechanics translate directly. For example, in a game of Magic, the turn order usually dictates that if it’s your turn, you “declare” which creatures are trying to attack the player, then the other player chooses which attacks to block with which creatures. Abilities like stomping, blocking, and provoking, of course, further complicate this basic idea, but that’s still the gist. In Magic: Legends, however, once you summon a creature, it usually follows you around and fights alongside you based on its powers – you don’t really micromanage much because the “churn” out of the summon, the casting new spells, and the re-summon is so quick.
As of now, there is a basic version of the 1v1 duel of PvP, but the focus definitely seems to be mostly on the co-op side and experimenting with how the different classes and deck combos can work together. The flow of the game is vastly different, but the Magic flavors are still there. Watching the incredible iconic card artwork come to life in an action game rather than another digital CCG is truly wonderful.
That being said, I definitely have my reservations on the monetization plan. Since Magic: Legends is a free-to-play game, when you first start out you can choose a single class to use, with all the others locked behind a pay wall. Then, by using an in-game currency that you slowly accumulate by playing the game called “planar mana” or by spending money directly in the store, you can unlock the following other classes. Other types of items available in the store include Convenience Boosts and Random Card Boosters, but you won’t be able to purchase specific spells or upgrade a specific spell in your deck.
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It doesn’t sound like a pay-to-win system, which is good, but it does make me really curious about what types of content will be reserved for paying customers. There will also be a Fortnite-style Battle Pass, where you subscribe to a season of content for a low price, usually around $ 15 in most games, and as you play and level up you will unlock. new cosmetics, boosters. , etc.
After seeing the demo in action and learning the details of how deckbuilding works in Magic: Legends, I can’t wait to try it out for myself. The extra layers of shade transplanted from the CGC seem to give Legends a strong sense of identity that games like this genre often lack, so it all works.
David Jagneaux is a freelance writer for IGN. Talk RPGs with him on Twitter at @David_Jagneaux.
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