Bluetracker

Tracks Blizzard employees across various accounts.

My thoughts on the game at the moment

As a magic the gathering player for a long time I have been looking for a good substitution for the phone. I was hoping that wizards of the coast would get their act together and make a port to the phone. Since it is not been available I have been playing a lot of yugioh duel links because I've tried hearthstone but I felt the gameplay to be too shallow. All along I've been looking in the wrong place waiting for wizards of the coast answer to the mobile market when I should have really been keeping this in my radar. So as in old School magic the gathering player New age yugioh duel links player and also hearthstone player I thought I'd give you my input.

Considering this game is an alpha I can say without a doubt it is the smoothest in terms of gameplay and interface. I have been playing for a couple hours now and I have found no bugs. I am going to run down a couple of the important factors for me and write a tiny bit about why I feel certain ways about this game.

Interface: I find the interface to be incredibly smooth not hard to navigate intuitive and I also enjoy the background art. I have found no problems navigating my ways to anything I'm looking for. As for the in-game interface I found equally as intuitive and the story tutorial like missions help not only push the narrative but also get used to the new features that are trickled in over the course of playing. I like the fact that I can magnify the art and zoom in on the cards to get a better view of what they do. Nothing felt overwhelming and it was pretty easy to tell what was going on for the most part. The only part that could maybe be a little confusing for anyone who hasn't played card games before is when a spell card did multiple interactions and you had to look at the card read and see what just transpired.

Gameplay: for the longest time I was racking my brain about how you would transition the mana system for magic the gathering over to mobile without being a dumpster fire mess of incredibly small cards that are impossible to read. This game has masterfully figured that out and actually created something I believe even better than magic the gathering in terms of resources. Burning cards not only does it allow you to ditch useless cards that would be saved for a better time but actually reward you with resources for doing so. I also feel like this game has stopped teppen before it even started because the main issue with teppen is you could only function with mono type decks and to try multi color was nearly impossible and not intuitive at all which made the games stale and took away the fun of deck building. This also made most matches a cookie cutter fight between colors which did not add very much variety to the matches or to the deck building process. That's why I love the fact that you were able to add as many colors as you would like and the burning of cards dictates the resources which makes the deck building possibilities limitless. I also enjoy Lane enhancements I think they are probably one of the coolest ideas that have come to a card game in a while. It adds another layer to your deck building strategy. I also love all the creature abilities and how you handled tapping or activating creatures abilities through the slide down to activate feature. At the end of the day this definitely seems like my type of game and something I'll be playing a lot in the future and letting my friends who also play magic the gathering know about.

So overall I think in a oversaturated market online card games this one does what every other one tries to do and break the mold. Bringing the reduced clutter of hearthstone with all the amazing strategy technique and Gritty art style of magic the gathering and put them under one roof.

The only negative I can possibly think of is the fact that I player on a razor 2 phone. And while it's never enough to cause an issue the phone does get warm I don't know how this would transition to other less gaming orientated phones but mine is able to handle that.

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