My great good friend, Bison, turned me on to the fact that this game is now free to play. I downloaded it last night and have played a couple of hours. So far, I like it. I've been playing MtG since '93 and I've been looking for a good PC version to play for almost as long. This offers full deck building, albeit, with cards you have to unlock by playing tutorials and battling the AI. Not sure if there is a pay feature that gets you cards faster, but, I am content to grind for what I get. If anyone is interested in a Duel and you see me online, ping me. If I have the time, I'll surely play :)
There are two ways to gain gold to purchase booster packs. 1. Grind, grind, grind. 2. Pay money to get gold to use to purchase booster packs.
My understanding is that you when you buy a booster, either way, is that you will never end up with more than a play set (4 cards) of any one card. This is nice.
It is also my understanding that this version of MtG will be a legacy game, which means that Wizards will allow Stainless to add more cards over time from previous or current blocks of cards to the game. So unlike past versions, your collection of cards will only grow.
I fully expect like all things. People will bitch and complain that Wizards isn't allowing the good cards or enough cards or charging too much (I guess free isn't cheap enough for some assholes.\). I also know that there will be the "power" MtG players, who rather than play paper MtG or MtGO will create the best decks from the available pool of cards and just make everyone else miserable with their metagame bullshit.
Me? I'm grinding the hell out of the game and playing Metaldog and Bob. Eventually we'll all get better cards and make different decks and I'm sure have fun playing the game and doing some old fashioned smack talk.
Yup - its not bad at all, and you really can't complain when its for free.
It does seem to be having server issues at the moment - I assume its due to overload.
Oh dear lord. And I thought the ftf game was bad enough :P
Quote from: mirth on July 30, 2015, 04:51:13 PM
Oh dear lord. And I thought the ftf game was bad enough :P
You've already expressed your hate for this. Go rain on someone else's parade :P
Hrmm... free you say?
Looks like another one I'll be checking out soon.
somebody mocked up a Lady MacBeth card over on FaceBool
(https://scontent.xx.fbcdn.net/hphotos-xpt1/v/t1.0-9/11831711_10101479907565195_7634568212435316690_n.jpg?oh=193dc642e6d4770c44e523909e7494ef&oe=560F2B2B)
The lady in the picture is actually a really good friend of ours here in town; the picture is from a recent run of MacBeth at local outdoor theaters.
She's the mother of one of Bayonet Jr's team-mates that's played with him for 4 of the last 7 years, and they live about 1/2 mile from us.
That was excessively awesome, Brant! :smitten:
So, is this MTG2015? Or something new? :-\
it's not real - someone was just picking around with a Lady MacBeth card, but the actress they chose happens to be a friend of mine.
Are you guys still getting connectivity issues with MtG:Duels?
Now that the weekend's here, I expect it will only get worse.
I was yesterday, but I got on OK today (so far).
I only just dl'd it this morning while at the office (once I learned it apparently wasn't MTG2015), so haven't tried yet. Curious about server issues, too; but hey, free.
Earned my first Booster pack this morning. 3 Black, 2 Red and a Blue. I'm playing White/Green right now, so, no help. I have defeated 4 opponents with a deck that I made and earned 60 Coins, which put me over the top for the Booster. I have also won a Duel on each of the three difficulty levels. I have noticed that the first Duel of a level is usually a loss for you. Then the next is a win. The bad thing is, that makes it feel contrived to me and if that is so, then the game is cheating on purpose. And I don't like that. I get that the A.I. can never be as 'smart' as you, but, I hate feeling manipulated. It could also be that what I have experienced is random and means nothing at all. Such is life.
Spent a few minutes playing the first skill quests ::) in the campaign. Wish I could skip those, but it doesn't matter as the servers are down or overcrowded or something so it wasn't saving my progress anyway. :buck2:
Still, aside from the happy-chirpy tutorial narrator (who sounds like an expo girl hired to give a presentation on things she's trying hard to sound interested in ;) ), the presentation seems decently operative.
Still wish Shandalar would be remade. sigh.
I also got my first booster, and have been tinkering about with deck-building. Managed a quick game with MD last night and the mechanics are quite straight forward.
As you say, Jason, it is a little tedious but at least you can earn some gold by doing the skill quests.
I quit (due to lack of sign-in meaning my progress wouldn't be saved) before getting to any skill quests that would earn me any gold. But when the server issues get ironed out I'll be back.
I'll probably wait a month or so. Maybe the connectivity problems will be gone by then.
A good expectation to have for most MMOs and popular free-to-plays.
I've enough gold saved up to purchase 2 packs for sure and am pretty close to 3 packs, so I think the ftp is working well enough. What I hope is that they don't cycle sets out of the game. It'd piss me off if they take origins off the market in 6 months and only keep the latest set on the market.
I will say that while the skills tests are incredibly easy; they are one of the best explanations of MtG abilities rules that I've seen and do exactly what they are intended to do. Show new players how abilities work in a clean and concise manner.
So far my blue/white deck is not performing well at all in the solo duels. I've played 4 duels and lost every single one of them. Removal is severally lacking in my deck, but hopefully I can open some decent cards with my packs.
I have to admit, having this just makes me want to get Shandalar (with its expansion) working on DosBox.
But still. Yeah, what do people do when WotC moves on to the next iteration of the computer game? If I bought Magic 2012 or 2013 (which I think I did once upon a time) and actually spent time and maybe money working on that, are my decks toast? Or Magic 2015 which for some insane reason was the first game since Shandalar to allow you to truly deck-build -- if I had spent a lot of time unlocking and/or buying cards for that, is all that effort gone now? Do I have to start over?
While that isn't a practical problem for me, since I never did much with those games, it speaks to one of the reasons I never did much with those games: what happens if I take the time to get cards in this year's version (is this 2016 now?), and then they roll out a new version next year? I have 30 year old cards (a few of them even black-border originals) sitting around in a box somewhere, not admittedly too well kept, but they exist and I can dang well play with them whenever I want. Their electronic versions seem suspicious for a collectable card game; I worry they're going to throw my collections away and require me to start over again fresh every year or so. Other CCGs on the market are certainly persistent.
Didn't someone earlier mention that the developer stated it was sticking with this Duels system for awhile, just requiring DLC for new stuff in the future? Hence no date in the title and free-to-play core game.
That's not to say it won't get flushed eventually, for something newer. But if this is true then maybe we won't need to keep purchasing the core game every year, so it stays compatible.
Yes this is supposed to be the only version for a while with new expansion released on it. I'm saying that I'd like to know that origins packs will be for sale in a two years from now and not just pulled from the market place. That would cause a very broken mp game quickly.
Finished the basic tutorial at lunch and the first mission of the first tutorial campaign (so to speak).
I noticed along the way that flavor text doesn't seem to even be an option, just practical texts in the description window. Was flavor text abandoned earlier? I mean, even Shandalar figured out an easy way to include the flavor texts.
(Mental note... Shandalar...)