Magic 2015

I buy the Duel of the planeswalkers games every year because (not counting the mountain of dlc) they are cheap and a great dose of Magic: The Gathering. So here's what's different in this year's game:

This year, with the 2015 version, you get to make your own deck! You still get a pre-made deck at the beginning which you get to modify as you get new cards or create a new one if you have enough cards. Playing through the campaign you unlock booster packs for each win and new decks for defeating specific opponents. Unlocking every cards in the basic set can take over 30 hours but opening a 10+ card booster pack after a win is always more fun than unlocking cards one at a time was in the 2014 game.

The game emphasizes 60 card decks, which is good. You can still build bigger decks but that is usually not optimal. In DOTP 2014, every new card unlocked was added to your deck after a win so you ended up with a 75+ card deck unless you took some cards out after every win.

The draft mode is gone, I really liked that mode and almost bought more slots to get additional draft decks. The only modes available in this one are campaign, cpu matches, and 2-4 player free-for-all online matches.

The menus were conceived for ipads and are terrible for pc. I play with a controller because this seems like easiest way to play the game (and is how i played all the previous versions) but having the slightest mouse movement take the button prompts away is kind of a bummer. From the main menu you can press the select(back) button to resume the campaign mode and modify your current deck but still have to navigate to the decks menu if you want to equip or create a different deck...

I don't like the idea of premium boosters, I got one from preordering the game and one from owning last year's game but now am left with an incomplete card collection because there is no way to unlock those cards other than buying premium boosters.

For people that play online a lot, the purchase of those premium boosters might be justified but if you only want one card from that list to complete your deck, it feels like a gamble to just buy boosters until you get the card you want.

Also, while you can build you decks from scratch, there are some limitations. You only have 3 copies of uncommon cards, 2 copies of rares and 1 mythic card in your collection. I haven't compared but I don't think the entire sets are available to unlock, either.

With all said and done, I have enjoyed my time with the game and might mess a bit more with the deck builder and play some additional online matches. I think for 10$ you get a really good game but locking out some cards behind micro-transactions is no fun.

Update: After a free update, all the premium boosters are now rewards for playing online games, which is great! Gives people an incentive to play more online matches and complete the card collection without having to pay for unlocks.