I guess they're taking Magic and making it an ARPG, but also keeping deckbuilding? Interesting tactic! I don't know if this game will be 'good' but I hope it's fun, at least.
An ARPG where you're forced to use randomly cycled spells instead of just spamming the same stuff over and over sounds intriguing. Unsure how well it'll work out in practice. Seems like they've got a plethora of fun and interesting spells as well, which they should have considering the IP they have to play with. I do wonder how it'll be monetized though, this is MtG after-all.
I think I probably knew this was a thing, then completely forgot about it. I like Magic and I like a good Diablo-type game, so I'll probably try this out.
I'd be curious to see how they plan to balance endgame encounters when the player has no guarantee of which abilities they'll have available at any given time. It seems like the player power would vary wildly based on the order your synergistic spells become randomly available to you. Obviously that's part of any deckbuilding/card game, but as someone with thousands of hours in Diablo II, Diablo III, and Path of Exile each, this seems more like a 'play through this single player/co-op campaign and then that's it' like D1/D2/Torchlights rather than any type of 'push this infinitely scaling content/leaderboard/top 1% endgame' like PoE/D3/Last Epoch. I'll give pretty much any Diablo clone a shot, though. so I'll be looking out for this.
Reminds me a lot of Lost Kingdoms. You had a deck, some cards were weapons, others creature summons, etc. So I'm really into this.
Though I don't think I like the idea of blue mages not having any blue in their decks. Why not have a character be customized depending on what you include in your deck?
Really not sure what to make of the deckbuilding mechanic and whether or not Magic as an IP fits well at all into that genre of video game (the setting and lore sure, but divorcing it from the card game seems weird and strange).
However, I can say that the movement in the trailer doesn't look... clunky, per say, but it also doesn't look like it feels as smooth and fluid as something like a Diablo 3 or a PoE. Visually it's also not astounding (though I assume that's because they're going to heavily target mobile and not PC), and... are those three separate currencies I see at the top of the screen?
Fully braced for a mediocre ARPG that is shackled with outdated gameplay and awful F2P (compared to PoE, which has extremely good F2P), while retaining some potential for some kind of innovative game design when it comes to the whole deckbuilding thing.
Man, the artists who make Magic cards are just incredible.
This seems like an interesting take on the genre. I've had a couple times in my life where I played MtG, but it's not a thing I've stuck with for any length of time. A good ARPG is always welcome, though, and this seems really cool. All of the various spell effects look great. I definitely have questions about character progression. Are cards/spells the "loot" of this game? That may not keep people coming back for more, but I suppose this mainly appeals to people who really want to build decks so that may not even be an issue. I'm interested to see where this goes.
Looks like it has interesting ideas at least. I do question the idea of randomizing the spells that pop up after use however. As others have said, I don't know how you can balance a game well when there is such a variety of potential tactics and when a player isn't guaranteed of being able to pull off a set order of abilities due to randomization. I worry that there will be a lot of "I'm going to run around firing off junk abilities I don't need right now until the thing I want pops up."
Ideally, this would sit in a middle ground somewhere between Diablo 3 and Path of Exile. The deck building might allow more gameplay variety than Diablo 3, where a lot of the classes ended up feeling extremely same-y, while having a deck be both the "loot" and progression might make it less complicated and intimidating than PoE.
(Seriously, I love Path of Exile, but with each season it grows ever harder for first time players to get into - Here's your standard loot! And these gems! And you gems are your skills! And you can link the gems to combine effects! And some gems are corrupted! And here's this massive skill tree! And here's this season's end-game mechanic! But here's prior season's mechanics right alongside it! And sometimes a mechanic will go away for awhile! But then it might come back!)
I played MtG as a kid (I won't date myself by saying which sets), but fell out of it when I went to college and ended up selling all my cards. I got back into it with MtG Arena a few years ago and I absolutely love playing Arena. It is all the slickness of Hearthstone matched up with MtG mechanics.
I have even started to dabble in physical cards again and I am teaching my son how to play. I have never really been into the lore, so I don't know how well the game will translate to an RPG, but I am definitely going to give it a shot.
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