A Low Quality Console Port
Magic can be a fun game, but it can also be an expensive and time consuming hobby. I was hoping for Duels of the Planeswalkers to be a an accessible, light version of Magic. Unfortunately, for the PC version of this game, all the good is overshadowed by the fact that it is a very half-assed port of the Xbox version.
The first red flag will probably be the co-op option in this game. When you begin looking through the modes there are large buttons for "Co-op Campaign" and "Co-op Challenge", when you click them the game informs you that not only are they offline only co-op, they require an Xbox controller to work. It was bad enough that they advertised online co-op before release, but they didn't even bother adding in hot seat play for offline co-op. Meaning the co-op feature won't be of any use to a majority of the players.
The next obvious issue comes when you try to play online. You'll find out pretty fast that they have voice chat in this game, but no push to talk feature, no way to disable the voice chat, and no text chat. This means if you have a mic, you have to mute it and you can't chat in other third party programs such as Ventrillo. If you run into someone who has their mic on and don't have a mic yourself, you have no way of letting them know their mic is open.
The online match system itself is also incredibly lacking. Simply connecting to a match will be an issue. There is currently a bug where you have to restart the game after each ranked match. There does not seem to be any way to select the game you join so playing with friends boils down to hosting a match and having your friend search for a match at the same time. Lots of kicking players and joining the wrong match ensue.
The underlying game is alright, its not the greatest game, but its not terrible. The problem lies in the fact that even the most basic features for PC gamers are missing. The online is barely function so its mostly a single player game. In the end the gameplay can't carry the buggy multi-player and the general poor quality of the port. Some people may argue it is only $10, but it completely fails to be worth even that $10.
My suggestion, avoid the PC version of this game. If you have an console, go for the console version. If you don't have a console just skip it. People may argue that some of this can be fixed with patches, but when they obviously put so little effort into this port do you really expect decent support for the game?