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Thursday, June 27, 2013

Duels of the Planeswalkers 2014

Yesterday at 7 pm local time Steam users coujld finally download Duels of the Planeswalkers 2014. It took about a minut to download the game but installation of it took ages for some unknown reason. 17 minutes past 7 pm I finally ran the game. The very first surprise was that the game was actually running at regular speed and it wasn't lagging^_^.

A Scavenging Ooze voucher showed up. Then I could enjoy Brad Rigney's Chandra model and choose the difficulty of the game (by stating that I play Magic 'A lot').

In DotP 2014 there are two single campaigns (normal and revenge), multiplayer (free-for-all and two headed giant) and Sealed Deck Campaign (two sealed deck slots are for free, then you have to buy a slot for 2 USD). First I decided to try the normal campaign. To make things more entertaining this time you get to see few videos and listen to Chandra telling you her story. You as a planeswalker start on a certain plane and after finding what you were looking for you move to another plane to search yet for another thing. On the planes there are encounters and decks to beat. The encounters are sometimes really special, especially those ones from Shandalar. The encounters stick to the storyline and the cards used are from the block having the same name as the plane. That's pretty nice actually.

As I pre-ordered the game I got Chandra's Firewave deck unlocked. I wasn't looking forward too much playing with it but in the end it wasn't that bad (last two games I primarily played with Mono White Weenie decks). In the first match I terribly died due to drawing cards that I couldn't even play so I went to the deck editor. Added in Grim Lavamancers, Sulfuric Vortexes, Inferno Titan, some more efficient burn spells and creatures and a completely different deck was born. With this it finally felt that you can actually win some games^^. Sulfurix Vortex seemed a bit overpowered. The majority of the games we won just because of playing this card and because of this card we couldn't fully enjoy the Jailbreak encounter^_^ (the game starts with a creature controlled by you enchanted with Prison Term and you have 9 turns to beat your opponent).

After few planes I decided to try out the Sealed Deck Campaign. I left tips and tutorial messages turned on so I turned them off after the game tried to explain me what sealed deck is actually about. I opened my booster packs and went through the cards in the deck manager. That actually looks pretty nice. It can sort your cards by color, rarity etc. You can add the amount of lands you want and it also shows you some kind of 'deck strength'. But who knows what the criteria are. My deck was supposedly 'Awesome'. I opened two Shivan Dragons and Earthquake so I was in red. I added green because other colors did not have enough creatures. So I had a deck with some Advocates of the Beast, some Beasts, haste and 'musle' slivers, some Giant Growths, Shocks and the Dragons. It was working quite nice. During the campaign after winning a game against some decks you are awarded with more booster packs (in total three). Those you can add to your pool and use them to enhance your deck even more. I opened one more Shock and Shivan Dragon^^. I got stuck against Liliana's deck that killed everything I had so I changed my deck to RG beatdown and that worked fine.

Next it was time for some challenges. There are ten Challenges in total. 5 are initial ones and the other 5 are advanced. But to be honest none of them are that much of a challenge. Most of them are about the knowledge of Magic: The Gathering rules (about how trample and lifelink works etc). This certainly is a good step to teach players how to play, but I would enjoy some more challenging challenges for a Magic player. (a following screenshot is not actually a spoiler)

After wondering what Protean Hulk can fetch in the final challenge for quite some time we got back to playing the normal campaign. We were just one plane from Ramaz. In the final match you play with Chandra against Ramaz's RUG ramp. We played some small creatures and attacked only to be hit by Earthquake. So more little creatures and attack. Burn spells did the rest...Not much of a challenge. It wasn't Cruel Control nor Darksteel Colossus on turn 1.

Anyway 10USD is the price for the game and that's not much. You get Scavening Ooze with it so that actually awesome. It was fun playing the game and I enjoyed it. It seems that the power level is lower compared with the previous games but nonetheless it was fun and I had to sideboard about three times during the whole game (a deck full of burn targeting only creatures against creatureless decks...does not work that much). As an introduction to Magic this game is much better suited than the previous ones. But the previous ones can be more challenging and can teach the player a bit more about deck styles and cards effects. The best thing about this game is probably the fact that you canplay with your deck you created from the m14 pool. That means that there can be some more intersting games.

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