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If you’ve played Diablo, Torchlight, Path of Exile or any fast-paced RPG, you’ll have a good idea of what to expect here. The camera is positioned at an isometric angle from top to bottom and you will spend time getting ready and getting ready to return to the central locations of the city before venturing into the game world and on dangerous missions. Unless you are doing a dedicated instantiated story mission, you may encounter other players in the world or in the city center, but it is not on a “massive” scale. It is similar in concept to how Destiny brings players together in search of content. You start by selecting your own personal Planeswalker with three main choices that define the character: your load of equipment and artifacts, your class and your deck. Your class will determine your innate abilities, such as your primary attack, special secondary attack, and utility skill, such as jumping like a geomancer. And then your deck acts like your real CCG card deck. You will select a variety of spells (each “card” in Magic is a spell) and you will need to build it with a mix of creature summoning spells, sorcery / arcane magic spells and enchantments.
From what I’ve seen, just like in the real Magic, deck building is a big part of Legends and it all comes down to how your hand is shuffled. Before starting a mission, you will need to customize your deck (12 cards at this point), as this directly affects which cards are randomly drawn to your hand (4 at a time) during combat. A unique curve used to mix things up is that the buttons for using your spell cards are randomly assigned each time. For example, a Magma Blast spell can be the B button in a moment, but after you cast it and eventually appear again, it can be X this time.
Another interesting aspect is how they chose to deal with mana costs. In CCG, you have a limited amount of mana resources that slowly build up over the course of a game, but in Magic: Legends the mana pool starts out large and is divided between colors based on the proportion of colors in your deck. If you have an exact 50/50 split between white and blue, your mana reserve will be too. But if it’s 8 white and only 4 blue, the mana pool will reflect that, so the mana you have available is proportional to the types of spells you have ready to use.
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There is a ton of strategy for defining the right character building. Since your class itself may be a totally different color from your deck’s spells, you can be extremely creative, as it takes into account all progression paths and building varieties. Two players using the same class can play with totally different characters based on the colors of the deck they use.Similar to how you can switch decks between matches in Magic if you wish, you can switch decks and loads very easily and quickly in Magic: Legends too. Cryptic did an extremely efficient job of combining the concepts of a game like Diablo with the basic rules behind Magic: The Gathering.
However, not all card game mechanics are translated directly. For example, in a Magic game, the turn order usually dictates that if it is your turn, you “declare” which creatures are trying to attack the player and then the other player chooses which attacks to block with which creatures. Skills like running over, blocking and provoking, of course, further complicate the central idea, but that is always the essence. In Magic: Legends, however, once you summon a creature, it usually follows you and fights beside you based on its powers – you really don’t do much micromanagement because the “agitation” of summoning, casting new spells, and the summons is so quick.
As of now, there is a basic 1v1 duel version of PvP, but the focus definitely seems to be more on the cooperative side of things and experimenting with how the various classes and deck combinations can work together. The flow of the game is extremely different, but the flavors of Magic are still there. Watching the incredible and iconic card art come to life in an action game, instead of just another digital CCG, is truly wonderful.
That said, I definitely have my reservations about the monetization plan. As Magic: Legends is a free game, when you start you choose a single class to use, with all the others blocked behind paid access. Then, using a game currency that you accumulate slowly when playing the game called “planar mana” or spending money directly in the money store, you can unlock the other subsequent classes. Other types of items available in the money store include convenience booster items and random card reinforcement packs, but you won’t be able to purchase specific spells or upgrade a specific spell in your deck.
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It doesn’t sound like a “pay to win” system, which is good, but it definitely makes me curious about what types of content will be for paying customers only. There will also be a Fortnite-style Battle Pass, in which you sign up for a low-rate content season, usually $ 15 or more in most games, and as you play and move up the ranks, you will unlock new cosmetics and packages reinforcement, and so on.
After seeing the demo in action and seeing the basic details of how deck building works in Magic: Legends, I am extremely excited to try it for myself. The extra layers of nuances that are transplanted from the CCG seem to give Legends a strong sense of identity that games of this genre usually lack, so fingers crossed everything works out.
David Jagneaux is a freelance writer for IGN. Chat RPGs with him on Twitter at @David_Jagneaux.