{"id":68,"date":"2009-06-18T10:54:33","date_gmt":"2009-06-18T15:54:33","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/ashotoforangejuice.com\/?p=68"},"modified":"2009-06-18T10:57:22","modified_gmt":"2009-06-18T15:57:22","slug":"magic-the-gathering","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ashotoforangejuice.com\/?p=68","title":{"rendered":"Magic the Gathering"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>As some of you may know while a young adult, Magic was a huge part of my life. Summers were spent socializing, gaming, and strategizing. Trying to hash together the best decks, the coolest combos, basic teenager geek cred. Luckily, I probably won more tournaments than I didn&#8217;t.<\/p>\n<p>For those familiar with the game, I played from just around Homelands to Planeshift. I&#8217;ve played a few limited tournaments since then, but by no means have I bought more than a pack or two here or there.<\/p>\n<p>Now I&#8217;ve tried to keep up a little bit with new sets, and rules changes (including the new &#8220;no more mana burn&#8221; ruleset). Anyway, this topic comes up with the new XBLA game, Duels of the Planeswalker. Which is a borrowed name from the original Microprose &#8220;Shandalar&#8221; series. Maybe one of the first video games I was excited about getting (even at it&#8217;s expensive price).<\/p>\n<p>Now this will be a quick little review of the XBLA game that I got last night (around 11) and played for a few hours.<\/p>\n<p>Pros:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li> Pretty. Now I haven&#8217;t played Magic Online, but this game is pretty. Flying creatures hover on the board, all the art looks great in High Def, even the targetting lines look slick.<\/li>\n<li>Simplified interface. The game autotaps for you, auto untaps, draws, etc etc. Basically the game autopilots through a lot of mundane parts of magic and cuts it down to pre-combat, combat, and post-combat.<\/li>\n<li>Puzzles. I love puzzles. Problem solving is one of those things that turned into a career for me. I had subscriber to Inquest Magazine (before it changed it&#8217;s name) for the two page puzzle. Some of those things were harsh. A few of these puzzles are pretty easy, and I can&#8217;t tell if there are only the 8 that are unlocked to start or if there are more once I get through them.<\/li>\n<li>Nostalgia. XBLA is a goldmine for nostalgia games. I can&#8217;t wait to play a few two-headed giant games with my friends I played magic with growing up.<\/li>\n<li>Value. $10. That&#8217;s right. Growing up I spent $100 on the Microprose game and first expansion. While that game is larger, and had more of a roleplaying feel (Go find it and play it if you never have) the basics of it exist in this new title. The good comparison is the dvd comparison. I can buy a dvd for 15 bucks, and watch it a handful of times. And get maybe 6 hours of entertainment. Since I&#8217;ve already played for 2 hours. I think I&#8217;ll get plenty of entertainment out of it.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Cons:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Deck building. One of my favorite things about Magic is deck building. The ultimate customization of thousands of cards and unique combos that different cards allow. The deck starts with a base &#8220;theme&#8221; and you can unlock what looks like up to 17 cards and add those into the starter decks.<\/li>\n<li>Combat timing. Maybe this is just me, but since the phases\/steps are timer based I&#8217;ve had a little bit of trouble with combat timing. I almost lost a game because I missed regenerating one of my creatures. I had to replay one of the puzzles, to successfully activate a creatures on attack ability.<\/li>\n<li>AI. They claim the AI is better, and it seems decent for now, but it still attacks when it should be holding off to block, and I&#8217;ve noticed a few mis-matched blocking assignments. I&#8217;ll hold judgement until the AI does something unexpected to turn around a lost game. I&#8217;m really competitive so we&#8217;ll see how that goes.<\/li>\n<li>Deck building. Sorry, I just wish it was better.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Unknowns:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>DLC. I don&#8217;t know what the dlc will actually be and how much it costs. I generally don&#8217;t buy dlc, but once in a while I do.<\/li>\n<li>Multiplayer. I haven&#8217;t broken out the multiplayer, so we&#8217;ll see how that is once I get that far.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Ah good ol&#8217; Magic. I still have my decks lying around somewhere, if you are up for a game. I generally play Lock type decks. My first actual deck being a Stasis deck. It doesn&#8217;t exist anymore, and it got deconstructed because it wasn&#8217;t too fun to play. Oh well, gotta get some work done before I can go back to playing.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>As some of you may know while a young adult, Magic was a huge part of my life. Summers were spent socializing, gaming, and strategizing. Trying to hash together the best decks, the coolest combos, basic teenager geek cred. Luckily, &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/ashotoforangejuice.com\/?p=68\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-68","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-games","category-video-games"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ashotoforangejuice.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/68","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ashotoforangejuice.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ashotoforangejuice.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ashotoforangejuice.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ashotoforangejuice.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=68"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/ashotoforangejuice.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/68\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":70,"href":"https:\/\/ashotoforangejuice.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/68\/revisions\/70"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ashotoforangejuice.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=68"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ashotoforangejuice.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=68"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ashotoforangejuice.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=68"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}