Looking for a game like Hearthstone with a little more substance?  Then you might be interested in Magic:  The Gathering, the grand-daddy of all trading card games.  But what’s that?  You don’t have friends that you can rope into trying a new collectible card game?  And they’re so expensive?  Well fear not, because Wizards of the Coast have brought this venerable game to iDevices.Read on past the cut to find out how the new free-to-play system works.

As of this morning, Magic Duels:  Origins became available on the Apple App store for the low, low price of Free.

Wizards of the Coast are trying much the same monetization formula as Hearthstone using daily and weekly quests to gate how much in-game currency you can get out of the system.  This means that every day, if you do the daily quest, you will get a little amount of gold that you can eventually use to purchase six-card booster packs.

These six cards are – obviously – slanted to the more common side of the card pool.  However, unlike Hearthstone, there is no crafting, instead, once you’ve hit the maximum of four [for a common] you will simply no longer see that card ever again if you open a booster.

Naturally, as per their free to play offering, you can also earn coin through PVP – each win netting you some gold.  If you don’t want to battle against live players, you can always turn to the AI which generates decks on the fly and has three modes:  Easy, Normal and Hard.  Each tier offers slightly better gold rewards and you can play as many games as you like, eking out as many wins as you like [for coin] in a day – unlike the Hearthstone model.

The final piece of this puzzle is that there are little stories interwoven into the game that also offer a small amount of gold for completion.

Packs in the store can be acquired by using the gold that you’ve gotten in-game or can be bought through actual money.

So, now that you know the monetization model – possibly the most important thing to know about a game like this – how can you get your hands on it?

Well, for the moment [in a move I find somewhat bizarre from Wizards] the game is only available for iDevices.  You’ll need 1.02GB free on your device of choice, running iOS 7 or later and any more-or-less modern Apple tablet or phone.

You can snag the game from here if you’re so inclined.