Tag: magic: the gathering

Spellweaver Review: It’s Magic, Jim, But Not As We Know It

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Magic:  The Gathering is a great game with a troubling digital history.  In one sense, it's really sad, because Hearthstone is immeasurably polished - a thing that Blizzard is absurdly good at.  And where Blizzard have gone, others have attempted to follow, because surely, if they can make it work to the tune of a silly number of people throwing money at imaginary cards that they're never going to really own [because the servers will go down and then you'll be left with nothing] then someone else has to be able to share the pot, right?

Probably.  But a lot of that is going to depend on lots of little factors.  And where Spellweaver comes up strong in some of those factors, it's just kind of bland and uninteresting for a lot of the rest. Read more

The Murky Rise Of Tabletop Simulators

I played a lot of Magic:  The Gathering when it came out.

Like.

A lot.

From 1994 onward, I attended weekly events, playtested in a group for competitions I would enter, played against the computer when the Microprose product came out and poured over lists of cards as they were released to find new strategies for old decks and to see if there were any interesting brand new plans I could utilize.

Before that, I played a lot of Dungeons and Dragons.

Like.

A lot, too.

From 1985 until I lost my gaming group to the vagaries of time commitments [Exams, jobs, families and the like] I played the Red Box, made characters under the Second Edition rules, built up a campaign for friends that ended in hilarious disaster when someone lit a torch in an underground zone that was nothing but propane gas and tended my Beast in long-standing games of Vampire:  The Masquerade.

The point is, I really like board, card and role playing games.

The problem is, of course, that these games are difficult to play without friends.  I am primarily an introvert.  I have few friends. Read more

Magic Duels: Review 2: The Bugs Strike Back

So, just about a year ago now, I wrote a completely scathing review of the tumultuous mess that Magic Duels was at launch.

Given the online nature of the game and given that it "perpetually renews" itself whenever new cards come out, I figured I would get back in and see a handful of things for myself.  Notably:  whether or not the game was more stable, whether or not the game fared better in my books if I had more cards [and a greater pool of potential deck lists to pull from] and whether or not Stainless had listened to the sheer avalanche of complaints about the game's launch state.

That last question?  That's the question that binds them all. Read more