Magic: The Gathering – Duels of the Planeswalkers

Good can come out of bad. After making an awesome dinner with Danie, I decided to play some Xbox Live with Lee. Lee and I have been keeping pretty close since he moved back to Austin and we found that playing on Xbox Live has been our favorite past time. It allows us to do something mindless and chit chat at the same time.

Then my Xbox 360 started to not read any game discs. It was pretty upsetting. In a frenzy I read up online to find that this is a common problem but will more than likely require me sending my Xbox 360 off, again, to be repaired. I am not sure if this "common problem," will be covered under warranty.

Danie, seeing that I was upset, suggested I buy an Xbox Live Arcade game so I could still play with Lee. Reading online, I learned that Magic: The Gathering – Duels of the Planeswalkers had just been released. Lee and I have played Magic together for a long time. Since grade school. We both downloaded it after I took a quick look at the trial and we were amazed with what we found.

I was never a great Magic player. I knew the rules, enjoyed the art, and had fun playing. Never took it very competitively. Lee was a different matter. He would spend hours on end fixing up his deck and seeking out cards for quick-kill combos. To each his own.

This game caters to the hardcore and the casual.

It's the first time I have played a software-based Magic game that cut off all the right amount of fat and preserved the nutrients of the game play itself. The interface is beautiful, the ambient music is essential, controls are easy-to-pickup, and the timing system is amazingly helpful.

Everything you would want to do in person, can be done on this Xbox Live edition: look at your opponents cards, view their recent discard in their graveyard, cast instants, look up rules--everything. Both Lee and I could not stop commenting on how much of a rewarding investment this game was.

The game seems to limit you to pre-made decks, which I find to be an easy way of solving the big problem of including every card created for the offline game. In my mature years of playing Magic, I preferred to purchase pre-made decks so I wouldn't be forced to invest time and money in building a collection... again. So far it seems you can unlock more pre-made decks, more cards for those decks, and eventually be able to download cards and decks that weren't there from launch.

The developer took one of my favorite Xbox Live games, Uno, and combined it with one of my favorite trading card games.