As many of you know, I enjoy a good round of Magic: The Gathering. And once upon a time, I was invested in Hearthstone, praising many of its creative foundations despite leaving the game due to disagreements with its card design philosophy.
Wizards of the Coast released a new game on PC and mobile a short time ago, asking the question: “What if we combined Magic: The Gathering with Hearthstone to create something new that bridges them together?” That game is Magic: Spellslingers.
Let’s give it a shot. We might end up liking it.
We won’t truly know, for another several weeks or months, whether or not this is a good game. Not only do players still need time to test the balance of each planeswalker spellslinger, and the cards they each have access to, but we need to understand the long-term support plan for the game. How often do they plan to add new cards, tweak each character’s abilities and stats, and what approach do they take to doing so? These are all pertinent questions that we simply do not have the capacity to answer. I’m hopeful, but WotC has a spotty track record in this area, so there’s reason to be cautious.
That said, the foundation they’ve built out here is a solid one. The most famous problem that players of Magic experience to this day is mana flood/mana screw, where despite building a balanced deck, they lose simply because they could not draw the land necessary to play their cards. By adopting the Hearthstone approach, this problem practically solves itself by ensuring a steady and consistent increase in mana as the game progresses. And by choosing a land other than the default, players can trade in that consistency for a chance to proc effects that further assist them over the course of the game.
Further, this hybrid appears to have addressed, at least so far, a big problem I’ve long held with Hearthstone: Its overreliance on randomness. While Spellslingers certainly has cards and effects that hit or proc randomly, by and large, most cards do require players to declare targets and think about the proper sequence of their plays. The tactical depth that I associate with the brand is maintained, even as they borrow heavily from Blizzard’s example.
I intend to stick with it for a time, to see if it has the staying power I want from it. Time will tell, but for now I’m happy with the game.
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