‘Duels of the Planeswalkers’ Works Like ‘Magic’
Pick a card. Any card. No, not that one, it’s worth thousands.
Marshal Rosenthal
Trading card games may come and go, but Magic: The Gathering has never lost steam since it first appeared in 1993. But now there’s Duels of the Planeswalkers, a video game that takes the best Magic has to offer and adds even more. To get the skinny, we turn to Nik Davidson, Lead game designer, Wizards of the Coast.
Man Cave Daily: First, how is Magic doing?
Nik Davidson: Magic has never been bigger or better than it is today. We have more than 6,800 stores running events around the world, and over 20 million players and fans playing at the highest levels of competition — streaming it online and turning it into an e-sport.
Duels of the Planeswalkers is the best way to learn how to play the game and get into Magic for the first time. It is also great at bringing people back into the game who have been gone for a while.
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MCD: Because video games have an attraction?
ND: Video games are that, but there’s more in that it lets you play when it’s convenient to you. The challenge of Magic from just a logistics standpoint is that you need a second human being to sit across the table from you. Duels lets you play against a very competent A.I. with a system that is going to handle the bookkeeping of the rules for you making sure you get all the interactions correct. Playing in that environment is a great teaching tool.
MCD: What can you do in a video game that you can’t with cards you can physically hold?
ND: What you can do in Duels that you can’t do in other forms of Magic is experience the story. We have some of the greatest artists in the world doing the art for Magic cards, but unfortunately, it’s placed on these small pieces of cardboard. Being able to take that beautiful art onto a big screen in high resolution lets us tell the stories in more of a RPG sort of way can’t be replicated with the paper cards.
credit: Wizards of the Coast
This year we’re following one of our major characters, Garruk Wildspeaker, who’s had a bad run of things lately. He was a very heroic character for a number of years, but things haven’t been going his way and now he’s cursed. He’s being consumed by dark Magic and the other Planeswalkers have realized that he’s become a threat to everyone. But there’s nowhere in the Multiverse where you can hide from Garruk – he’s the Multiverse’s greatest hunter. So, while you’re setting out to try and help him, he doesn’t really want any help and at some point he turns the tables and starts hunting you. That story takes place across five of the most popular planes, including Theros, and onwards until the final confrontation.
MCD: Tell us about the multiplayer feature.
ND: What’s nice about the multiplayer feature is that you can play online anytime, with very quick matchmaking against somebody of your relative skill level. For someone who wants to play a single quick game and doesn’t have their friends around, it’s a very easy way to find players and play Magic. But there’s really no way to replace the face to face interaction. Magic has been going on for as long as it has because as people play, lifelong friendships have sprung up in play groups from all over the world to create these great social groups — or rivalries. One of the big things we do with Duels is to give you a helping hand into your local community game store. When you purchase Duels you can get a code that you redeem online and take into the store to get a limited edition alternate art foil card that we put into these special Duels boosters. There’s actually a store locator inside the game itself.
credit: Wizards of the Coast
MCD: How does Duels of the Planeswalkers differ from video games from previous years?
ND: What we did was to clean up the play field and make it very clean, very well organized so that the attention is drawn to the cards themselves. As can be seen, we have some of the best artists in fantasy right now doing beautiful art and again it’s nice to see it on the big HD screen. There’s a certain amount of visual effects that we add to the game to create a more video game-like feel, but the core of this is really replicating the core rules of Magic — streamlining the experience. Everything that you are doing in Duels is authentic Magic — it is playing by the rules. The skills that you’re learning in Duels are going to translate directly to playing at your local game store or kitchen table.
There are a few little visual flourishes when one is taking damage, when creatures battle, to draw attention to the battle. These are little things — no 3D animations or cinematic cutaways, there’s no need. It’s really all about drawing the attention to the cards and teaching people what the game is all about.
Marshal Rosenthal is a Los Angeles-based freelance writer specializing in technology, consumer electronics and pop culture. Visit his website.
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