Magic: The Gathering - Duels of the Planeswalkers 2015 (2014)

I've played only one of these before and i never played this but had it and so i gave MtG 2015 a go in 2022 (I knew it was going to be fairly short and was just hankering for some games one night) might as well make effort to clear the backlog right?

First, this isn't very good. I thought it was a bit better than Magic 2014 though. As you play through it you unlock the theme decks of the time and that's cool, but what isnt is how much of a chore it is to edit the decks or tweak them. A shame because I liked the decks in this more than some of the theme decks i actually own. And yea, the AI is incredibly bad almost as if it was done to be enough to make you want to stop playing and just go buy some cards to save yourself the trouble of playing this... Kinda what you inevitably eventually expect of Wizards of the Coast, it seems.

What is nice about this though is there is a helpful hint button that will guide you (sometimes quite wrongly) into what it thinks your best move is at any point in the turn. While it's technically basically a form of cheating, even if you know how to play this is helpful for a new deck you arent familiar with.

I tried building a nice little vampire deck but it didnt hold a candle to the upgraded black and white deck i switched to called "Life and Death" (as you make progress it upgrades your deck with better cards, or at least unlocks them so you can reload the new version of the deck.. this isnt explained in the game)

I started playing MtG back in 1996. Two years later MicroProse released M:TG aka Shandalar. To date this is still the best digital version of Magic. It had an incredibly fun campaign mode where you picked a starter deck and your character roamed over a map battling enemies, doing quests and trading cards. For some bizarre reason no other Magic game seems to have had such a mode.

You could also play quick games against the AI with constructed decks. This was a ton of fun. Playing a game of Magic is also what Shandalar excelled at. The UI is quick and clean. There were no pointless annoying animations or sounds. Instead of having a timer for various steps you manually decided where the game stopped. You could skip your entire turn in a second with a single click.

Newer digital versions of Magic are, for some utterly insane reason, all inferior. Magic 2015 has a truly truly terrible UI. It's menus are amongst the worst i have ever encountered. Gameplay is incredibly sluggish. There's awful timers and animations and sound effects. The freaking timer has a sound effect, do you know how annoying that is? It also has a hilarious badly designed playing area. It emulates a real game, so your opponents cards are far away and... upside down. It's mindboggling that anyone thought that would be a good idea for a computer game.

The game also refuses to let you tap manually. Instead you scroll through all possible combinations... which takes more time. And in the deckbuilder all filters are in a dropdown menu. Because this is 2003 and there wouldn't be enough space on my 17" monitor to show them all. I guess that's also the reason why they can't just show all textword abilities next to the card like every single digital cardgame does. Instead you have to click "more info"... and they still make you scroll through each ability. Dear lord.