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Magic: Legends looks to turn the card game all Diablo-yCome, gather
Come, gather
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Watch on YouTube
Magic: Legendswill have us bash and zap monsters as different classes of Planeswalker, the all-powerful wizards we play as in the card game. Magic’s five elements of magic are here formalised into classes, like the Mind or Geomancer. It looks like wizards will still be summoning creatures like their cardboard counterparts. It’s an action-RPG game set in the fictional worlds of Magic rather than an attempt to capture the card game in action-RPG form, which is reasonably the only way they could do this - though a bit of a shame to me.
The Magic I know and adore is so much larger and weirder than scrapping and zapping on a battlefield. It’s about wizards scheming to complete their carefully-crated plan while foiling their foe’s scheme, which might work in a wildly different way with a whole other vibe. The range of options and the theming of cards make duels so much larger and weirder than goblins fighting in a car park. As I said back in 2017:
“A single deck will contain a mish-mash of creatures, spells, story beats, mechanical devices, and goodness knows what else. Onerecent tournament deckincluded a mighty fire wizard, an indestructible world-devouring titan, police confiscations, rogue magic refiners, mastercrafted bonsai, a shrine to false gods, and a waterfall which comes to life. Those don’t form a coherent story — they aren’t supposed to — but every deck presents weird facets of this world. A regulation-issue video game would seem small and drab in comparison.”
Magic: Legends is due to launch in 2020.
