[fanboy] L5R is better, anyway. [/fanboy]

bzr_wzr

Don't remind me of Magic. I plugged in far too many dollars towards cards in the late 90's.

ShaggE

Magic the Gathering is a great game and the cards themselves are pieces of art. Used to play it a lot more than I'm playing it now but I still have a good amount of cards and little "Magic" still happens from time to time.

MtG Online previous versions were nothing too spectacular either in my opinion. Crumby, poorly-designed interface as the article stated is pretty accurate description. Also, as it's been said before me by fellow Kotakuites, digital cards are not that appealing compared to real carton ones that stay in your drawer until your grandchildren discover them under the cobwebs many years from now.

Dekko

I'd rather just play real Magic with my friends >>

Unless they find a way for me to get all my decks transfered into the online game, I'm out.

AuraHACK

Oh, and not to spam, but...

This is the newest release of a program that in the previous version, users running dual-core processers had to manually disable one of the cores in the task manager, or the program would terminate itself. No joke-- check the gleemax community forums.

wild homes

PS fucking iphone and its predictive type. Am, not an? WTF. Manu?

On behalf of the English language, I apologise.

wild homes

I used to play Magic Online, up until about 2 years ago. It's a really great program, but the support just isn't there. And yes, there was a version 2.0, which crashed almost as badly as 3.0 did. Part of me wants to check it out, but like others have said, it's incredibly expensive - same price as the physical cards, but you don't actually get anything.

I think the 3.0 launch has been delayed for the last 18 months or so.

thefais

Zzzz.... I'm sorry, what was this article about? I nodded off after reading all that text in the screen shot.

TrueCrime

Magic jumped the shark long time ago.

ayyyyyyyyyyyyye

Kyle81

I played in the beta, and it was a giant clusterfuck. It lingered on, in beta, for two years. It hardly appeared to be ready to launch last time the beta was up, about two weeks ago. WotC have no clue how to manage their online presence. And 3.0, while a nice step up from 2.5, is already, at launch, at least one (if not two) years obsolete. The interface is comically low-res in parts, and seems amateurish on the whole. Manu of these problems would be alleviated if WotC would acknowledge that the online game is GROSSLY INFERIOR to its tabletop counterpart, and reduce the cost of materiel accordingly, but they refuse to do so.

And the result is that Magic Online is am embarassment and a joke. Oh well.

wild homes

i've been trying to play MTGO for about 2 weeks now... the new account and trial servers are offline too... MTGO III isn't Magic III, its just the third re-haul of the software; although it seems as though it is just a downgrade.

wfreiden

Magic Online is a pretty cool idea (albeit with botched implementation), but it will never measure up to playing with a bunch of friends in real life.

Darth Navster

@Derigor: I found six boosters at my local Gamestop... so they're in

depward

I don't play MTGO, but I do play MTG. All my friends that play MTGO were talking about this and I find it funny, especially how they worked for like 5 years on it and delayed it numerous times to "make it better and more stable".

Ryadic

Magic Online 3? didnt know they had a 2! I thought the first one was kinda fun because from my understanding (I had a fiend that played) you had to use real world money to buy virtual cards?
Now I'm not big into card games but I can see how spending real world money on real world cards then slugging it out online on Eye of Judgement makes sense. Because at the end of the day I have a drawer full of cards. That I own, and wont disappear if a server goes down.

Oh well /shrug. Side note: I need me some more EoJ cards, wheres the new series I need it. It's a sick addiction that someone introduced me to and I cant help it... I must buy more cards!

Derigor

The real thing is addictive but expensive as hell... Online probably is just as expensive but you don't get to hold the cards. The game itself is amazing, incredible depth. I play magic with MagicWorkStation, it's not as in-depth as Magic Online but it serves its purpose.

Ethereus

Is it really that hard to make a card game on the internet? Its not like you are worrying about WoW like server loads or compatability issues with the latest graphics cards.

NitrousO

There was a Magic I and II?

Truvill

So wait... people still play Magic? I thought that was a 90s thing.

Cloral

Even though I've been visiting that site for years, I don't tend to go by IGN's reviews...

Still, the straight up card-game video games always seem a little uninteresting to me.

If only there were more games like Culdcept!

sir_carrot

Their customer support doesn't seem to care about issues either, as I had to find out from attempting to create an account (Credit Card info put in and everything) and after I hit submit THEN it said the signup server is down. Emails to customer support have gone unanswered.

AVOID!

nicless

@ShaggE:
That really shouldn't be a problem if you still have the cards, right? I mean, you could always sell them.

Channing

How could it get worse than the interface that Magin Online already has!?

I swear, if you play that game it feels like you're playing something from 1997.

twesterms 2nd

I was just wondering the other day if this was out. It had been several years since I heard about the new version, but haven't played in a LONG while.

It's nice to think that I have all these digital cards lying in wait for me. Sad to know that they are all obsolete, and I don't have enough rares to create a killer deck and compete.

Also, I always had trouble making decks without the physical cards.

But, man, Magic is an insanely well-designed game.

dirtybacon

With MTGO, it is easier to keep your collection organized. I played IRL magic for years until taking the leap into MTGO when it first launched. Yes, there are a lot of interface and server issues (crashing and down during big releases).

There are a lot of perks, too!
You can use the same cards in different decks (cant do that irl without taking them out of each deck, possible re-sleeving the cards.)
You can do a lot of meta game research by watching all of the saved replays of past tournaments, etc.
There is always a tournament or a draft available. (Getting drafts together irl is far more difficult than MTGO.)

Even with all of it's issues I am excited for the 3.0 release.

kladkain

It's about time the concept of buying cards died. I would much rather play games like Culdcept Saga and Catan, where how much money you spent has little to do with how well you play.

Edge of Blade

Never played Magic, but my friends and I play the WoW TCG so I was semi-interested in this. I like computerized card games like this and Eye of Judgement because it takes away the mess of stat/damage tracking. There's also no arguing over exactly what a card does.

At the moment, the only virtual card game I play is Spectromancer. It's a fun game, but just a warning, it's horribly flawed.

Bluecell

damn..MTG that seems so long ago the days of tapping for mana and whatnot. my cards havent seen light for 3 years now

NLK4711

So WotC decides to follow up Shadowmoor (hurray awesome set) with a crap online interface? Sounds about right to me.

Lyner

C'mon Az, like L/U didn't have "God Cards"... Moxen, Djinns, duals... Geez, even Serra Angel. Not to mention all the crazy blue spells.

I still prefer playing the real game but it's such a money sinkhole to try and stay current, unfortunately. One thing you can do is buy 4x Sets of Commons and Uncommons usually for like $20.

FanDam

What's hillarious to me about this announcement is that I remember how botched of a release 2.0 was. It was so bad that WotC fired Leaping Lizards and decided to take it on themselves. Three years after 3.0 was supposed to come out I see this. Comic gold.

@dirtybacon: When I first got on MTGO I thought I needed to buy a lot of cards to have fun. Turns out that leauges really level the playing field (assuming they've fixed some of the collusion issues) and were a lot more fun for me than constructed games.

Augur

I've been playing MTG for almost 13 years... I started with 4th edition. Back then, it was a game of luck and strategy. Then Hasbro came along.
Nowadays, it's all about who gets the "God Card". Therefore, the only way to win is to buy the most recent set, and buy, buy, buy. Now, I can't hate Hasbro for wanting to make money, that's what they do.
BUT
I can ask that they ditch this weak ass campaign of "BUY BUY BUY The god card" and replace it with "BUY BUY BUY the awesome combo".

Then I might consider this game.

FallenAzrael

Saying that it crashed with 1300 users is kind of a misnomer actually, it crashed once on launch day, and hasn't crashed (only been taken down intentionally for admin) since. The interface is yes, pure crap for anything except for actually playing the game, which is a step up with much higher resolution card art and a nifty zooming feature.

The good news noted here is actually good news though - it can't get much worse than it is now, and even now the servers are more stable than the last month or so of MTGO 2.0.

jamuraa

@AuraHACK: that is what kept me from joining... i have a bigillion cards and I'm not going to start investing on virtual decks when i have 2 shoe boxes chock full of cards

I enjoy the game a lot, is deep and fun and difficult to master, but spending a good amount of money twice is too much even for a loyal fan

bunch.of.wackos

They lost all my decks and screwed up all my packs I had unopened and saved. They are evil to the max. It looks so horrible. How horrible? Sooooo horrible. Like... we've all tried to imagine cthulhu, and being stuck in the middle of an ocean having to look at HIM... it's gross. It's not fun. You feel helpless and stranded, doomed, that's what playing mtgo 3.doh is like.

Tons of card art is missing. It's... MTG is unintuitive, the stack, last in first out, the difference between 'until end of turn' and 'at end of turn,' these are things that don't make natural sense.

The online experience of V3 takes that unintuitive principle and infuses it with design.

Huge swaths of empty space abound. Chatting causes a 50% transparent box to pop up in your face and then slowly fade away. Or... it's along the right hand side in 3x20 word column. I signed a hundreds long... am sad.

When people say, "it will only get better," I say, version 3 was supposed to come out 4 years ago. Someone up there said it was 2 years in beta, but it was set to debut 4 years ago. They have shown no interest in hitting their mile markers and deadlines.

Go to the MTGO forums. It's a ball of bad.

Squanderdalfast

I remember the other MTG online stuff. They were downright useless. This coming from someone who happily spent hundereds of dollars on the actual game back in the 90's and early 2000's. Its just an awful idea. Paying for virtual cards is wasteful, and having access to any and all cards pretty much breaks the game.

Wizard just needs to be happy with the money they rake in from kids and teenagers now. (you know, the ones who later say 'Dammit! I wish I had even half that money back for a couple car payments or something now!')

Muffin_Man

@FallenAzrael: The only "god card" at the moment is tarmogorf. And I don't even play it in a tournament calibur deck. If anything, it's moved away from ths "god card" syndrome and more into a "tier 2" syndrome. There are a large number of tier 2 decks that can compete on relatively equal grounds nowadays than this even several years ago.

@FanDam: Depends on the format. If you play eternal formats (casual, Legacy, etc.), there would only be a small handful from each set that you'd need to get from any given set. If you want to be current for the less eternal formats, like Extended and Standard, then yes.

Lyner

Wow - talk about the easy-on-the-wallet way to play Magic. Man, I haven't played a game of Magic since 1996 I think. Used to have hours of fun with my buddies.

Reuptake

I can't get into the whole magic online thing... I mean, Magic Workstation and Apprentice are free. I'm not about to give up thousands of dollars worth of real cards just to buy them online. I'm a 1.5 player which makes mtgo worthless to me. Plus I have enough issues with paying $40 for a piece of cardboard that's 2.5 inches by 3.5 inches across. I'm not likely to buy virtual Tarms.

Anemone

@Anemone: fucking Tarmogoyf.

Spaz569

Is there an offline mode where you play against the computer? I would enjoy this game big time if I didn't have to worry about going against people that are already great at the game or can't wait more than a couple of seconds for you to make your next move.
The game itself can be a lot of fun, but there should be an option for people that don't want to spend tons of money in cards, kind of like the Yugioh games.

Masterpain22

I really like how Magic Online does not work very well.

Wizards is selling booster displays at 55€ to retailers. Those boxes need to be produced AND shipped. So they get ... Around 1€ out of each pack sold

They sell boosters online for 3€ (and its only so cheap because the doller is VERY low right now).

If Magic Online would work brilliant they might consider to close paper distibutings (along with some rework on their redemption policy) alltogether.

Wikipedia:
According to Wizards of the Coast, Magic Online is "somewhere between 30% to 50% of the total Magic business."[2]

Gremory

@FallenAzrael:

Sorry for the double post but I have to respond to this.

You don't need the 'god' card. Lots of times there are ways to deal with the 'god' card. Actually what you should do (some people already do this) is either buy a few boosters with the 'god' card in it so you pull one then sell it for more then the boosters cost. Or, become a 'magic oracle' and predict what is going to be highly valued cards, hang on to them, and then sell them. If you're smart enough you can actually do this.

Also, the biggest thing is you just need to find a good local group to play with. Playing casual and not type 2.0 (the latest card blocks) with the RIGHT type of people will most likely be fun. As long as they aren't pricks and neither are you it will most likely be a fun experience. I've played with people anywhere from 'just getting back in and only have 2 crappy/mediocre decks' to 'I have a playset of every card since beta and make new decks constantly'. The biggest thing is both of these people were cool and were there to play magic and have fun. Not stroke their ego.

ehlaren

I'm sorry but, unless you live out in the middle of the desert with no one to play magic with, people who pay the same price for make believe cards as the real ones are frikkin morons. I can't wait till one day Wizards cancels the service and all the money you spent can't be recovered in any form whatsoever! Hey, even if the apocalypse happens and we're all running around Mad Max style I can still play magic with my *real* cards.

Haha suckers.

"According to Wizards of the Coast, Magic Online is "somewhere between 30% to 50% of the total Magic business." They might make a lot of money off of it due to higher sell price + lower production cost but there is no way they sell more cards online then the physical ones.

ehlaren

@Masterpain22: If you have an older computer running 95 or something similar you can hit up the first magic game. I think it was called shandlar or something. It's really fun to play.

Anemone