Recent reviews by Cryptical

Timeless game with incredible replay value.

Magic 2014 has many improved aspects when compared to previous games in the series. However, some of those aspects also bring new problems.

First of all, graphically this game is great for a TGC. However, the game has been optimized poorly. For some reason my GPU gets more hot when this game is running, than when I run a game such as Assassin's Creed IV. This makes no sense at all.

As you may have heard, this game introduces Sealed Play. This means you can put together your own deck, however the only wait to get new cards is by winning online matches, defeating opponoments in the Sealed Play Campaign(s) and defeating a few Planewalkers in the campaign.

The problem here are the Sealed Play Campaigns. For some reason, the developer thought it was a great idea to give you two "slots". This means a few things:

1: You can only play two Sealed Play campaigns, as you can only play one campaign per deck. Even if you remove all the cards in your deck after you have finished a campaign, it still counts as a slot, so that doens't work.
2: You can only have two sealed decks at any time. If you ever want to play with different cards, you will have to edit your existing decks.

Now, the thing here is, that you can actually buy more slots, with real money. This wouldn't be a problem if this game was free-to-play to begin with, however seeing as you do have to pay for the game, this simply feels like ripping you off. That's just not cool.
What's more, even if you buy more slots, there is a limit to how many slots you can buy. The impact of this is limited because there are only so many cards in the game anyway, however it's still weird and shouldn't be necessary.

I'm also disappointed in the length of the campaigns. After beating the campaign, you do get a "revenge" campagin which is harder, but that campaign is pretty short aswell. There is an expension for this game which gives you another two campaigns (normal & revenge), but those are not long either. Then again, the expension doesn't cost that much so it's not a big deal.

Overall, I like this game. It has some neat things such as Sealed Play, the online system works pretty well and the graphics are pretty good for a TCG. Unfortunately, with every pro comes a con. Sealed Play is very limited and basically just a way of ripping you off, the online system works fine but that's all it really is: fine. Very standard. Graphics-wise this game is great, but very unoptimized.

Conclusion:

The thing is that the card game is awesome to begin with, so there is not much the developer can do to do things wrong. Unfortunately, it still manages to do that, however the game is still very enjoyable. I'm looking forward to Magic 2015. I hope they will simply sell that game without any limitations. if that's the case, than I wouldn't mind if that game would cost more than this game does. Also, more cards would be nice. If only they'd give Magic Online these graphics...that would be great.