Recent reviews by Succuboi

Blood Bowl is an awesome game in theory. In practice, it's spoiled by dice rolls that feel biased towards the AI every time and a learning curve that's way too steep.

I've been playing for about a week now.
They've given me so many cards for simply logging in and playing that I actually have a decent spread of decks and playstyles (Unlike MTG Duels. That game is just spam flying to win.)
On Day 5 I got Lightmare Points (Their version of the buyable currency that most Free to Play games have) for simply logging in. Conveniently enough to buy any of the 15-card booster packs, and not actually too far off being able to afford some of the fancier items like full decks and card backs.
Haven't run into any bugs either, despite what other people have said about the game.

Biggest complaint is that, yes, the matchmaking system does seem a tad iffy. One game I'm up against a guy with an overwhelmingly powerful deck, the next I end up fighting somebody using the most basic of Flame Dawn units, so that could do with some work.

Overall though, it's worth a shot if you like card games. Some of the animations (Timely Strike) are hilarious, and all of them are well done.

Extra Edit: I crashed the game by summoning about 50 Inter-Dimensional Phase Bots and many Genesis buffers. Fun!

Compared to previous MTG games that have been released over the years, I'd say Magic Duels is a step in the right direction.
Unfortunately, it's a very clumsy, unbalanced step that ends up dropping the series into a ditch.

Sure, you can now create your very own decks from scratch, but unless you pay up you're going to struggle to find a deck that actually works. Most of the time, your decks wont work. Since you don't have any good cards. And that "Medium" difficulty AI just played his third foil planeswalker. And has two Soulblade Djinn's. And two weird wyvern things that buff other flying monsters that you can't even see in the card collection, so had no way of knowing that your opponent was going to play them.

Yep, a completely fair match to your band of 2/1 tern's and merfolk that have no abilities.

The Deck Wizard doesn't help much either. Sure, it tries to do good by telling you some good strategies, but then it gives you the option of having to choose from only 5 cards at a time, with cards that the Wizard deems 'relevant.' Also, the Wizard limits the number of cards you get to choose in each step. Want a large number of enchantments for this deck about buffing creatures with enchantments? Too bad, you can only have six. Want a lot of spells for your burn deck? Nope, can't have too many of those. Need to save room for more Goblin Pikemen.
It leads to most archetype decks being unbalanced and rife with issues that you can't fix, because the game doesn't let you. Which is bad, since archetype quests are the most common quest type, and are the only way of making more than 15 coins per battle with the AI.

Coming back to the issue of the AI, it likes to stuff the same cards into its decks over and over. This is especially true in Medium difficulty battles, which I've found to be harder than the Hard difficulty. Whereas the Hard AI does actually try to perform complex, unique strategies with its cards (even if that means filling its deck with nothing but legendaries and rares), the Medium AI enjoys nothing more than playing the same cheap cards over and over with the sole intention of making the player miserable.
It plays Foundry of the Consuls multiple times almost without fail, even if it isn't playing an artifact deck, simply to summon those 1/1 Thopters which are almost as annoying to deal with as TF2's mini-sentries. It loves playing Perilous Myr's early in the game to prevent you from doing anything without losing your whole field. It loves playing Languish when you think you're actually winning for once. Every action the player makes, it loves suddenly having just the right card to counter that move.
And yet it still isn't smart enough to play Yeva's Forcemage /before/ attacking, to utilize the buff it gives.

There are a ton of other issues lying around that I haven't covered here, and so the only way I can recommend this game to anyone is if they're looking for a way of learning how to play MTG without having to shell out a lot of money for a deck that they might not even like.



I can't even recommend it as a way of checking out what new cards have been released, what with how few cards are shown in the collection and how you might as well just buy physical boosters, since they give you almost thrice as many cards as the digital packs.