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Whoo whoo! Can't wait. And the promo Garruk card looks amazing!

indeed ever since I noticed the ads on the promo cards and watched the trailer I've been waiting for teh ability to play magic when my friends are all busy(and I refuse to invest in magic online).

wizards of the coats annouced that anyone who buys the game will get a code to redeem at wizard of the coasts site for a free promo foil Garruk Wildspeaker planeswalker card.

I was finally able to download this at 10:15PM last night. The code generator for the free promo card was still broken but the game itself was up and running. I started the main campaign mode. Right off the game made casually playing magic a lot of fun and quite easy. Almost everything you want to do is one button press away. The offline mode handles turn progression quite well. In tourney play you have quite a bit of time to sit and think about your moves. In the game you constantly have about ten seconds to act unless it's your turn and need to act for the turn to progress. In online mode each turn has a 20 sec time limit.

-Graphics are about as good as you'd want a magic game to have. Card art is in HD and is as detailed as the cards. The loading screens also feature some really terrific HD scans of prominent art from the latest release of cards. Each action is given an animation the attacking animations amount to clawing or biting animations being overlaid on the cards. It sounds lame but is actually accurate and dependent on what type of creature is attacking and defending.

-Sound- the game uses most of the front speakers for combat and with the rear ones providing extra ambient sounds and music. The music is standard fantasy fair, epic and melodic and I never found it annoying.

-Gameplay well summing up magic the gathering gameplay can be quite a task. The latest rule changes spanned 27 pages themselves. Basically though main 1 vs 1 gameplay consists of you dealing an opening hand of 7 cards to yourself, you can keep the hand or deal a new hand minus 1 card to yourself, you can do this over and over until you can't draw any cards. But the idea is to have a balance of strong cards and at least 3 land cards. Since land cards cost nothing to play and you can play one per your own turn. You want at least three available at some point since you need land to play creatures and other spells and actually I’ll leave it to the tutorial for the rest but ultimately the game is very in depth. I didn’t do the tutorial since I currently play in tourneys but the game also makes sure you can follow the basics as they come up in play. When a card comes out with an ability you haven’t encountered before a hint pops up to inform you and you can either disable the hint or let it pop up the next time the ability is triggered by gameplay.

-ganeplay for veterans. It only took a minute to acquaint myself with the controls and overall they rarely gave me a problem. It made me postpone victory for a couple turns in one match where I could’ve dealt a leathal blow, unfortunately my thumb was resting on Y which will skip the attacking phase whereas A selects creatures you wish to attack with. The game uses the new set of magic 2010 rules. Which means no mana burn and no damage from the stack. Unfortunately maybe due to time the game doesn’t handle multiple blocking creatures quite right. Instead of allowing the attacking player to choose where this power is dealt first the game just automatically assigns it evenly across defending creatures. That does indeed affect gameplay from a very strategic point. Hopefully that gets patched at some point.

This game while very fun and enjoyable for magic vets is designed primarily to suck in new players and get old players back into the game. Because of that deck building is extremely limited. You start out with access to only 2 single color decks. With each win you unlock new decks(up to 8) and up to 17 new cards per deck. Which means you can only add or switch out 17 cards per deck. The devs said this was to keep to game balanced and considering the limited amount of cards compared to all the standard legal cards in circulation I can see their point but it also means online gameplay will be fairly repetitive after a while, though expansions may help that. This move is also blatantly a choice to not impact the comprehensive Magic: online PC game which offers full deck building and a card store to buy online cards straight from Wizards of the coast.

Overall, great game to rediscover magic and also discover it for the first time. All in all I’d say the actual game is still more fun but this is not a bad replacement for when you lack physical players in your area.