Are you looking for a challenging strategy game in a portable format? If so, this is the game for you. This is an example of a remarkable piece of work that is being seriously under-appreciated.
A little background is in order. Collectible card games (now called “trading card games”) began in 1993 with “Magic the Gathering,” a game designed by Richard Garfield, who was just then earning his Ph.D. in mathematics at Penn.
The basic idea of Magic the Gathering is that you build your own deck of cards (which set of cards you can select from depends on the precise rules of the format you are playing) and then “duel” against an opponent who has built his own deck.
In a duel, you start with 20 “life” points, and the objective is to reduce your opponent to zero points before they do the same to you. You play some of your cards as “creatures” which attack your opponent or defend you against your opponent’s creatures. There are other cards that act as “sorceries,” “instants,” “artifacts,” or “enchantments,” which are “spells” that you cast and have all sorts of different effects, like killing creatures, reducing your opponent’s life, making your creatures stronger, and so on. (There are many other possibilities–there now exist roughly 10,000 different cards, so you can appreciate that they do many different things.) Each creature or other spell is paid for with “mana” that you usually obtain from your “land” cards.
When you play a “spell” it is put on a “stack,” and your opponent has a chance to respond to it before it “resolves.” Much as in a computer stack, the spells can pile up, and are resolved in last in, first out, order. Since many of the cards have effects which violate the normal rules, it can be very complicated to keep track of what is going on.
The key to winning in Magic is to design a deck where your cards act synergistically with each other, and then to be able to take advantage of all the subtle interactions and timing effects. It’s incredibly difficult and challenging to play well, no less challenging than Chess, and like Chess, it can be played either casually or in serious tournaments.
If you want to learn more about Magic, you should visit www.magicthegathering.com, which has a vast amount of information. You should probably start with the “Magic Academy” articles, and this article in particular.
I personally played seriously between 2004 and 2006, and my highlight was reaching 2nd place in a rather serious “Pro tour qualifier” tournament in 2005 (see the picture above for what one of these tournaments is like) with my Blue-White Ninja deck (although in that link, the Mike Flores gives me too much credit for the deck design; I copied an obscure but brilliant deck I found on the internet, a practice referred to as “net-decking”). For the last year, though, I haven’t played much, and my son Adam has seriously surpassed me in in both playing and deck-designing ability.
Magic the Gathering has been fantastically popular for a serious card game, and has spawned many imitations because of its ridiculously successful business model. Because the cards that are legal to build your decks with keep changing, the game keeps evolving (which is nice), but that means you have to keep spending money to buy more cards (which may not be so nice for you, but it is certainly nice for the publishers.) Actually, it’s a little more complicated than that–they’ve cleverly arranged it so that your old cards are still legal for some formats, and since they are no longer printed, those old cards tend to hold their value pretty well. And many Magic players actually quite enjoy collecting and trading their cards.
Anyways, most of the imitations, like Pokemon card game, Yu-gi-oh, or Duel Masters, are vastly simplified games targeting a younger set. (Most Magic players are males between the ages of 15 and 30.)
One imitative game, which at least roughly equals Magic in complexity and interest, is the “Marvel Trading Card Game” (also known as “Versus System.”) The theme is a little different; it has superheroes battling villains instead of monsters fighting and wizards casting spells and so on, but it works very similarly. Forgetting about the theme, and judging them strictly as abstract games, there’s little to make one prefer one game very much over the other–they are clearly closely related, and the competitive Marvel scene is dominated by Magic players.
Unfortunately, no versions of Magic have come out for portable game systems. There was a computer game back in 1998, but its AI was really pretty bad. There is a version of Magic the Gathering that can be played online, but you need to buy the cards for the same price as you pay for real cards. (You are able to play for free against other beginners with simple starter decks.) You can also play for free online using the excellent Magic Workstation program, but Magic Workstation doesn’t enforce the rules, so you need to be a relatively experienced player to use it.
Probably Wizards of the Coast (the publishers of Magic) haven’t wanted to cut into their card sales with a computer or portable game that effectively gives you a huge number of cards to play with for a relatively small price, or possibly they don’t believe that it’s possible to program an AI that plays Magic competently.
There have been numerous Yu-gi-oh and Duel Masters games for Nintendo DS’s and Gameboys, but I find those games to be distinctly inferior to Magic.
Anyways, we now have “Marvel Trading Card Game” for the DS, PSP, or PC. I have the DS version for my DS Lite. To play the game on a DS, you hold your DS sideways like a book. The game board is shown on the touchscreen, and you poke at your cards with the stylus to play them. On the other screen the currently selected card is shown in detail so that you can read all of its rules.
You can follow two “paths” through the game, one where you play with superhero cards, and one where you play with villain cards. When you win duels, you are rewarded with new cards, which you can use to make a more powerful deck, which you will definitely need to do, because your opponents’ decks will get more powerful. The game includes about 800 different cards in all. There are also tutorials and very challenging puzzles.
In general this is an extremely challenging game! The AI is very impressive (and it gets some advantage from having slightly better decks than you). You can win, but you will need think hard and play very carefully. After the first couple opponents, you start facing good decks, and I started losing duels more often than winning them. But since I can always identify my errors when I lose, it doesn’t feel unfair, just challenging. Each duel will take about 40 minutes (Versus duels tend to last longer than Magic duels, which typically only take 20 minutes). You can also play online with other players, but I haven’t tried that, because if I wanted to play online, I would just use Magic Workstation.
The game has been getting mediocre reviews (they mostly complain that the game is so hard; another problem is that the music is pretty bad–I agree that you should turn off the sound), so my viewpoint is obviously a minority one. But nevertheless, if you like Magic, or want to see what serious trading card games are about, or want something that will make the time fly during a long plane or train trip, I recommend you pick this up.
Nerd Wisdom 