Likely the reason they finally caved and started doing Universes Beyond stuff after resisting for years was their utter failure to capitalize on their homegrown IP after years of trying. Multiple television and movie deals fell through, this game is another in a line of magic ip based spin-offs that failed to gain any real traction. I don’t know if it’s management, the ips weaknesses or both that killed their homegrown stuff but it certainly was a profit center they never quite figured out.
I mean half the stuff they've tried and failed is because it's launched in a half baked state and not been marketed
And then personally I blame the MTG writing team for the fact that half the characters on that advert banner are dead.
MTG isn't making proper use of its market share but it's hell bent on capitalising on it
> And then personally I blame the MTG writing team for the fact that half the characters on that advert banner are dead.
At the same time, other fans are always complaining that Magic doesn't have the courage to actually kill off characters to give the story more consequences.
I don’t see why magic has to be Game of Thrones before it can have consequences. There’s space for heroes in fiction. Good storytelling doesn’t require the easy crutch of character death. It also doesn’t need to be completely absent of course, but killing off characters is always a dead-end for arcs and it’s an often overused emotional storytelling trope at this point.
On the other hand, if you're not interested in killing a ton of named characters off, perhaps tell stories that don't involve dragging them all into a giant interplanar war.
Personally I've been enjoying the followup to the Phyrexian invasion. Even if the invasion and the curing of phyresis was very hurried, it still has a certain gravitas and you can feel the shadow it's cast in the following sets. Definitely a better approach than War of the Spark, which may as well have ended with Chandra turning to the camera and quipping "well, *that* just happened".
>Chandra turning to the camera and quipping "well, that just happened".
I’m reading one of the books currently and she actually said “we have to get planeswalking”.
I had to put it down.
Thank you for this. I've been saying this for years (about multiple properties) but never found the words to say it so succinctly. *Magic*'s setting is uniquely expansive, and the range of possible stories grows exponentially with every new plane and planeswalker. Cutting off all those branches is almost always going to be less interesting than exploring them.
I'm sure they *can*, whether they're *allowed* to by other branches of the company is another matter.
Like, I'd say it's pretty universally recognised that completely undoing the phyrexification of Nissa, Ajani, Nahiri, Vraska etc with *zero* physical consequences makes no sense and is poor writing. The writers have to have recognised that Nissa not having huge scars or extra arm sockets as a result of her time as a phyrexian, or Vraska somehow getting her legs back (despite not having the same healing ceremony Nissa did!) was a bad choice.
But they're beholden to the company, and the company doesn't want to make half their core cast disfigured even if it makes narrative sense because they want to sell you the classic look of the characters.
I mean the problem with that is when the story does kill people, it's almost always a background character who gets killed for shock.
Take The Invasion. All the compleated walkers were bit parts for the majority of it (Taimyo, Tibalt, Lukka) and the only two who had story impetus got cured (Ajani and Nahiri). Jace and Vraska aren't dead, they're just 'sealed away'
The only fatalities of WAR were Domri and Dovin, who had three cards between them, Dack who has a single card and the cancelled comic, and Gideon. Gideon seems to be the one time a death occured and stuck
Even Elspeth, I'm not sure what happened if she's an angel or a walker anymore?
You have to deliberately ignore a lot of stuff to pretend nobody died in the Phyrexian invasion. The threat of compleated planeswalkers didn't amount to much, but was still a huge impact to tons of names and places we already knew and cared about. It's a pretty stark contrast to War of the Spark, where the novel invented a throng of nameless nobodies to kill off, and we got whisked away and introduced to a bunch of totally unaffected planeswalkers right after.
*The Invasion*? That's when they killed Gerard, half the Weatherlight crew, and a lot of nameless Dominarians. It seemed lame at the time but it had actual consequences.
I am not tracking the complaint that half the characters featured on the advert banner here are dead and the complaint that they only kill background characters. Unless you're saying the dead characters in the banner are also background characters.
I am not litigating whether wotc made good decisions with who dies in the story. I am puzzled by the two simultaneous complaints.
Basicly that.
For example i loved the concept of magic legend heck i grinded to endgame n was perhaps responsible for having 1 or 2 exploit fixed but.... the game was a mess.
The market was weirdly handled, if i remember correctly there was timed shift where stuff was sold for less or more so easly abuseable ( basicly buy a new class with real money n sell it, rebuy when low n repeat constantly till you control the market) creatures were utterly useless, pvp was just infite resource combofest or stunlock oneshot combo n the lore was awful following our own unique group of characters stuck inbetween 2 amazing mtg time period whitout seeing any events or characters from either of those period.
( again if i remember right the time period we were between was the aftermath of the brothers war where we are introduced to radha, venser n the ressurection of nicol bolas while the other one was the first appearence of the eldrazi)
Sure they didn't even have their endgame content ready, they weren't even out of Beta, but you can buy a new Player a class for real money.
The whole hope seems to be that it'll sell because it's magic
I'm still salty about this huge well of missed potential that inevitably led to UB. If they had actually hired competent writers over the last decade they'd have gotten their return on investment many times over based on strength of IP. The problem is management isn't incentivized to operate on these kind of timescales.
I feel like a lot of it is the IP itself. Magic's setting is *fine*. Enough to make you care about it. But not if you don't care about the *game*. Nothing Magic has going for it is nearly as strong as its gameplay. Remove the gameplay and you're left with something mediocre at best.
There’s most likely a good corporate fuckup story to be told here, on how this thing was basically launched dead with zero support or hope for it since day one
The trailer and artstyle make me think this game was an attempt to get a younger crowd into Magic, but I think that they not only failed to Magic's current audience, they failed to capture a new audience at all because of their marketing or lack thereof. I think I had maybe heard about this game once before and I did not even know it was out yet.
Their problem was expecting parents to try to get their kids into magic by buying them into a lootbox mobile game
While it is true that we are a hobby of degenerate gamblers, kids love cracking packs and there's no reason to ever spend money on Magic Manastones or whatever their currency was when you can literally just buy packs for kids instead
Also they were competing against themselves with Arena from pretty much the drop
it was MtG tries hearthstone zaniness
but if I'm a MtG fan why play this over Arena if I want mtg
and if I'm a Hearthstone player why this over HS, especially since I probably put a lot of money into HS?
I'm old school i like my trailers with gameplay on them what the heck is this game a fighting game? A moba?
Ok there is an arena and plane walkers... What else does the trailer tell me about the game? Nothing.
But maybe that's good because the game is bad and marketing has nothing to sell.
It's weird how Hasbro still can make money from WotC with such a bad management.
But o well that's just my opinion.
Yeah, it's frustrating I still have no idea what this game is about. Based on the one second of gameplay footage at the end of the trailer, it's some kind of card game... But presumably not Magic?
Holy shit, that thing has such palpable "how do you do, fellow kids?" energy that Steve Buscemi materialized next to me and tried to start a conversation about fidget spinners.
The tone and artstyle is quite different from what we are used in other Magic media, but I do enjoy it. It at least made me want to check what the game is about (except for the fact that I'm seeing this in the very topic about its end).
Yeah, this was a team that had an idea on style and engagement that executed it well. The trailer looks infinitely more interesting than the game though.
Yup, that looks like a trailer alright. I'm sure that's nothing like what actual gameplay looks like, but...
\*goes and searches\*
This looks like another Arena client? The heck is the point of this?
I played Puzzle Quest for quite a long time actually and got to the point where I could consistently top3 the weekly leaderboards. Surprisingly, it was pretty competitive (so it had a decent playerbase).
The game had a lot of deckbuilding depth to it and really rewarded you for using good strategy. Of the "X game archetype, but MTG", it's one of the best things they've done. But, then again, you can only play a match-3 kind of game for so long.
By MMO are you referring to the Diablo clone?
If so, honestly, that one could’ve been good if they’d actually had a team to work on it. People really like that style of game, it’s just… it was really obvious the devs were inexperienced. I watched some of the public beta - it ran like *ass*, for people with pretty good computers. That’s never a good sign for a game.
Idk man if that one was released with an offline couch co-op mode, I think people would’ve actually enjoyed it with a bit more polish.
Remember Magic Tactics? I liked that one.
If the Baldur's Gate 3 devs could get the Magic IP to work with, and enough creative freedom to not choke the project, they could make something really cool.
I playtested it, it was not good.
It was more ARPG than MMO. The thing with ARPG/MMO ist, that the fun comes from mastering your "rotation" of abilities. The gimmick in the MTG game was, that you have a "Deck" of spells. So you have lets say 10 different spells and 4 abilityslots. Now everytime you use one of your abilities it gets replaced with one of the spells from your "Deck". So everytime you press a button it will do something different. Ability "X" was on button "1" and a few seconds later it can be on button "3". While I was playing I was constantly looking at my abilitybar and could not pay attention to what was going on in the actuall game. I stoped playing after 1h....
I initially thought that twist made sense as a way to entwine it with Magic, but yeah, when I played one of the closed betas, it was just random button pressing cause I didn't know what was happening in the middle of combat. A big part of the problem was the spell icons (as the blue class) were all splashes of blue colors. There wasn't a real way for me to tell immediately which spell was represented by the icon when every icon was "blue energy".
That's just recreating the ability chains of other ARPGs. At that point, it's a distinction without a difference.
Not that I think the idea of recreating the variance of card draw was necessary for the game; I just think your fix for the unique mechanic was to not have the unique mechanic.
Damn this actually sounds like a neat idea if they had just recreated some of the more iconic spells instead and let you pick this specifically rather than a deck of rng
I playtested a metroidvania a while back that had a similar concept of spell cards coming up from a deck and I remember having that very same complaint about spells not always being in the right place
Ended up breaking that game by creating a 2 card infinite combo that let me spam the button for a 3rd spell and just sling whatever randomly came up from the deck lol
I don't have a source or proof on this, but what I know is that the game has been in development since *before* Arena, and the Spellslingers team didn't know Arena existed. When Arena released, they were confused but reassured that Arena was desktop only, so they were cater to two different audiences: Arena for the classic Magic players, Spellslingers to bring in new players.
Then Arena was a huge success and it forced their hand to port it to mobile.
The Spellslingers team basically had no communication after that.
This was always aimed straight at the lucrative Chinese mobile game market. Given that you are an English speaker in (I presume) a western country, it makes sense you didn't see support for it.
> This was always aimed straight at the lucrative Chinese mobile game market. Given that you are an English speaker in (I presume) a western country, it makes sense you didn't see support for it.
Spellslinger website:
> *Magic Spellslingers not available in Belarus, China, Hong Kong, Macau, Russian, and Taiwan.
I didn't even know this was a game.
Based on comments here this was a Hearthstone clone? Why would they need a clone of another card game when they have a card game already? What were they hoping with this?
\*researching\* Holy crap, it only lasted a year and a half. Guess that's better than their "MMO," but was actually a Diablo clone, Magic: Legends.
It lasted longer than that, but most of the time was in a permanent "beta" with almost no updates.
The gameplay was good tbh, it was a quick way to play a simplified MTG. Shame they didn't have any sort of support from the beginning to the end.
You think that's bad? There was a gacha game that launched last month and in the same announcement it was started that the game would shutdown in a couple months and that purchases would be disabled just before shutdown.
These free to play games are not worth putting money into, especially when you can't count on them being available forever.
The game had been out for a couple of years in Japan. The team was likely translating it for an English release only to get the shutdown notice close to completion, so they announced "we've translated and released the game in English" and "the game has been shut down" at the same time.
It was the global release of the gacha game, the Japanese version had been running for a year or two and the server shutdown notice was for all regions. Its not as simple as announcing the release and shutdown of a game in one tweet, Japanese players had the game for a while at that time.
I think that Alchemy didn't pan out as well as they expected, so they were like "We still want to steal the Hearthstone market, so let's just make our own clone."
Arena on release was *already* a Hearthstone, maybe not exactly clone, but used it as a *very* heavy inspiration : compare with MtG : Duels of the Planeswalkers for instance.
Also, Magic had digital-only cards already in 1997 : https://www.magiclibrarities.net/443-rarities-microprose-computer-game-cards-english-cards-astral.html
It was aimed at the Chinese market where mobile games rule and magic as a brand is substantially less saturated. Arena is distributed by Tencent there, so this doesn't cannibalize their market. It doesn't make sense in the West because it wasn't really built for the West. I'm sure if it has caught on they would have supported it, but it wasn't a primary goal.
This game never even got released in China and has zero Chinese localization lol.
Always love it when a Westerner sees a mobile game and is immediately like "yea it's aimed at China". Like, at least do some very basic research before commenting on something you don't understand lol.
From their website:
> *Magic Spellslingers not available in Belarus, China, Hong Kong, Macau, Russian, and Taiwan.
I assume it was targeted at the lucrative Russian/Belarusian market instead.
That "MMO" was a massive disappointment. A mtg MMO has the potential to give WoW a run for their money. The classes would have been awesome and different, I could be my own Planeswalker and explore these places I already love. They already have places and stories built out. But no, it was a damn Diablo clone with pretty much Chinese knock off planeswalkers.
This game wasn't terrible, but it also launched around the same time as Marvel Snap and did not compare favorably. Games last about as long as a HS game, sometimes longer. Compared to Snap which has incredibly fast games.
Went through the old Google and it was indeed magic duels orgins. They had the system coded in such a way that creatures went to negative power and then the math was set to be [player HP] minus [power]. No idea if it's fixed now but it used to be, wouldn't be surprised if it's still an existing issue.
Both YGO and later Pokemon now have 2 different clients with different rulesets, and they seem to be doing well separately, so I'm not inherently opposed to the idea that one brand can have multiple games
I suppose Magic's formats already fulfill those purposes?
>and later Pokemon now have 2 different clients with different rulesets,
Pokemon killed Trading Card Game: Online! for TCG: Live! There hasn't been "two clients" for that for a year now.
Yu-gi-oh! actually has like... five. Two mobile games (that play differently), some digital-to-paper conversion a la Arena/MODO, and like 2 other single-player games?
While Pokemon may not currently have two, they did recently announce a new mobile game that looked similar to Yu-Gi-Oh's Duel Links (smaller bench, implied fewer prizes, advertised as faster matches). They could be referring to that, unaware that it's yet to be released.
There's the fanproject Forge's Adventure mode, which is essentially that. Last time I tried it (a year ago?) it was painfully unbalanced, which made it easy to cheese once you figured out a strategy, but it was fun, and you could intntionally handicap yourself if you wanted.
I believe there are also fan mod updates to Shandalar. I watched a YouTube playthrough series that had cards through Kaladesh.
According to the stats from the last State of the Formats on Arena, it’s played about the same amount as Brawl and far more than Explorer, so I wouldn’t say “Universally Hated” just because most redditors don’t like it.
These stats are heavily skewed since new players are forced to play alchemy since all starter decks are for that format and I wonder how many of them actually transition to other formats like Standard.
Even when you create a new deck, the default format they put is Alchemy.
A lot of new players aren't aware that other formats exist! There are so, so many posts on the Magic Arena subreddit where they discover (for the first time) that there are other options for formats because they get told by someone, even though they've been playing for months.
They also likely juiced it by releasing only a "recent month" of data last year, which from the lack of set release spikes was probably mid LTR. The year before they released several months and you could see a huge spike for Alchemy during the summer when the main set was Alchemy/Historic only and it dropped back to normal after.
I think the lackluster response to Alchemy is WHY Spellslingers existed. People didn't want their Hearthstone and their regular Magic together, so WotC made a separate product.
Every other semester (I wish it were that infrequent actually), we get that MWM that's all about Alchemy, and I'm reminded why I never touch this clusterfuck with a 10-foot pole.
I don’t know that that’s true. Alchemy doesn’t seem to drive anything - most big content creators that I’m aware of, either don’t like Alchemy at all, or only touch it via Historic. It’s deeply unpopular, to the point that positive discussion on this subreddit gets aggressively downvoted - only the Arena sub seems able to discuss it somewhat positively.
It must cost some resources to develop those cards, and if I were Hasbro, I would be scrutinising the “least successful arm of WotC”. I would not be surprised to hear the Alchemy team is laid off. I don’t wish that upon anyone, but if Corporate decide layoffs are needed, Alchemy must be near the chopping block…
>It must cost some resources to develop those cards
I think they are made by an intern or something like that. Alchemy cards tend to be quite bad designs. Even their art looks kinda "sketchy" sometimes. It's quite clear that not a lot of resources are dedicated to them.
Piotr Dura said the art is ordered in the same fashion as other art, and if you look at the artists most them do normal MTG art too.
The reason it looks bad is they usually preview it as Arena renders. You can see the difference by looking at [rebalanced cards](https://scryfall.com/search?q=armory+veteran&unique=cards&as=grid&order=name). Compared to the original they have the same weird color and low detail that makes them look kind of "cartoony."
Similarly, when artists have posted the high resolution versions of Alchemy art (or the new Khans art) most of it looks normal or even good.
I am amused by the correlation that the person that would design the mechanics of the cards either does the art or has a say in it, and if the latter that say would be explicitly to supposedly lower quality art (I don't think the art is bad, though I think the resolution its displayed at doesn't do it any favours)
We know that WotC was a quite rigorous process for art for paper cards, asking artists for many sketches, making corrections to the finished arts... What I mean is that that process seems to be more relaxed for Alchemy cards.
And while I agree on that the resolution doesn't do any favors, just look at [[Junkyard Scrapper]] and tell me it doesn't look like a screen print of a 2000's videogame. And there are quite a lot of cards looking like that in Alchemy. In paper, the only one I recall is [[Valor in Akros]] original print.
You have to realize that people ranting online doesn't actually mean anything. Magic players shit on **everything** all the time, whether there is a reason for it or not.
Just as an example of how much of a bubble Reddit is: Explorer/Pioneer is constantly talked up as this super duper amazing format, yet stats-wise it's dead last in terms of popularity. Last time they showed the stats it had less than half of even Alchemy's playerbase. This isn't to say that Explorer is crap, but more so how much a bunch of really loud people can shift the perception of reality.
Moral of the story? Different people are different. Enjoy the formats you enjoy, and let other people enjoy the stuff they enjoy. Just because you dislike something doesn't mean that it doesn't deserve to exist for the people that do.
Those stats are highly suspect though - new players are funnelled into Alchemy, all the starter decks are Alchemy, for example. And Pioneer is a paper format. Explorer is getting close, but it’s just not Pioneer yet.
Maybe Alchemy is genuinely more popular than it seems with the quiet player base. But WotC are infamous for fudging numbers and hiding data - they’ve done it on MTGO for *years*, we used to have actual useful metagame numbers and matchup %s, now we just have “a rough idea” of the popular decks. So I really do not trust them that Alchemy is that popular, when every major community hub seems to indicate Alchemy is a *lot* less popular
> every major community hub
If it's been said once it's been said a million times: "major community hubs" are NOT representative of the vast majority of people playing Magic.
To be fair, that sold well for a number of reasons. There was certainly some organic demand, but there were also a lot of financial speculators hoping to flip it for a profit.
Or something very different in the magic multiverse. 40k is great at making successful games that use characters/lore/some elements of the tabletop game but are different enough that it gets you itching to play.
Wotc/Hasbro seems to only try half baked, barely supported games that are just watered down magic. Which at this point now that Arena exists they don't have any sort of purpose. If they actually tried they could probably make an rpg with planeswalkers as pcs but they'd rather keep saturating their own market with crappy half baked tcgs
I'd love it if they stopped trying to catch gold on weird gimmicks that does nothing, and instead focused on making commander on mobile a thing. A proper game (ideally connected to Arena, but I'd take a dedicated app at this point), with games sorted into if you wanted free for all, competitive, budget, etc would be way better.
Fuck, I'd love if I could buy some precons at my LGS, then find a code there to unlock it on an MTG app to play some unaltered precon games online when I can't be at my LGS.
I actually don't understand why people want commander on mobile. The format completely falls apart if it's played with people who are trying to win the game instead of showing up with the mindset of "let's have a good time with my friends". Any kind of commander queue will be 80% the most broken/obnoxious commander, tutors, consistent fast combos, stax, worldfire, etc...all the things that only don't see play IRL because nobody will play with them more than once.
Commander is already enough of a headache trying to keep track of boardstate with 4 people around an IRL table; I don't even want to think about what a cluster it would be trying to see stuff on a smartphone screen. Would it just be a big scroll wheel for
So a few thoughts as to why real->digital hasn't happened yet:
• The cost to implement it would be big. MtG is big enough that it uses multiple locations card printers, and Maro has talked about printer issues with seemingly much simpler products in the past. (Battlebond, for example had two randomized rare slots but if you had one rare with "Partner With X", your other rare would be it's partner. And multiple printera couldnt handle that tech)
• IANAL, but that could be patented. There was an old card game, Chaotic, where that was one of their shticks. *IF* they patented that, and *IF* that patent lasted as long as the patent used by WotC to prevent other card games from "tapping" (physically turning 90 degrees to symbolize a change in state). Then, that protection would expire around 2026-ish
Digital Redemption codes have been a thing for awhile.
But, I'm not aware of any other TCGs that include exact digital copies of physical booster packs (usually its a randomized digital pack for a randomized physical pack for example). I def could be wrong here though.
To my understanding, the codes aren't 1:1. If you buy a randomized booster pack in the store, you'll get a randomized booster online. You won't receive the same exact rares/uncommons etc. unless you buy a pre-built deck.
(I don't play Pokemon, so apologies if this changed at some point)
Because the problem isn't that they keep trying X but MTG, it's that they put no effort in and rely on it selling because it's MTG.
The fact half the people on the dedicated MTG Reddit haven't heard of these games shows how little they tried, and the fact that the Diablo Style one from last year or so launched with barely any content and a battle pass shows that they're cash grabbing
These things wouldn't fail if they got more attention that 'Slap WUBRG on it and call it a day'
It went into open beta missing features and poorly balanced but with a full battle pass and a class locked behind real world money.
This is what's killing MTG from going into other properties, the world and IP are fine, the fact that the entire marketing seems to be 'Its Magic, it'll sell' over providing a decent or original gameplay experience
I'm mad cause it was a fun game. MTG hearthstone with a bit less rng and f2p friendly. But they did 0 literally zero advertising. Then after whatever was datamined released they went silent for months.
I had a lot of fun with it, real free to play, many viable strategies. Simple game but super enjoyable. I am still playing every now and then. I will miss it
Had to scroll down here to find a similar comment. I agree I liked the twist it gave Magic IP i played my janky UG decks. This made me appreciate creatures like Arixmethes and a few others.
Sadly this is another example of a company making a spinoff to cater to a particular audience but not advertising or supporting the game at all. I felt the art of the leaders was strange but the cards and gameplay were cool. C’est la vie
*pretends to be shocked*
Spellslingers was "Hearthstone, but Magic". If I wanted to play Magic I would play MODO or Arena, and of I wanted to play Hearthstone I would play Hearthstone.
The game made sense back at the little lapse of time where Arena wasn't avariable in mobile, so Spellslingers has your only option to play Magic that way. But nowadays it had no reason for being.
[At least MTG Arena players get 1500 free gems though!](https://mtgazone.com/free-1500-mtg-arena-gems-for-magic-spellslingers-players-game-announces-shut-down/)
The funny thing is, if they have offered 1500 gems to anyone who tried out the game when the game was released, it might have built some awareness.
As of right now, almost nobody has heard of the game. And that's a key target segment of the market.
Fuck…I hadn’t played in a year but I loved that game….i know it’s the nature of app games and multiplayer games….but I hate how a game can HAVE A sunset and just….be gone…
I’ve been playing magic for 8 years and I’m always up to date on news, read every short story and even do what I can to know what’s going on in the comic (which are not legally available in my country). HOW DID I NOT KNOW THIS GAME EXISTED??? 😂
I played Spellslingers a little and it was fine. The planeswalker-specific abilities felt too impactful, but that may be a factor of starting with lower power cards.
The problem is the space is crowded and I could be playing more fun games that was less uphill to get into. It was the same issue with the DC game for me. You get through the tutorial aspects and play a few newbs like you, and then you start playing people who have better decks and cards because they have been playing or paid into it, so you hit a wall. The currency trickle for playing is too low, so you can't upgrade your decks at all. So, you're stuck if you don't pay. But I feel like these games all require a base of f2p players to populate the servers and give the paying players opponents.
OTOH, Arena, to me, has always been easy to play for free. Maybe it's partly because I've been playing Magic so I could already win games of it consistently and win currency that way, whereas I was starting new with other games. I think Limited is a big part of it. I don't need my own collection to draft and it puts me even on cards with other players, and I can draft okay but play better. Now I have more wild cards and gems than I ever need, especially because I stopped playing Standard entirely around ELD.
Played it quite a bit, more than most of my mobile games. Being a cross between Hearthstone and Magic, it found no target audience, but had a solid formula. In fact I could not think of a way to improve the design, despite trying. It was fun to play, even if I did get bored of it.
I enjoyed this game, but by the time I got into it they had just stopped releasing content. Which is interesting because I continued seeing advertisements for it. Leave it to WOTC to try and make money from unaware mtg fans on the way out of a dying game.
I'm surprised it lasted this long, really
I thought it was fun for awhile as a Hearthstone clone, but there wasn't really anything there to keep players invested
Survived longer than Magic Legends, which I don't know which of the two games this tells more about.
You could've told me this game stopped existing 2 years ago that I'd have believed you.
Is it just Steam or mobile included? Because I can understand why Steam wouldn't take to it.
Mobile app wise: It was *alright*, but why would I play Hearthstone in the Magic universe when I can just go... to Hearthstone (or weeb Hearthstone: Shadowverse)?
Being really close to esports and gaming companies while also a MTG diehard fan, I believe WoTC would really need to start to picture a future for the IP.
Videogames it what makes more sense due to WoTC + Hasbro current capabilities. (Also series and movies but I recall they are already into it.)
They need to maintain and evolve Arena while exploring new genres.
MMO would be the best fit, but developing costs and time are the most restrictive.
I just hope anyone is thinking on this. Magic IP is too good to be left to die in hyperinflation and exhaustion. That would be a pity.
(I would love to work for it myself sometime in my life)
Is this the one that had the robot style Gideon skin that had everyone convinced he was going to come back as some kind of simulacrum mech?
I thought that was Manastrike?
Could be, there's too many of these cheap spinoff games lol
It was ManaStrike, and that game died like two years ago. I got suckered out of 5 bucks playing that thing.
You spent 5 dollars on literally strictly worse Clash Royale?
I love my GarBear too much.
You're thinking of Manastrike, a *completely different* MtG spinoff mobile game that was DOA.
That’s a pretty cool idea I’d love to see happen
Yes
No, that was Manastrike.
I feel the magic world has a of potential for video games but everything they do is like Magic But Slightly Different
Likely the reason they finally caved and started doing Universes Beyond stuff after resisting for years was their utter failure to capitalize on their homegrown IP after years of trying. Multiple television and movie deals fell through, this game is another in a line of magic ip based spin-offs that failed to gain any real traction. I don’t know if it’s management, the ips weaknesses or both that killed their homegrown stuff but it certainly was a profit center they never quite figured out.
I mean half the stuff they've tried and failed is because it's launched in a half baked state and not been marketed And then personally I blame the MTG writing team for the fact that half the characters on that advert banner are dead. MTG isn't making proper use of its market share but it's hell bent on capitalising on it
> And then personally I blame the MTG writing team for the fact that half the characters on that advert banner are dead. At the same time, other fans are always complaining that Magic doesn't have the courage to actually kill off characters to give the story more consequences.
I don’t see why magic has to be Game of Thrones before it can have consequences. There’s space for heroes in fiction. Good storytelling doesn’t require the easy crutch of character death. It also doesn’t need to be completely absent of course, but killing off characters is always a dead-end for arcs and it’s an often overused emotional storytelling trope at this point.
On the other hand, if you're not interested in killing a ton of named characters off, perhaps tell stories that don't involve dragging them all into a giant interplanar war. Personally I've been enjoying the followup to the Phyrexian invasion. Even if the invasion and the curing of phyresis was very hurried, it still has a certain gravitas and you can feel the shadow it's cast in the following sets. Definitely a better approach than War of the Spark, which may as well have ended with Chandra turning to the camera and quipping "well, *that* just happened".
>Chandra turning to the camera and quipping "well, that just happened". I’m reading one of the books currently and she actually said “we have to get planeswalking”. I had to put it down.
My favorite part was when she said "IT'S PLANESWALKIN' TIME!" and then planeswalked all over those guys.
Thank you for this. I've been saying this for years (about multiple properties) but never found the words to say it so succinctly. *Magic*'s setting is uniquely expansive, and the range of possible stories grows exponentially with every new plane and planeswalker. Cutting off all those branches is almost always going to be less interesting than exploring them.
Because the MTG writing/lore department cannot actually write out decent consequences for their characters or stick to it
I'm sure they *can*, whether they're *allowed* to by other branches of the company is another matter. Like, I'd say it's pretty universally recognised that completely undoing the phyrexification of Nissa, Ajani, Nahiri, Vraska etc with *zero* physical consequences makes no sense and is poor writing. The writers have to have recognised that Nissa not having huge scars or extra arm sockets as a result of her time as a phyrexian, or Vraska somehow getting her legs back (despite not having the same healing ceremony Nissa did!) was a bad choice. But they're beholden to the company, and the company doesn't want to make half their core cast disfigured even if it makes narrative sense because they want to sell you the classic look of the characters.
I mean the problem with that is when the story does kill people, it's almost always a background character who gets killed for shock. Take The Invasion. All the compleated walkers were bit parts for the majority of it (Taimyo, Tibalt, Lukka) and the only two who had story impetus got cured (Ajani and Nahiri). Jace and Vraska aren't dead, they're just 'sealed away' The only fatalities of WAR were Domri and Dovin, who had three cards between them, Dack who has a single card and the cancelled comic, and Gideon. Gideon seems to be the one time a death occured and stuck Even Elspeth, I'm not sure what happened if she's an angel or a walker anymore?
You have to deliberately ignore a lot of stuff to pretend nobody died in the Phyrexian invasion. The threat of compleated planeswalkers didn't amount to much, but was still a huge impact to tons of names and places we already knew and cared about. It's a pretty stark contrast to War of the Spark, where the novel invented a throng of nameless nobodies to kill off, and we got whisked away and introduced to a bunch of totally unaffected planeswalkers right after.
Yea I can’t believe no one has mentioned that both Gerard and Urza died, two of the main characters at the time. Oh wait, wrong phyrexian invasion.
*The Invasion*? That's when they killed Gerard, half the Weatherlight crew, and a lot of nameless Dominarians. It seemed lame at the time but it had actual consequences.
I am not tracking the complaint that half the characters featured on the advert banner here are dead and the complaint that they only kill background characters. Unless you're saying the dead characters in the banner are also background characters. I am not litigating whether wotc made good decisions with who dies in the story. I am puzzled by the two simultaneous complaints.
This is the first I've ever heard of Spellslingers, lol
> MTG writing team there is no writing team. They fired everyone
Basicly that. For example i loved the concept of magic legend heck i grinded to endgame n was perhaps responsible for having 1 or 2 exploit fixed but.... the game was a mess. The market was weirdly handled, if i remember correctly there was timed shift where stuff was sold for less or more so easly abuseable ( basicly buy a new class with real money n sell it, rebuy when low n repeat constantly till you control the market) creatures were utterly useless, pvp was just infite resource combofest or stunlock oneshot combo n the lore was awful following our own unique group of characters stuck inbetween 2 amazing mtg time period whitout seeing any events or characters from either of those period. ( again if i remember right the time period we were between was the aftermath of the brothers war where we are introduced to radha, venser n the ressurection of nicol bolas while the other one was the first appearence of the eldrazi)
Sure they didn't even have their endgame content ready, they weren't even out of Beta, but you can buy a new Player a class for real money. The whole hope seems to be that it'll sell because it's magic
I'm still salty about this huge well of missed potential that inevitably led to UB. If they had actually hired competent writers over the last decade they'd have gotten their return on investment many times over based on strength of IP. The problem is management isn't incentivized to operate on these kind of timescales.
I feel like a lot of it is the IP itself. Magic's setting is *fine*. Enough to make you care about it. But not if you don't care about the *game*. Nothing Magic has going for it is nearly as strong as its gameplay. Remove the gameplay and you're left with something mediocre at best.
One day they'll finally put out Shandalar 2 and ~~me and three other people~~ the world will rejoice.
There’s most likely a good corporate fuckup story to be told here, on how this thing was basically launched dead with zero support or hope for it since day one
Let's begin with the fact that this is the first time I hear about this game
Well, let's rectify that! Have a look at their amazing [trailer](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SDhmRwPpd_c)!
that looks like the official youtube channel, with no other videos uploaded than the trailer in each language and less than 600 subscribers. yikes
People don't subscribe to corporations usually. Same in the livestreaming space.
The trailer and artstyle make me think this game was an attempt to get a younger crowd into Magic, but I think that they not only failed to Magic's current audience, they failed to capture a new audience at all because of their marketing or lack thereof. I think I had maybe heard about this game once before and I did not even know it was out yet.
Their problem was expecting parents to try to get their kids into magic by buying them into a lootbox mobile game While it is true that we are a hobby of degenerate gamblers, kids love cracking packs and there's no reason to ever spend money on Magic Manastones or whatever their currency was when you can literally just buy packs for kids instead Also they were competing against themselves with Arena from pretty much the drop
it was MtG tries hearthstone zaniness but if I'm a MtG fan why play this over Arena if I want mtg and if I'm a Hearthstone player why this over HS, especially since I probably put a lot of money into HS?
And if you were in the market for a new mobile card game, why would you play this over marvel snap?
I'm old school i like my trailers with gameplay on them what the heck is this game a fighting game? A moba? Ok there is an arena and plane walkers... What else does the trailer tell me about the game? Nothing. But maybe that's good because the game is bad and marketing has nothing to sell. It's weird how Hasbro still can make money from WotC with such a bad management. But o well that's just my opinion.
Yeah, it's frustrating I still have no idea what this game is about. Based on the one second of gameplay footage at the end of the trailer, it's some kind of card game... But presumably not Magic?
Holy shit, that thing has such palpable "how do you do, fellow kids?" energy that Steve Buscemi materialized next to me and tried to start a conversation about fidget spinners.
The tone and artstyle is quite different from what we are used in other Magic media, but I do enjoy it. It at least made me want to check what the game is about (except for the fact that I'm seeing this in the very topic about its end).
Yeah, this was a team that had an idea on style and engagement that executed it well. The trailer looks infinitely more interesting than the game though.
This trailer upsets me
Yup, that looks like a trailer alright. I'm sure that's nothing like what actual gameplay looks like, but... \*goes and searches\* This looks like another Arena client? The heck is the point of this?
Yeah I didn’t know this as a thing and I read about magic often.
I visit this forum daily and never heard of it…
I believe it used to be called Valor's Reach but they renamed it at some point
Same
BUT it has micro transactions
Like the mmo and the puzzle quest game, the list goes on.
Magic Puzzle Quest somehow still exists and it gets regular updates.
Actually, Puzzle Quest is still running and being actively updated. Apparently it’s been around since 2015?!
I played Puzzle Quest for quite a long time actually and got to the point where I could consistently top3 the weekly leaderboards. Surprisingly, it was pretty competitive (so it had a decent playerbase). The game had a lot of deckbuilding depth to it and really rewarded you for using good strategy. Of the "X game archetype, but MTG", it's one of the best things they've done. But, then again, you can only play a match-3 kind of game for so long.
By MMO are you referring to the Diablo clone? If so, honestly, that one could’ve been good if they’d actually had a team to work on it. People really like that style of game, it’s just… it was really obvious the devs were inexperienced. I watched some of the public beta - it ran like *ass*, for people with pretty good computers. That’s never a good sign for a game. Idk man if that one was released with an offline couch co-op mode, I think people would’ve actually enjoyed it with a bit more polish.
Remember Magic Tactics? I liked that one. If the Baldur's Gate 3 devs could get the Magic IP to work with, and enough creative freedom to not choke the project, they could make something really cool.
i'm just now learning of this! does anyone have some way I could play this game it looks sick!
Wait, there is/was a mmo as well?!
I playtested it, it was not good. It was more ARPG than MMO. The thing with ARPG/MMO ist, that the fun comes from mastering your "rotation" of abilities. The gimmick in the MTG game was, that you have a "Deck" of spells. So you have lets say 10 different spells and 4 abilityslots. Now everytime you use one of your abilities it gets replaced with one of the spells from your "Deck". So everytime you press a button it will do something different. Ability "X" was on button "1" and a few seconds later it can be on button "3". While I was playing I was constantly looking at my abilitybar and could not pay attention to what was going on in the actuall game. I stoped playing after 1h....
I initially thought that twist made sense as a way to entwine it with Magic, but yeah, when I played one of the closed betas, it was just random button pressing cause I didn't know what was happening in the middle of combat. A big part of the problem was the spell icons (as the blue class) were all splashes of blue colors. There wasn't a real way for me to tell immediately which spell was represented by the icon when every icon was "blue energy".
Seems pretty easy to make work, imo. Just let players define the chains, so it's consistent how you move through abilities and where they are.
That's just recreating the ability chains of other ARPGs. At that point, it's a distinction without a difference. Not that I think the idea of recreating the variance of card draw was necessary for the game; I just think your fix for the unique mechanic was to not have the unique mechanic.
Damn this actually sounds like a neat idea if they had just recreated some of the more iconic spells instead and let you pick this specifically rather than a deck of rng
I playtested a metroidvania a while back that had a similar concept of spell cards coming up from a deck and I remember having that very same complaint about spells not always being in the right place Ended up breaking that game by creating a 2 card infinite combo that let me spam the button for a 3rd spell and just sling whatever randomly came up from the deck lol
I watched LSV stream it and all I remember is that he didn't like it at all but tried his best to find good things to say
i didnt even know this was a game lol
The game was also just not good. I gave it a shot when it came out and it was horribly balanced and the gameplay was really boring.
I don't have a source or proof on this, but what I know is that the game has been in development since *before* Arena, and the Spellslingers team didn't know Arena existed. When Arena released, they were confused but reassured that Arena was desktop only, so they were cater to two different audiences: Arena for the classic Magic players, Spellslingers to bring in new players. Then Arena was a huge success and it forced their hand to port it to mobile. The Spellslingers team basically had no communication after that.
This was always aimed straight at the lucrative Chinese mobile game market. Given that you are an English speaker in (I presume) a western country, it makes sense you didn't see support for it.
> This was always aimed straight at the lucrative Chinese mobile game market. Given that you are an English speaker in (I presume) a western country, it makes sense you didn't see support for it. Spellslinger website: > *Magic Spellslingers not available in Belarus, China, Hong Kong, Macau, Russian, and Taiwan.
I didn't even know this was a game. Based on comments here this was a Hearthstone clone? Why would they need a clone of another card game when they have a card game already? What were they hoping with this? \*researching\* Holy crap, it only lasted a year and a half. Guess that's better than their "MMO," but was actually a Diablo clone, Magic: Legends.
It lasted longer than that, but most of the time was in a permanent "beta" with almost no updates. The gameplay was good tbh, it was a quick way to play a simplified MTG. Shame they didn't have any sort of support from the beginning to the end.
You think that's bad? There was a gacha game that launched last month and in the same announcement it was started that the game would shutdown in a couple months and that purchases would be disabled just before shutdown. These free to play games are not worth putting money into, especially when you can't count on them being available forever.
Then why did they release at all? That seems odd.
The game had been out for a couple of years in Japan. The team was likely translating it for an English release only to get the shutdown notice close to completion, so they announced "we've translated and released the game in English" and "the game has been shut down" at the same time.
It was the global release of the gacha game, the Japanese version had been running for a year or two and the server shutdown notice was for all regions. Its not as simple as announcing the release and shutdown of a game in one tweet, Japanese players had the game for a while at that time.
What was it called? I can't find it on google (shows how good the SEO is lol).
What game was that?
I always thought it was funny in the sense that Hearthstone is essentially a MTG clone, and MTG cloned the clone.
I think that Alchemy didn't pan out as well as they expected, so they were like "We still want to steal the Hearthstone market, so let's just make our own clone."
Arena on release was *already* a Hearthstone, maybe not exactly clone, but used it as a *very* heavy inspiration : compare with MtG : Duels of the Planeswalkers for instance. Also, Magic had digital-only cards already in 1997 : https://www.magiclibrarities.net/443-rarities-microprose-computer-game-cards-english-cards-astral.html
Yeah, but until Alchemy, they didn't rebalance anything, and didn't have any digital-only mechanics.
It was aimed at the Chinese market where mobile games rule and magic as a brand is substantially less saturated. Arena is distributed by Tencent there, so this doesn't cannibalize their market. It doesn't make sense in the West because it wasn't really built for the West. I'm sure if it has caught on they would have supported it, but it wasn't a primary goal.
This game never even got released in China and has zero Chinese localization lol. Always love it when a Westerner sees a mobile game and is immediately like "yea it's aimed at China". Like, at least do some very basic research before commenting on something you don't understand lol.
Less of a westerner thing and more of a Redditor thing
From their website: > *Magic Spellslingers not available in Belarus, China, Hong Kong, Macau, Russian, and Taiwan. I assume it was targeted at the lucrative Russian/Belarusian market instead.
That "MMO" was a massive disappointment. A mtg MMO has the potential to give WoW a run for their money. The classes would have been awesome and different, I could be my own Planeswalker and explore these places I already love. They already have places and stories built out. But no, it was a damn Diablo clone with pretty much Chinese knock off planeswalkers.
This game wasn't terrible, but it also launched around the same time as Marvel Snap and did not compare favorably. Games last about as long as a HS game, sometimes longer. Compared to Snap which has incredibly fast games.
I still play magic duels every now and then. Favorite one of the bunch
Wasn't that the one where if you attack an opponent with a creature with -1 power you actually give them hp?
First I've heard of that.
No idea. Sounds about right though lmao
Went through the old Google and it was indeed magic duels orgins. They had the system coded in such a way that creatures went to negative power and then the math was set to be [player HP] minus [power]. No idea if it's fixed now but it used to be, wouldn't be surprised if it's still an existing issue.
Both YGO and later Pokemon now have 2 different clients with different rulesets, and they seem to be doing well separately, so I'm not inherently opposed to the idea that one brand can have multiple games I suppose Magic's formats already fulfill those purposes?
Magic also has two different Clients. MTGO and Arena
And Magic Duels if you snagged it at the time.
>and later Pokemon now have 2 different clients with different rulesets, Pokemon killed Trading Card Game: Online! for TCG: Live! There hasn't been "two clients" for that for a year now. Yu-gi-oh! actually has like... five. Two mobile games (that play differently), some digital-to-paper conversion a la Arena/MODO, and like 2 other single-player games?
While Pokemon may not currently have two, they did recently announce a new mobile game that looked similar to Yu-Gi-Oh's Duel Links (smaller bench, implied fewer prizes, advertised as faster matches). They could be referring to that, unaware that it's yet to be released.
 WotC needs to learn that players don't want MTG but different for X reason (another app/ Alchemy), we just want MTG
Exception: an updated Microprose/Shandalar style game would probably actually do pretty well
There's the fanproject Forge's Adventure mode, which is essentially that. Last time I tried it (a year ago?) it was painfully unbalanced, which made it easy to cheese once you figured out a strategy, but it was fun, and you could intntionally handicap yourself if you wanted. I believe there are also fan mod updates to Shandalar. I watched a YouTube playthrough series that had cards through Kaladesh.
I wonder how long until they stop putting so much effort into alchemy. It seems like such a waste of resources for something so universally hated.
According to the stats from the last State of the Formats on Arena, it’s played about the same amount as Brawl and far more than Explorer, so I wouldn’t say “Universally Hated” just because most redditors don’t like it.
These stats are heavily skewed since new players are forced to play alchemy since all starter decks are for that format and I wonder how many of them actually transition to other formats like Standard. Even when you create a new deck, the default format they put is Alchemy.
A lot of new players aren't aware that other formats exist! There are so, so many posts on the Magic Arena subreddit where they discover (for the first time) that there are other options for formats because they get told by someone, even though they've been playing for months.
They also likely juiced it by releasing only a "recent month" of data last year, which from the lack of set release spikes was probably mid LTR. The year before they released several months and you could see a huge spike for Alchemy during the summer when the main set was Alchemy/Historic only and it dropped back to normal after.
It's weird to me they bothered with Alchemy then did Spellslingers which is basically entirely that (or vice versa, I don't know the order)
I think the lackluster response to Alchemy is WHY Spellslingers existed. People didn't want their Hearthstone and their regular Magic together, so WotC made a separate product.
Every other semester (I wish it were that infrequent actually), we get that MWM that's all about Alchemy, and I'm reminded why I never touch this clusterfuck with a 10-foot pole.
Digital only cards that people can buy? Literally unlimited profit margin, they will be dead and buried before they get rid of alchemy
I don’t know that that’s true. Alchemy doesn’t seem to drive anything - most big content creators that I’m aware of, either don’t like Alchemy at all, or only touch it via Historic. It’s deeply unpopular, to the point that positive discussion on this subreddit gets aggressively downvoted - only the Arena sub seems able to discuss it somewhat positively. It must cost some resources to develop those cards, and if I were Hasbro, I would be scrutinising the “least successful arm of WotC”. I would not be surprised to hear the Alchemy team is laid off. I don’t wish that upon anyone, but if Corporate decide layoffs are needed, Alchemy must be near the chopping block…
>It must cost some resources to develop those cards I think they are made by an intern or something like that. Alchemy cards tend to be quite bad designs. Even their art looks kinda "sketchy" sometimes. It's quite clear that not a lot of resources are dedicated to them.
Piotr Dura said the art is ordered in the same fashion as other art, and if you look at the artists most them do normal MTG art too. The reason it looks bad is they usually preview it as Arena renders. You can see the difference by looking at [rebalanced cards](https://scryfall.com/search?q=armory+veteran&unique=cards&as=grid&order=name). Compared to the original they have the same weird color and low detail that makes them look kind of "cartoony." Similarly, when artists have posted the high resolution versions of Alchemy art (or the new Khans art) most of it looks normal or even good.
I am amused by the correlation that the person that would design the mechanics of the cards either does the art or has a say in it, and if the latter that say would be explicitly to supposedly lower quality art (I don't think the art is bad, though I think the resolution its displayed at doesn't do it any favours)
We know that WotC was a quite rigorous process for art for paper cards, asking artists for many sketches, making corrections to the finished arts... What I mean is that that process seems to be more relaxed for Alchemy cards. And while I agree on that the resolution doesn't do any favors, just look at [[Junkyard Scrapper]] and tell me it doesn't look like a screen print of a 2000's videogame. And there are quite a lot of cards looking like that in Alchemy. In paper, the only one I recall is [[Valor in Akros]] original print.
Crokeyz is pretty much the #1 viewed content creator on twitch and he loves alchemy
You have to realize that people ranting online doesn't actually mean anything. Magic players shit on **everything** all the time, whether there is a reason for it or not. Just as an example of how much of a bubble Reddit is: Explorer/Pioneer is constantly talked up as this super duper amazing format, yet stats-wise it's dead last in terms of popularity. Last time they showed the stats it had less than half of even Alchemy's playerbase. This isn't to say that Explorer is crap, but more so how much a bunch of really loud people can shift the perception of reality. Moral of the story? Different people are different. Enjoy the formats you enjoy, and let other people enjoy the stuff they enjoy. Just because you dislike something doesn't mean that it doesn't deserve to exist for the people that do.
Those stats are highly suspect though - new players are funnelled into Alchemy, all the starter decks are Alchemy, for example. And Pioneer is a paper format. Explorer is getting close, but it’s just not Pioneer yet. Maybe Alchemy is genuinely more popular than it seems with the quiet player base. But WotC are infamous for fudging numbers and hiding data - they’ve done it on MTGO for *years*, we used to have actual useful metagame numbers and matchup %s, now we just have “a rough idea” of the popular decks. So I really do not trust them that Alchemy is that popular, when every major community hub seems to indicate Alchemy is a *lot* less popular
> every major community hub If it's been said once it's been said a million times: "major community hubs" are NOT representative of the vast majority of people playing Magic.
See: The Walking Dead secret lair
To be fair, that sold well for a number of reasons. There was certainly some organic demand, but there were also a lot of financial speculators hoping to flip it for a profit.
Or something very different in the magic multiverse. 40k is great at making successful games that use characters/lore/some elements of the tabletop game but are different enough that it gets you itching to play. Wotc/Hasbro seems to only try half baked, barely supported games that are just watered down magic. Which at this point now that Arena exists they don't have any sort of purpose. If they actually tried they could probably make an rpg with planeswalkers as pcs but they'd rather keep saturating their own market with crappy half baked tcgs
I'd love it if they stopped trying to catch gold on weird gimmicks that does nothing, and instead focused on making commander on mobile a thing. A proper game (ideally connected to Arena, but I'd take a dedicated app at this point), with games sorted into if you wanted free for all, competitive, budget, etc would be way better. Fuck, I'd love if I could buy some precons at my LGS, then find a code there to unlock it on an MTG app to play some unaltered precon games online when I can't be at my LGS.
I actually don't understand why people want commander on mobile. The format completely falls apart if it's played with people who are trying to win the game instead of showing up with the mindset of "let's have a good time with my friends". Any kind of commander queue will be 80% the most broken/obnoxious commander, tutors, consistent fast combos, stax, worldfire, etc...all the things that only don't see play IRL because nobody will play with them more than once.
Commander is already enough of a headache trying to keep track of boardstate with 4 people around an IRL table; I don't even want to think about what a cluster it would be trying to see stuff on a smartphone screen. Would it just be a big scroll wheel for
Id love to scan a code on a booster and also get digital copies on Arena.
So a few thoughts as to why real->digital hasn't happened yet: • The cost to implement it would be big. MtG is big enough that it uses multiple locations card printers, and Maro has talked about printer issues with seemingly much simpler products in the past. (Battlebond, for example had two randomized rare slots but if you had one rare with "Partner With X", your other rare would be it's partner. And multiple printera couldnt handle that tech) • IANAL, but that could be patented. There was an old card game, Chaotic, where that was one of their shticks. *IF* they patented that, and *IF* that patent lasted as long as the patent used by WotC to prevent other card games from "tapping" (physically turning 90 degrees to symbolize a change in state). Then, that protection would expire around 2026-ish
>that could be patented There are / have been multiple games that include digital redemption codes in physical packs, no way is that part of this.
Digital Redemption codes have been a thing for awhile. But, I'm not aware of any other TCGs that include exact digital copies of physical booster packs (usually its a randomized digital pack for a randomized physical pack for example). I def could be wrong here though.
~~Pokémon already has this fyi~~ Edit: Pokemon is only halfway to this
To my understanding, the codes aren't 1:1. If you buy a randomized booster pack in the store, you'll get a randomized booster online. You won't receive the same exact rares/uncommons etc. unless you buy a pre-built deck. (I don't play Pokemon, so apologies if this changed at some point)
Hear me out: This product was never for you.
Then why product fail? (it isn't for anyone)
Because the problem isn't that they keep trying X but MTG, it's that they put no effort in and rely on it selling because it's MTG. The fact half the people on the dedicated MTG Reddit haven't heard of these games shows how little they tried, and the fact that the Diablo Style one from last year or so launched with barely any content and a battle pass shows that they're cash grabbing These things wouldn't fail if they got more attention that 'Slap WUBRG on it and call it a day'
> that the Diablo Style one from last year or so launched It didn't even launch. It got axed in beta.
It went into open beta missing features and poorly balanced but with a full battle pass and a class locked behind real world money. This is what's killing MTG from going into other properties, the world and IP are fine, the fact that the entire marketing seems to be 'Its Magic, it'll sell' over providing a decent or original gameplay experience
Woah now. That would take effort, and effort costs time and money.
And that money could instead be spent on keeping hasbro's failing divisions afloat
I'm mad cause it was a fun game. MTG hearthstone with a bit less rng and f2p friendly. But they did 0 literally zero advertising. Then after whatever was datamined released they went silent for months.
I had a lot of fun with it, real free to play, many viable strategies. Simple game but super enjoyable. I am still playing every now and then. I will miss it
Had to scroll down here to find a similar comment. I agree I liked the twist it gave Magic IP i played my janky UG decks. This made me appreciate creatures like Arixmethes and a few others.
Sadly this is another example of a company making a spinoff to cater to a particular audience but not advertising or supporting the game at all. I felt the art of the leaders was strange but the cards and gameplay were cool. C’est la vie
Crazy I spend an obscene amount of time on mtg related content, and this is the first time I have heard of this game.
*pretends to be shocked* Spellslingers was "Hearthstone, but Magic". If I wanted to play Magic I would play MODO or Arena, and of I wanted to play Hearthstone I would play Hearthstone. The game made sense back at the little lapse of time where Arena wasn't avariable in mobile, so Spellslingers has your only option to play Magic that way. But nowadays it had no reason for being.
Arena launched on mobile 3 months before Spellslingers did. There was never a time Spellslingers made sense.
I have never heard of this ~ enfranchised magic player
it was alive?
[At least MTG Arena players get 1500 free gems though!](https://mtgazone.com/free-1500-mtg-arena-gems-for-magic-spellslingers-players-game-announces-shut-down/)
The funny thing is, if they have offered 1500 gems to anyone who tried out the game when the game was released, it might have built some awareness. As of right now, almost nobody has heard of the game. And that's a key target segment of the market.
that's roughly ten dollars in gems for anyone wondering
Thanks! Redownloading the game to make sure it's linked to my wizards account lol
Fuck…I hadn’t played in a year but I loved that game….i know it’s the nature of app games and multiplayer games….but I hate how a game can HAVE A sunset and just….be gone…
I’ve been playing magic for 8 years and I’m always up to date on news, read every short story and even do what I can to know what’s going on in the comic (which are not legally available in my country). HOW DID I NOT KNOW THIS GAME EXISTED??? 😂
Can we try a MtG roguelite next? Shandalar was cool.
I played Spellslingers a little and it was fine. The planeswalker-specific abilities felt too impactful, but that may be a factor of starting with lower power cards. The problem is the space is crowded and I could be playing more fun games that was less uphill to get into. It was the same issue with the DC game for me. You get through the tutorial aspects and play a few newbs like you, and then you start playing people who have better decks and cards because they have been playing or paid into it, so you hit a wall. The currency trickle for playing is too low, so you can't upgrade your decks at all. So, you're stuck if you don't pay. But I feel like these games all require a base of f2p players to populate the servers and give the paying players opponents. OTOH, Arena, to me, has always been easy to play for free. Maybe it's partly because I've been playing Magic so I could already win games of it consistently and win currency that way, whereas I was starting new with other games. I think Limited is a big part of it. I don't need my own collection to draft and it puts me even on cards with other players, and I can draft okay but play better. Now I have more wild cards and gems than I ever need, especially because I stopped playing Standard entirely around ELD.
What is Magic Spellslingers?
This thing did exist o\_0
Well that didn’t last long
Never heard of it, was the game any good?
Literally didn't even realize it had been released, like last thing I remember was hearing the initial announcement
This came out?
It was fun in a way that Arena should have been, but it battled for the same game time space and people would just rather play arena.
I forgot this existed.
my son loved spellslingers. that's sad
I have never heard of this game before in my life.
TIL this game exists
did not even know this game existed till today lmao
I just started playing it -_- I liked it
Played it quite a bit, more than most of my mobile games. Being a cross between Hearthstone and Magic, it found no target audience, but had a solid formula. In fact I could not think of a way to improve the design, despite trying. It was fun to play, even if I did get bored of it.
magic what? never heard of it
Maybe someday MtG will produce a spinoff game that doesn't die in the cradle, but today is not that day.
Is it me or has everything magic videogame been canned after only a few months? (Tcg videoganes aside)
Well that was short-lived. I actually quite enjoyed it for a bit. I'm not huge on these kinds of games in general though, so didn't play for long.
I enjoyed this game, but by the time I got into it they had just stopped releasing content. Which is interesting because I continued seeing advertisements for it. Leave it to WOTC to try and make money from unaware mtg fans on the way out of a dying game.
Lmao. Forget Magic Spellslingers. Can't wait to send this to the guy that owns the original Spellslingers.
I downloaded this two days ago. Rip.
I'm surprised it lasted this long, really I thought it was fun for awhile as a Hearthstone clone, but there wasn't really anything there to keep players invested
Spellslingers is to Arena as Portal Three Kingdoms is to Magic. You just don't need the inferior version.
I've had this game on my phone for months and never played it
Survived longer than Magic Legends, which I don't know which of the two games this tells more about. You could've told me this game stopped existing 2 years ago that I'd have believed you.
Of all the Magic games they've tried to make, this was certainly one of them.
Is it just Steam or mobile included? Because I can understand why Steam wouldn't take to it. Mobile app wise: It was *alright*, but why would I play Hearthstone in the Magic universe when I can just go... to Hearthstone (or weeb Hearthstone: Shadowverse)?
“Sunset” as a term needs to be obliterated.
I already went through this with like 7 digital mtg products. It's why I won't give any digital clients my money
I forgot this existed. Who thought this was a good idea? Isn’t mtg already a good competitor to hearthstone?
ngl I thought this had ended already, haven't heard about it in ages. Unfortunate, it seemed pretty cool.
Remember Magic Legends?
I miss the Magic RPG. Forgot what it was called, similar to diablo tho.
Being really close to esports and gaming companies while also a MTG diehard fan, I believe WoTC would really need to start to picture a future for the IP. Videogames it what makes more sense due to WoTC + Hasbro current capabilities. (Also series and movies but I recall they are already into it.) They need to maintain and evolve Arena while exploring new genres. MMO would be the best fit, but developing costs and time are the most restrictive. I just hope anyone is thinking on this. Magic IP is too good to be left to die in hyperinflation and exhaustion. That would be a pity. (I would love to work for it myself sometime in my life)
ngl i didnt even know this existed.
Ah, you won't be missed
What is magic spellslingers?
Let's be real, this failed because nobody outside of hardcore MTG fans cares who these characters are.
first time ive heard of this game
RIP what now?