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Magic: Duels of the Planeswalkers 2012 - Out now on Steam, XBL and PSN
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Block the other 6/4 with a Bloodthrone Vampire
Block the 9/9 with both Lord of the Pit and the other Bloodthrone Vampire
Let the 1/1 through
After blockers, sac the Cultist to gain 1 life.
Sacrifice the Vampire blocking the 6/4 to the Vampire blocking the 9/9 to survive
Win on the swing back.
Also, I'd just like to say that the rules for sacrificing and blocking are unintuitive and possibly unfair.
There is another way.
Now for shenanigans. Sacrifice the cultist to gain 1 life. Sacrifice everything else to the Vampire blocking the colossus, pumping him up to 9/9. All of your creatures die but you win during your upkeep because you have 20 creatures in your graveyard.
It seems a little better, but it's still not great. There have still been situations where you have an activated ability on the field requiring red or something and it will tap you out of mountains because you have something in your hand you don't want to cast which requires a lot of blue. It's pretty smart for cards in hand though.
Oh, and the game has non standard mama sources now! One of the decks has mox emeralds in it
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The gameplay is not agile as playing someone using real cards.
"We have years of struggle ahead, mostly within ourselves." - Made in USA
umm, yes, there are steam achievements. I've been getting them. I can't speak to any difficulty in said achievements ('win a game with X deck,' 'win an archenemy game,' etc.), but I didn't check the full list.
They really feel like achievements added for achievements sake. Though I'm not sure what else they could have really done.
The vampires... I'm not sure. There are cards in there that become more useful the more vampires you got, but it's not that easy to swarm (as far as I can tell). Nor is it particularly easy to get enough land for the deck's heavier hitters. Mostly it seems like you just need to pull every trick you can to boost whatever vampires you do get out there, and there are a lot of cards that help.
Mostly, though, I'm sticking with it because the fact this Black vampire deck is capable of giving you heaps of extra life amuses me. I'd have thought that running a deck like this would've seen your own life drained, not the enemy's.
Could've used another Captivating Vampire, though.
It feels that the decks which were strongest before now feel much weaker, while the weaker decks feel much stronger. The power level seems more uniform, but it's below where say the elves and vampires decks were. Both now feel that they are lacking a final 'punch' which they had before and now lack.
It seriously needs to come out on iPad though
Play green deck, get 2-4 mana and loaded of 5+ CC creatures. Play white weenie deck and find myself drawing 8+ land. Computer also seems to have a pristine draw. Restarted probably 20 games now to win once.
Maybe I'll suck up my ego and kick it down to medium because I can't remember ever having such a miserable stretch playing MTGO.
edit.. also stops in this game are fucking terrible. Particularly trying to activate things after blockers are declared but before damage is applied where I see no hard stop, you just rush to activate abilities? I don't know. Maybe I'll get used to it but it feels super janky compared to MTGO. Don't know why they didn't model the game off that mechanics-wise.
I know that feeling and it happens way too often. Actually dropped it down to mage and I still tend to get manafucked a third of the time.
The computer definitely cheats on the highest difficulty, most decks they'll get the copy of the card they have one of in their deck 9/10 times exactly when they can drop it eg: Nocturnus at 4 mana for the vampire deck.
I've never had a problem stopping after declaring blockers but before damage is applied, though.
I think there's 10.
Know there's some avatar gear, got me a hat.
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It's the exact same mechanically as the first one, but that's not a bad thing. The decks are pretty interesting, too. For instance the blue deck starts off as an illusion beats with two cancels and a couple of Air Elementals. But as you unlock stuff you get tools to make the deck into either a grindy control thing (with more counters, evacuate and finishers) or into a fish deck with more illusion beats and tempo stuff. I played through the first half of the campaign last night with it and thought, "man, there's really not a control deck in this game." Then I realized the blue deck COULD be, I just hadn't built it that way, upgrading the cancels into counterspells rather than just cutting the bears and having 4 counters.
Plus you unlock cards in blocks rather than one at a time, so you only have to win one match to not put 3 Kraken's Eyes in your deck, rather than 3.
Looking over the cards/unlocks, I think the Vampire deck is a lot like the Illusions deck in that
But if you're going for the vampires, the multikicker vampire is better than the unblockable guy because of Nocturnus and Captivating and the sword. But the unblockable guy is just a miserable draw late when you could play the multikicker guy as a 4/4.
Just in general, my tips would be
1) Don't run a card that all it does is gain you life, especially against the red deck with Punishing Fire.
2) Don't run more than 60 cards (unless doing so is more fun for you, in that case have at it, it's just suboptimal). A lot of mana flood problems come from the game adding land as you add cards.
3) When adding/removing cards, think about what your deck is trying to do. How is it going to win? What does it want to be doing on turns 3-5?
4) If you're having problems with beating a certain deck, think about what kind of deck is good against it. Think about what cards you cut might be good against just this deck. White is good against the illusion deck because you have ways of targeting their creatures to kill them (the tapper). The red deck is going to be good against the Vampires because they have Punishing Fire, but Punishing Fire is pretty bad against a deck that never gains life (which should be most of them).
The illusions decks, the machinations decks, and anything which focuses on control and denial and aims to win using raw mana power is good.
I won the first one on my first try last night with three illusion decks.
Also, does the AI really cheat on the hardest difficulty, or does it just feel like it is cheating, like Puzzle Quest?
If it actually is stacking the deck, then fuck it, time to lower the difficulty.
I believe it may be more likely to get 'priority shuffling' where cards with low casting cost are on top, and ones with mid to high casting cost show up a few more cards in. However, it might just be that it's usually playing hamstrung and only on highest difficulty does it shuffle fairly.
You'd need to play lots of times and see how often the AI is mana screwed or has mana but nothing to play. If those things happen the expected amount of time, then the AI isn't cheating much.
One of the bumps I hit was Sorin and his Blood Magic deck. It was a total dick to the Equipment deck, with him constantly removing my guys with instants right before I attached something to them and generally being a huge pain.
After I finally beat him I started using the Blood Magic deck and breezed through most of the main campaign with it, mainly because the guys after him didn't seem to have good counters to it.
The challenges were awesome, real mind teasers, I hope they release more of them.
"Orkses never lose a battle. If we win we win, if we die we die fightin so it don't count. If we runs for it we don't die neither, cos we can come back for annuver go, see!".
Indeed; there have been enough times where the AI has been mana screwed to me to not question the shuffling. Also, I doubt the developer would have needed to change the shuffling code they use, so if the old one wasnt cheating, I doubt the new one is.
My friends recently got back into magic. My life has been incredibly crazy and hectic recently, and I've barely had time to hang out with them, let alone devote any sort of time to a hobby. But I'm thinking that I'd like to be able to collect and play with them if things settle down here a bit.
In the meantime, is Duels of the Planeswalkers a decent way for me to sharpen my gameplay skills and strategy if I were to ever get back into collecting the actual cards again?
I'm also having a difficult time deciding which platform to get it on. I've got a 360, PS3, and a gaming PC. I'm just not very sure which one would be the better choice for playing the game on.
Platform doesn't really matter. If you want the promo card, I think the PSN version gets the worst of the three.
Nissa's deck seems weaker compared to the previous one. I miss the Elvish Champion.
"We have years of struggle ahead, mostly within ourselves." - Made in USA
But then, they were probably the single most broken card in the first game so I can totally understand why they're gone
"We have years of struggle ahead, mostly within ourselves." - Made in USA