To be blunt, I’ve never really played Magic The Gathering to any significant degree to understand it on more than a surface “this is a collectable card game" level. But based on a demo of Magic: the Gathering – Puzzle Quest at PAX Prime 2015, it seems like fans of the long-running card game franchise have something to look forward to here. Expect a structure very similar to Marvel Puzzle Quest (Free), but with MtG premise and rules, where you actually roll in to battle with your hero character and a deck of cards you can summon and use in battle by making your gem matches on the puzzle board. Summoned creatures will attack other creatures and eventually the opposing hero, with the goal being to run down their health.
This does seem to be a better fit for the license than Adventure Time Puzzle Quest (Free), which felt inordinately complicated and slow-starting for a game based on an 11-minute long TV show. Plenty of adults are Adventure Time fans and the show is really quite complex in its lore and mythology, but the fit seemed suboptimal in action. Integrating in the card-based gameplay of Magic and mixing in mana generation through matching the gems on a Puzzle Quest board made sense. Not to me, personally – as a newbie to Magic, the discussion between the representative demoing the game and Eli made no sense, whatsoever, but there seems to be some fascinating aspects there for fans of the Magic franchise. Expect 5 Planeswalkers at launch with more down the road. With the mixture of CCG elements with match-3 RPGs, this could actually have some appeal to more than just MtG fans, for sure. While it might still require a taste for the modern incarnation of Puzzle Quest as a free-to-play, social-driven game, there’s reason to be at least a bit hopeful for it.
