Magic: The Gathering - Battlegrounds Impressions

At the ongoing E3, we took a close look at Atari Games' upcoming competitive action game for the PC and Xbox, Magic: The Gathering - Battlegrounds. In the game, just as in the collectible-card game it's based on, you'll play as a powerful wizard who duels with rival wizards by using magic spells and summoning fantastic creatures. However, the new game will put you in direct control of your wizard, a character represented onscreen who can attack, and be attacked by, enemy monsters.

Your wizard will square off against his or her opponent on opposite sides of a divided playing field, dashing back and forth and picking up mana crystals to power your spells. Battlegrounds will feature about 70 different magic spells at the time of the game's release--half of these will be creature spells, and the other half will be sorceries (one-time effects) and enchantments (permanent spell effects that last until dispelled). The game will feature a total of nine wizards: a generic male and generic female wizard, as well as seven wizards based on cards from the Legends expansion set that was released some years ago for the original card game.

We watched a battle between a wizard using red spells (a color associated with fire and aggressive monster attacks) and a wizard using green spells (a color associated with generating bonus mana and large creatures). Both wizards summoned numerous creatures that rushed forward to attack enemy creatures and the opposing wizard. Part of your strategy will require you to figure out where to cast your spells--if you cast spells closer to your opponent's side, you'll be much more likely to sustain damage from enemy creatures, but your own creatures will get a head start on your opponent (and in the case of slow-moving creatures, such as goblins, this may aid your efforts considerably). In addition, we saw that many creatures will work much like the cards that inspired them--for instance, summoning a goblin king strengthens all other goblins in play, and llanowar elves will be relatively weak creatures that produce bonus mana.

Magic: The Gathering - Battlegrounds will feature multiple play modes, including a single-player story mode that will let you begin the game with a limited "library" of spells and creatures but acquire more through successive battles. The game will also feature an arcade mode in which you'll duel with what were described as "simple, fun" preset sets of spells and creatures. Finally, Battlegrounds will feature competitive online play--the Xbox version of the game will feature Xbox Live support, with online rankings that will keep track of your wins and losses and the ability to view the libraries of other players, so if your own deck could use some improvement, you'll be able to peruse the repertoire of the top-ranked players and take a few lessons from them. Magic: The Gathering - Battlegrounds will be released this November, and the team plans to release a new content download with additional spells shortly thereafter.