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Old July 8th, 2015, 10:32 AM
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Schulzy Schulzy is offline
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Join Date: July 29, 2007
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Re: Magic: the Gathering Strategy Board Game (Looks HeroScap

Right now it is, though I have not yet played a game yet. That comes this evening.

When you open the box, the first thing you'll do is pick up the miniatures. They are all nestled in a plastic insert, though with little rhyme or reason. The paint jobs and sculpts on the planeswalkers are pretty good for the most part, except that Nissa looks like a derp with sausages for ears. The squad figures are all solid color, with the blue and red ones being translucent, and the planeswalkers being clear plastic. However, these are made out of a softer molded plastic than Heroscape minis. I can bend the double base figures without them snapping at all. Not really a big deal, but the bases won't always lie flat on a surface. However, the bases would need to be repainted along with the minis, so most people will probably want to rebase figures in order to repaint them.

The set comes with the scant 8 hexes of the desert terrain we always wanted. The dice are lame. The glyphs are kinda lame. most of the terrain is cardboard. We knew all this already.

All of the squads that come in this base set are unique, like in RotV. If you want to custom these in the squad units, you'll need more sets (which, frankly, is my plan). The units all come in one of 5 colors, which are as of yet not intermixable. The rules make mention of artifact units (intermixable with any color). I heavily suspect that they will make two color planeswalkers that can summon units of one color or another.

On to the roolz! For the most part, the rules are the same. This basically looks like someone house-ruled Heroscape. The major difference is the removal of Order Markers as the source of hidden information, and replacing them with the spell cards. Each color of magic gets a deck of 12 spell cards that gets a card drawn from once a turn. You get a starting hand of 3 cards. Once the deck runs out, you don't get to draw spell cards the rest of the game. These cards can provide temporary boosts to units, permanent boosts to units, or be played face down to be triggered later, trap style. Most of these take their names from currently known Magic cards. Instead of order markers, you simply choose an army card to activate on your turn.

Squads (or, at least the unique ones in this set) have a health total, as well as attack and defense (called power and toughness to bring it in line with Magic terms). We have seen the tiny, fiddly cubes that act as damage markers. Armies are built with 500 points of figures (variable)
and 200 points worth of spell cards.

Traditional start zones are done away with. Instead, you place your planeswalker on the start space, and summon your units on the fly from your reserve pile (unsummoned units). When they die, they go to your graveyard pile. When you defeat the enemy planes walker, you win.

All in all, not a bad crossover game. We all would have preferred a backwards compatible flavorized version of Heroscape, but this game plays very similarly, and the customization mostly does itself. My biggest complaint is that as a player of both, I feel the mechanics of both games are being done an injustice when being mixed together like this. But they have to market this to Magic players, and apparently if a Magic player plays a game without cards to flop, it's just too gosh darn different. Personally, I'll pick up probably two more sets on the cheap and run them through the customs grinder.

Side Note: We MAY want to prepare a post for easy visibility for people that stumble onto this site as a result of this game.
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