Magic: the Gathering Strategy Board Game

[quozl]

No, we want a thorough write-up right now!

[chas]

Schulzy:

Do it! If it must be short, concentrate on the differences with Heroscape (such as they are).

[jwsanner2]

Received mine yesterday. Components are good for the price point, but the miniatures are not stellar in quality. I'm going to take a shot at painting one and see how it looks. Gameplay is describable as "Heroscape Express." Even my wife, ignorant in the ways of scape, picked it up immediately. Other reviews are largely correct insofar as it feels like a Heroscape reboot with Magic tacked on to power the hype, but the Magic mechanics aren't bad; the "hmm what spell does my opponent have?" factor is quite fun.

[Dad_Scaper]

Originally Posted by jwsanner2

Received mine yesterday. Components are good for the price point, but the miniatures are not stellar in quality. I'm going to take a shot at painting one and see how it looks. Gameplay is describable as "Heroscape Express." Even my wife, ignorant in the ways of scape, picked it up immediately. Other reviews are largely correct insofar as it feels like a Heroscape reboot with Magic tacked on to power the hype, but the Magic mechanics aren't bad; the "hmm what spell does my opponent have?" factor is quite fun.

Thanks!

I'm curious to hear feedback on what TV described as (maybe) the biggest asset of this game, which is the winning condition: Instead of hunting & killing an entire army, you have to get one guy, and that guy can only be hidden for the price of keeping him somewhat inactive. I thought that looked really appealing & I'm curious to know what people think.

[Schulzy]

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.

[jwsanner2]

Originally Posted by Dad_Scaper

Thanks!

I'm curious to hear feedback on what TV described as (maybe) the biggest asset of this game, which is the winning condition: Instead of hunting & killing an entire army, you have to get one guy, and that guy can only be hidden for the price of keeping him somewhat inactive. I thought that looked really appealing & I'm curious to know what people think.

Well, in my limited experience, the spell deck for most of the Planeswalkers helps to keep them alive, and mitigates some of the risk of putting them into combat. They also tend to be strong enough that holding them back would probably put you at a hefty disadvantage. There is a new layer of strategy relative to Scape that requires balancing the utility of attacking with your squads vs. throwing a few bodies in the way knowing that they are likely to be destroyed, but protecting your Walker.

[Dad_Scaper]

Cool. My own thought, and TV said the same thing, was that the format is cleaner than a kill-em-all type game. It's more like Summoner Wars, or chess, for that matter. I'm really looking forward to that change, more than anything. No more chasing Isamu or Marro Warriors or whatever all around the board after 58 minutes of a 60-minute game.

[chas]

Big thanks and rep to our intrepid first reporters!

1. On bgg, someone wondered why the Arena of the Planeswalkers (AP) squads are all Unique Squads. Tom Vassel says the game will come alive with expansions. On bgg, someone mentioned the pile up of Unique Heroes in stores when sold in Waves with Common Squads, which has been also mentioned here as being Hasbro's biggest marketing mistake. Putting this together, I'd guess upcoming expansions in 2016 will be chock full of Common Squads.

2. The BIG QUESTION is, do you want to cross the streams? If so, as I do, it seems that the easiest way to go is to port AP into Scape, rather than the other way around, using Order Markers to activate everyone, most spell cards only being playable when its owner Planeswalker (PW) gets an OM. All Scape pieces can just start in a Start Zone, chaining adjacent to the PW, or on the board edge, or whatever.

Until I get my copy this must remain speculative, but as I've said upthread, it shouldn't be hard to do, for those as wants to...

3. There seems to be some misunderstanding about what I meant by "Generalscape" upthread, when I said that AP seems like Generalscape. I didn't mean we'd played games where armies must be from the same faction. I meant that we'd used actual custom cards for the Generals (based on the wonderful ones by Scaper Dad, who is not Dad Scaper; I added Acquilla and Valkryll.) and put them right into the game, their defeat signalling the retirement of that player from the game. So substituting a PW for a Valkyrie General...

[quozl]

Originally Posted by Dad_Scaper

Cool. My own thought, and TV said the same thing, was that the format is cleaner than a kill-em-all type game. It's more like Summoner Wars, or chess, for that matter. I'm really looking forward to that change, more than anything. No more chasing Isamu or Marro Warriors or whatever all around the board after 58 minutes of a 60-minute game.

I thought that was a common Heroscape variant. It does work pretty well.

[Sherman Davies]

Originally Posted by Schulzy

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.

This is an excellent idea. Perhaps one of the Admins would like to handle this?
@Aldin , @Grungebob , @Xorlof , @Xotli ?

[Dad_Scaper]

Originally Posted by quozl

I thought that was a common Heroscape variant. It does work pretty well.

It's easy enough to manufacture in the universe of 'Scape, but you can see with Summoner Wars the way in which it might look different, if the metagame was built around that concept from the ground up. It may be something; it may be nothing. It's what interests me most, for now.

[Confred]

I will definitely mix the two games.

My House Rule:
If you draft a planeswalker, you get the spell deck and you may start any figures of the same color in reserve to summon.
I will use order markers.
After revealing an order marker from a planeswalker, instead of taking the turn, you may take a turn with a hero or squad you control of the same color.
If the planeswalker dies, you cannot summon any more figures or cast any more spells.
"Kings" will be a separate game style.