y2dvd said:
Thinking of going online too. Does it have all the multiplayer options like Archenemy and such?
There's no Archenemy but you sacrifice that for a gazillion other formats to play at your hearts content.
Commander goes on sale soon on MTGO and two headed giant and emperor are all fun mutiplayer formats.
You can draft every five minutes. How often do you get to draft at your local card shop? You can draft without PANTS on. PANTS my friend, the pants tyranny is over thanks to MTGO. You can draft at 3am when you should be going to sleep!
You get free cards just for playing the game. Every month they have Magic Online Player Rewards and you get points just for logging into the game. You get points for buying product, you get points for playing.
There's so much MTGO hate out there by people merely interested in the game but don't want to get into it that I can't comprehend.
The biggest complaint is about having to spend money, which is justifiable, but honestly, unless you want to use MTGO to go to a Pro Tour (which you can, incidentally enough) or to be the biggest Epeener out there with your foiled tricked out deck then yes, its expensive. But the thing is, it really doesn't cost that much. For less money you'd spend a weekend going to the movies + popcorn +/- date you can have endless hours of fun with the only thing holding you back is your creativity.
If you want a tool that will make you a better player, find people in the community, and oh yeah, play a very fun game whenever you want there's nothing else like it.
Many people say that stuff like Magic Workstation and Apprentice are better because its 100 percent free. Not to knock it, its a great tool and we all used it in the late 90s but it speaks for a lot when a lot of the pros abandoned it for MTGO as well. The reasons is the rules enforcement by the game itself. The other simulators never gave you that. Many pros got the upset when a lot of MTGO players started to show up at Pro Tours and doing things they never thought of. Why? Because the stack and phases are so much more outlined, so much more pronounced in the game that it makes you think of plays not really ever thought of in paper magic. It makes you a better player, hands down. How often do you get to test a deck? And how often is testing that deck going to be your local metagame? Magic lets you test 24/7 be it in a casual or tournament setting.
And lastly, Magic lets you play decks that you really shouldn't ever play in real life. What I mean by that is because the engine takes care of a lot of things, there's the ability to play decks that can be fun but due to the way the physical word works, would be very tedious.
For example, in MTGO when you shuffle, you never think anything of it. Think about shuffling in the real world setting. Every time you activate an ability that requires a reshuffle, that takes out minutes of your life, minutes out of a tournament, and becomes tedious as all hell. In MTGO, you plop down 8 sac lands and shuffle, and its not like, okay here we go, here we go.
How fun is it to constantly having to worry if your opponent is honest or not? What if I played my all modular/proliferate deck where 75% of my cards have a counter of some sort, be it +1/+1 -1/-1 or charge counters? Imagine playing that in paper magic. You'd go insane, Magic online handles it all and its pretty damn cool.
Oh and lastly. You know how Duels is pretty cool? What if I told you you can play Magic Online all you want and you don't even have to spend the 10 bucks to register? No I'm not talking about pirated servers. I'm talking about the client itself has a demo mode where you get to play against real people with real constructed precons. You just click play the demo, and you have access to 5 decks you can play all day long with.
Just putting that out there.
Zaraki_Kenpachi said:
Now I'm debating getting MTG:O. Is there any word of an update soon? Feels outdated with DOTP 2012.
Info on version 4.0 has kinda petered out. It was weird, like 3 years ago they said it would go web based, and now its like you hear nothing. Some people saw it in action, said it was amazing (one of the biggest limitations is that its all Windows based, lots of people want to reliably play it on a mac) but now I heard that the browser based version was scrapped. So who knows.
Honestly, the interface is not that bad, and at least it gives you more freedom and control than DoTP. Besides, its magic, DoTP can feel arcady at times. Not to mention I kinda like choosing which lands I want to tap to pay for a cost.
