Holy ^%$# This Might be Awesome!!!

Interesting, I'll be keeping my eye on this one also.

Duels of the Planeswalkers came out last week on PC (via Steam) as well, which was fun for a while. Shame no deckbuilding.

So, is the game play sort of like Etherlords II, http://www.impulsedriven.com/eld2 ? Free roaming overworld and then go to an arena area for combat? Or is it battle in the overworld?

The mention of micro-transactions scares me at once. So, what is the real price of the game?

Can I just buy all the stuff at once, or do you become qualified to buy a certain pack after you have achieved goals?

I would suspect they will go for a similar business model to the game Battleforge that EA has put out.  It's basically on online CCG where you can level up your cards, but you need multiples of that particular card to advance it.

The "Real" price of the game is going to be what you spend on expansions which would be like buying cards online for the online version of Magic:TG the Card Game. As far as gameplay I don't know anything more then what this article says. As long as they don't get ridiculous with the cost it might be ok. I don't like the whole microtransaction thing either.

See above. According to the article though we won't be using "cards" but spells. This is supposed to more accurately "Bring the Card Game to Life" which could be very cool. As a long ago and long time Magic:TG player, but not having the time to get together with the "bros" these days, this could fill that old gaming void....as long as they don't go crazy with the pricing. If the prices are what I would consider "too high" for what I would pay for this, say equal to the amount of money I used to spend on actual cards when I was 14-15, then I wouldn't play it. If it cost about what I used to pay for packs or boxes of cards, it might be cool. At this point I'm still in the "wait and see" frame of mind.

Well if you're a huge magic fan I guess you might enjoy it, but these kinds of 'collectible tactics' games have been around for a while, it doesn't sound as though there is really anything new here, other than the license being used.

Lets just say that if you want a MtG fix, this probably isn't it, but you may like it anyway.  MtG has some online leagues anyway don't they?

Indeed they do. There is a Serious On-line Magic:TG Game that uses virtual versions of the real cards and they can be bought and sold etc etc. There are even professional Tournaments in volved and some dudes who make their livings winning those tournaments, and I'm talking totally On-line, just like the dudes who travel all over and do it in real life.

This isn't going to be played like the card game though, the rules will be different. Basically it's just a "Use of the License" and a promise to "Bring the Game to Life". You're right there are plenty of other games out there with this kind of pay to play set-up. This is only really exciting to an ex-magic player like who always wanted to see what a real "Wizards Duel" would look like assuming grown men didn't stand around and throw down cards and call them out by name like "Poke'mymom" or "Yu-Gi-Blow"..er um..LoL. You know what I meant. This might actually be "Cool".

On a side note, I believe one of the planned On-line modes for Elemental will be something like this, a "Wizards Duel" I mean.

All MTG games end up being terrible because in the end, all everyone wants is a version of the full CCG with a single player component for offline play.  Of course, that will never happen due to the same reason there will never be a Warhammer 40k game that mirrors the tabletop gameplay.

I used to use Magic Workstation to play for free years ago, but it seems like it's no longer freeware anymore.

Yes, it will hopefully appeal to the MtG demographic who are not already involved in the other tactics online games.  I used to play a couple a while back, but frankly, the cost to 'keep up' became more than I was willing to pay.

I suppose from the games point of view that 's not a huge issue if they can keep new players coming in, but meh, just not my cup of tea so much, the micro-transaction games.

Microprose did a very good adaptation of MtG in their time (yes, the same Microprose company), with a fairly good sandbox/adventure mode where you have to win cards by fighting against monsters and doing quests in a random map and with the objective to fight a big boss.

I has a good interface for such an old game, and in fact the interface might be similar to the MtG online

The only default is that there are only cards from the base 4th edition and some of the first extentions, so after a while you know what decks are the most effective with the cards available, and some cards are really overkill (at least, some of the most powerful like moxes and black lotus must be found in dungeons that can be hard to survive early in the game).

I just found that  there was still som fan works in progress: http://www.slightlymagic.net/forum/viewforum.php?f=25

They have been able to add new cards for multiplayer and solo tournament play (but not yet for the solo sandbox it seems, or at least not in a very stable way *yet*)

In fact, I'm downloading the game now and will play again tonight.