Magic: Legends (Open Beta) review

Ever since it was announced, I was looking forward to seeing how this game would look like. I wanted to know how a Free to Play MMORPG with the player being a Planeswalker could work. Well now it's finally in the Open Beta stage and I jumped into the Blind Eternities to explore Magic Legends by CRYPTIC.

The game studio has plenty of experience making MMOs, most notably Perfect World and Neverwinter (also a WotC licensed game).

State of the Game: Open Beta (Disclaimer)

Obviously, Magic Legends is not yet finished. At the very least there will need to be a lot of balancing, bug fixing and polishing necessary. Yes, there are bugs. But the game is mostly stable, there aren't any hugely game-breaking bugs. Mostly what the game needs, going into the future would be balancing. That said, the game works as it is now, just with hiccups. I won't be addressing the game bugs here, as they might get fixed over time before the game (hopefully) reaches full release. What I will do, instead, is review its core mechanics and experience.

During my time I haven’t run into any bug that would make any missions unfinishable and thus bar you from progressing. There were some skirmishes that would get stuck, but those have been fixed since.

Into the Multiverse

After creating your character, you are thrown into the main story / tutorial. You planeswalk for the first time and end up in Bolas' Meditation Realm where you meet Ral Zarek and an unknown hostile Planeswalker. After almost getting Ral killed, you rush to his aid and together you push through the Meditation Realm where Ral teaches you Planeswalker 101.

You then follow that enemy Planeswalker to Zendikar's Tazeem, where you help Nissa quell the chaos sowed there by the villain.

At that point you get directed to the Sanctum, a hub for all the players to hang out, trade, PvP and join Events. You'll also get to claim a piece of the Meditation Realm, where you can expand various facilities in order to improve your spells, artifacts, and such.

Eventually you get to experience all the five realms that are in the game at this point. In addition to Tazeem, you can planeswalk to Dominaria's Shiv, Tolaria or Benalia, or you can choose to go to Innistrad's Gavony.

On each of those realms, the Planeswalker you've been pursuing leaves a mess that you're left to fix.

The story in general feels very nice. I do realize that the story needs to fit the characters therein, many of whom are canon, but it still does a good job presenting a good story. The villains aren't villains because they're comic book evil (except for one, maybe two). They have their (usually) good intentions using bad means. They also don't sometimes fight to the death even. It was a nice surprise to play through the story in the sea of fairly generic “smash the villain” kind of stories.

You get to meet some members of the Weatherlight, even. But in this case, only in memorial form. Squee, on the other hand, you get to accidentally kill by planeswalking on top of him at the start of the Shiv story. Speaking of Squee, he's in no way a comedic relief character, despite not being the brightest. He does want to help Shiv and he's doing a good job, too. Besides Goblin diplomacy, he steers you in the right direction.

Your Planeswalker

Upon character creation, you will have the option to choose one of the 5 classes. This choice is not permanent, as you can unlock further classes later and can swap to them at will. However, you still need to 'obtain' that new class and it's increasingly difficult to do so. So make sure to choose classes that you will enjoy playing.

The 5 starter classes are:

• Sanctifier - A cleric from Innistrad wielding a holy symbol of Avacyn. Your main gimmick will be healing for yourself and your minions. The Sanctifier can shoot her basic attack the farthest, making her the ranged class.
• Mindmage - Mindmages are masters of crowd control. As expected, since they're associated with blue mana. The Mindmage has a medium range of her basic attacks.
• Necromancer - All Necromancers can animate skeletons as minions or sacrifice them for boons. They use their soul lanterns to slash at opponents at mid to close range.
• Beastcaller - The Beastcaller has a faithful pet at her side, that can be buffed just as any minion without having to summon any creatures. They wield an Axe (like any decent Green planeswalker, am I right?) and are close range fighters.
• Geomancer - The Geomancer conjures up the power of the rock to imbue her fists into lethal weapons. She can use the earth to jump to the enemy quickly. Her fists are point blank range weapons.

Each class has 3 abilities that can't be changed and are tied to the class.

• Primary - That's your autoattack. You can spam it as much as you like. It is obviously not very strong, but all primary attacks pierce through enemies, so you can generally hit whole clumps of mobs.
• Secondary - Usually a damage skill that hits enemies in a reasonably large AoE for a fair amount of damage. It has a cooldown.
• Utility - Some kind of a class-related gimmick. Escape / healing / control skill.

Apart from the 5 starter classes, there can be classes that you can unlock in other ways. Right now, there's just one - a Dimir Assassin.

Each class has 30 levels. With levels gained, the class' abilities improve until finally on level 30 you get a trait that you can use. You can have at most 3 traits selected. The Geomancer one is particularly interesting, as it allows you to resurrect upon defeat with a bit of health.

Apart from class levels, you also have a Planeswalker level. Think of it as a combination of your class levels. You will still gain Planeswalker XP even after your class is maxed out. Planeswaler level increases your drops, health, damage and crit damage. The maximum Planeswalker level right now is 300.

You will get to enjoy a lot of satisfying whacking that sends your enemies flying. That enhances the image that you’re something else now… You’re a Planeswalker.

The Magic

Most of the oomph of your character, will come from your spells. When you choose a starter class and then go through the tutorial, you will receive spells of the class' color. These spells together create a deck. You have to have 12 spells in your deck (or less if you're still in the tutorial).

The way spells work in Legends is that you have 4 spell slots - your hand. As long as at least one slot is empty (has no spell in it) you will see a slowly recharging counter. Once the bar is full you get to “draw” a random spell from your deck. You can then cast any of the spells. You need to pay attention to what spells are on your hand and on which position at any moment, as you will need to press the right hotkey to cast it.

There are spells of three types:

• Sorcery - Your average damaging spell (most spells deal damage, with varying AoE) or utility spell with short duration.
• Creature - Summon a minion to fight for you indefinitely (at least until it dies or you sacrifice it hehe)
• Enchantment - For a longer duration (usually 30s) you get to enjoy some kind of a buff.

These spells are inspired by the actual cards that exist in Magic. For example Glorious Anthem in Legends does pretty much the same thing that a Glorious Anthem would do in Magic. Some are changed to fit into the game.

Don't expect nice art, however. The spells have new art that is far from the usual art quality. Imagine the kind of a skill icon.

Creatures get categorized by the good old power and toughness, representing DPS and HP of the minion. Increasing P/T via effects increases the respective values of the minion. It also makes the minion grow bigger, which is an endearing little detail.

You will need mana to cast each spell. Your mana recharges while in combat and you can hold up to 12 mana at most. Most spells in Legends cost differently from their Magic counterparts, however.

Your deck can have at most 2 colors of spells. That affects the mana that you get and recharge. If your deck is mostly blue and a smidge of green, then the mana pool will reflect that, only regenerating green slowly and its reserves will be low. There's a fair amount of spells already and they allow for a lot of buildcrafting options. Do you want to build your deck around 1/1s and then pumping them all? No problem! Go White / Red, summon 10 Goblins and cast a Glorious Anthem! Then add Sanctifier to heal your poor fodder. Or would you like to go up and personal? Get spells that buff your planeswalker and punch your enemies to oblivion with Geomancer. Or you like stompy? Enlarge your Beastcaller pet and go fight like in Pokemon. Do you like combos? Go with Blue / Black and you will never run out of spells on hand. I'd say this is a huge part of the game and one of its greatest appeals.

Not many spells can Crit, but if they can, you need to fulfill some requirement that's consistent with the spell’s color, rather than a random chance. For example a blue spell might require you to have the enemy affected by a crowd control effect or a black spell checks if the enemy is low on health. This idea of Crits is in my opinion way better than the usual Crit chance %.

Combat Phase

If I were to liken this game to any other game, I'd choose Diablo. It very much feels like it when you squash large amounts of creatures and collect whatever they dropped. Most enemies are easy to kill and don't offer much resistance. Some are tougher and others even grant nearby fodder extra abilities (Deathtouch in particular can make your 7/7 Big Guy™ very sad and very dead pretty soon).

The AI isn't very smart, though (even for your creatures, unfortunately), so don't expect any overly interesting fights so far. You can manually order your minions to attack a specific target, though (which they will obey as soon as they get their morning coffee).

All in all combat still feels fluid and oddly satisfying (as you plow through waves of werewolves throwing them through air to all sides with your surekill spells).

In Legends, you have a wide variety of spells that can be used to enhance each other. Wide AoEs are usually weaker or way more mana intensive, but you can combo spells that clump enemies from a large area into a small cluster and then wipe them out with a narrow AoE spell or ability that deals much more damage.

The Battlefield

I was honestly stunned when I first saw Zendikar. And it's not just Zendikar. All the maps are beautiful and breathtaking with a lot of detail put into them. Even when looking off the edge of the maps, you can still see detailed cliffs, or the remnants of old artifacts. The game camera is isometric, like in Diablo, which is a perfect fit for the game.

Enemies don't just spawn, they run out of caves and buildings. Goblins climb up from their caves. Saprolings crawl up the slopes of Tazeem. The creature models are also very detailed and very similar to how they're portrayed on Magic cards.

The maps themselves (called Overworld) feature a lot of non-story map events in which you can participate alone or with other players. Every map has three mana towers that you can defend or reclaim. Or various skirmishes of three general levels of difficulty: Minor, Major and Special. Special is the hardest to find, since it has a long respawn time, but also yields the best rewards.

You can also find a Mythic creature that spawns from time to time somewhere on the map (always in the same place, but on the map you will only see a large circle where it could be). Those creatures are harder to beat and might need some different approach, since they have various abilities (like Flash - randomly teleports, Retaliation - you get a portion of damage you deal to it while it's up, Hypnotic - creates areas that will stun you if you walk into them, and so on).

There's always something to do on the maps, you'll walk from one skirmish to another or you can use one of the fast travel points to get to a skirmish quickly.

After enough skirmishes have been beaten, a map boss will spawn along with a random boss. These are harder and tougher than whatever you can encounter on the maps and might require a few players to beat.

Most of the content has different difficulty modes. Which also applies to the Overworld maps. Normal is the lowest difficulty, fit for a new player. But as you grow in power you'd want to swap to a more difficult map for better drops (some drops are only available on the hardest maps).

The game is really beautiful, with a great deal of detail.

The Loadout

Probably the most important and central concept of Legends is Loadout Score. In a nutshell this score tracks the upgrade status of your spells in deck, equipped artifacts and equipment. It then acts as a multiplier to your damage and HP.

You can somehow upgrade almost anything in Legends so that you can increase your Loadout Score.

Spells get upgraded through collecting spell pages that can be gained through enemy drops. If you have enough, you can upgrade the spell to a new rank, increasing its effects and giving you a flat bonus to LS.

Artifacts have three variants: Lesser, Greater and Legendary. You can have 3 Lesser, 2 Greater and one Legendary. They're important to buildcrafting and the Legendary artifact possesses a very important build-defining ability (for example the Whip of Erebos resurrects a creature after it dies for a short time, which lets you sacrifice your creatures and then sacrifice them again). While lesser artifacts just buff some statistics (like Blue Creature Health or the like). Upgrading artifacts requires artifact shards (that drop from enemies) and increases the artifacts' potency and your LS.

Equipment is the most unique of all. You have 6 slots for equipment and you gain it through drops. Each new equipment unlocks a skin for it, so you can customize your character's appearance with it as well (which is almost unheard of nowadays as pretty much every cosmetic item gets paywalled). You can get multiple copies of the same equipment and those can be used to upgrade the equipment from some 20-40% up to a 100% of its potential. The amount is RNG for each upgrade, but 100% is always the cap, so you can just get content at 95% or so. Items also have mods that let you swap their abilities for others that you might like more. Upgrading also raises LS.

High LS is practically a prerequisite for playing on harder map instances, as without a certain value, you will just get obliterated by basic mobs.

You can combo your equipment and spells in various ways. Would you like an army of Zombies, for example?

Multiplayer

I would say that this is somewhat of a pain point for the game. On Overworld, this isn't much of an issue. There tend to be some 2-5 other active players on each map, especially on harder map instances and those players flock to skirmishes and do them together (as harder maps become challenging).

However, there are also very nice and cool missions for up to 3 players that generally require the players to cooperate for a better score. Unfortunately, since there are 2 per map (10 in total) and each has 4 difficulty modes, that means that in total there are 40 instances for which you can queue. As the game has no ingame LFG option as of yet, trying to play any of these will likely result in disappointment. Which is a pity, because those missions are very well designed and interesting. There is a social system where you can add in-game friends and you can also party up to play together, but that seems unnecessary in the Overworlds. So I suppose only actual real life friends would use that feature.

Zone chat is currently invisible unless you specifically open it (as if to talk), so there isn't much chatter there either.

You can solo the multiplayer missions, but it’s just more fun with other players. Besides they’re designed to have more players on the field, so in solo, you end up running around from one corner of the map to the other and back again. All missions have a timer, so they will always last the same amount of time, but you have to do more 'work' in solo.

Home is where the Aether is

Your Realm is also an important part of the game. It's the place in which you can use resources you've collected over time.

You can build and upgrade your Mana Vault that generates so-called Planar Mana that is necessary for further upgrades and allows you to refine boss drops into resources.

Arcane Workshop builds relic fragments for you which you can use to upgrade your Artifacts.

Mystical Study allows you to research exclusive spells and learn new classes.

Finally the Aetheric core lets you build Lands that reduce the amount of spell pages needed for spell upgrades and also creates spell pages for you.

The necessary amounts of planar mana to upgrade these facilities steeply increase, however.

Fashion: the Gathering

On every plane, you will find a Tailor. An NPC that can change pretty much every cosmetic choice you've made during Character creation and more.

You can change your character's sex, build, hair, hair color, skin color, face, various clothes and dyes. The dye options are limited I'd say, but it's satisfactory.

The best part is that you can get most of the models through playing the game and getting equipment drops that automatically unlock that equipment's skin.

Of course, some cosmetics are walled in the premium version of Season Pass.

The costumes that NPCs and enemies wear are also often obtainable.

Untap, Upkeep, Draw

Finally let's talk about the item shop. The game is Free to Play so I did expect some money making going on. If you know other CRYPTIC games, you'll recognize the Zen currency. As with other games, you can exchange Zen for Aether (an in-game resource that you can “refine” a limited amount per day). So there is some limited interchangeability, but it all depends on how much Zen flows into the game. If few players spend Zen on Legends, the affordability of Store items for Free to Play players will be very low. At the day the Open Beta launched, the cost of 1 Zen was 100 Aether. Nowadays it's 1 Zen for 750 Aether and there's not much of Zen to be had overall. That itself can hint on the popularity of the game right now.

The Store isn't outright pay to win, but you can buy RNG boosters packs (loot boxes) that could drop the coveted Dimir Assassin class and other exclusive goodies. Granted, those can still be purchased through the player market for Gold (common in-game currency). But again, if no player sells those on the market, then its availability is 0.

The Season Pass has 2 modes: Free and Premium. The Premium one offers mostly skins and some spell pages and an occasional booster pack. But it doesn't feel like it's worth the 1000 Zen. While the Free mode has the Dimir Assassin class at the very end, which is very nice as you can gain it through playing. You progress in the Season Pass by completing daily and weekly Season Pass quests.

You can also purchase class Starter Packs whose greatest benefit is that you don't need to unlock that class through playing, but instead you get it unlocked for all characters, new and old, on the account.

I wouldn’t call the game pay-to-win, but it’s also not completely innocent. While anything powerful can in theory be obtained by playing the game (and then trading / exchanging Aether for Zen), it can just mean a lot of grinding.

Cleanup Phase

If you've expected a playstyle similar to Magic: the Gathering, then you won't find that here. But Legends were never meant to be that. Instead you'll find a game from the world of Magic.

A nice story involving characters that we know from cards. Fluid, interesting, fun gameplay and buildcrafting that drove my interest. However, there's also no endgame, no reason to improve apart from curiosity. Issues with finding players for matchmaking. The fact that only the players who know Magic can potentially be interested in Legends. The game has a lot to improve, but that's what the Open Beta is there for.

It is apparent that the game was made by people who have a certain level of understanding and/or passion for Magic and that feeling permeates the whole game in its design or the small details that you can see.

I would definitely recommend trying the game for yourselves. You might find that you like it. But I'd guess most Magic players won't.