As with your normal Magic The Gathering game, you can face off against the computer or against a friend, or if it takes your fancy, you can battle your friends on Xbox Live as well.  Though this part of the Magic series has one really bad flaw, and that is that there is no custom deck building. I found that to be a really big downer and almost made me not want to buy it, but being the Magic fan I am, I decided to give it a try.

In place of custom deck builds are pre-made balanced decks. Those of which I will give introductions to, if you want to know the deck themselves, then you may want to pick up the free trial and see for yourselves.

The first deck is a red which focus’s on damaging the enemy with artifacts and creature spells. Next is the green deck, which relies more on the powerful monsters and Aura based enchantments to powerhouse the enemy. There is a White deck built to torment players with flying creatures and life gaining enchantments, as well as a few abilities to stop your opponent from dealing damage. Mixing in there as well is a discard powered Black deck, also adding in card limiting abilities that damage you when you either draw or discard cards. The blue deck is based on suppression. Keeping your enemy from playing powerful monsters as you attack with a majority of flying creatures. With those there are a few mix decks that you can unlock along with the blue, white, and black decks.

The game play is as straight forward as you can get. It’s magic on the console. For those to say that card games should be played with cards, then I say why no protect your cards and just play online anyway? I don’t feel like driving alll the way to your house to play .

I believe in my thoughts this arcade title hits a 5/10 until custom deck building comes into play.