I, along with many, many millions of individuals, was one of the ones that dumped a small fortune into the Magic : The Gathering card game. In between friendly and championship tournaments, I never could seem to get enough of the nifty strategic card game, and that’s what most of my money went to a few years ago. Well, time has gone by and aside from the occasional internet game now, I really don’t have a lot of time to devote to it like I used to. I was excited that the Xbox release of Magic The Gathering : Battlegrounds would allow me to get into it on my console system in more of an action-based format (as I have seen in info about it), but too many things went wrong with this game along the line for it to hold my attention or even be enjoyable for a long period of time …

Magic The Gathering: Battlegrounds has players selecting a champion and using various creatures and spells to try and decimate an opposing caster before he or she gets to you first. As its namesake implies, players choose cards based on actual ones from the MTG game from the 5 different “mana” (magic power that must be accumulated in order to bring out creatures, spells, and enchantments) pools of dark, light, fire, water, and earth in one of three different play modes: Quest (story type mode), Arcade Duel, and two player either on the console or online.

During play, players will first choose their caster champion and then have the option to go in and alter their spellbook in a mixture of different mana styles and can update their spells, enchantments, and creatures the way they see fit to do. When play begins, rather than being the standard turn-based “draw a card, play a card, perform combat action” of the tabletop game, players fully control their caster to run around an arena gathering mana crystals and shards to generate the magic needed to cast out what they want to use. Once a caster’s 20 life points have been reduced to 0, the game is over.

The main issue that I had with this game right up front is the fact that you have absolutely no starting ground to really do anything other than the quest mode. Even the PSX MTG game that came out a few years back (which met reviewing doom due to the action-based style versus the traditional play) allowed you to design your own decks up front, but Battlegrounds only contains two creatures and two spells to use if you want to play in an arcade match or a versus duel, and they really aren’t very good. I tried to play a blue mana versus a black mana caster in arcade mode up front, and simply turned the game off after the match ran for 30 minutes with no resolution since I just got bored with it. Well, off to the quest mode …

The quest mode also serves as somewhat of a tutorial up front, as it shows you how to run around scooping up mana and tries to show you how to use some really basic strategies like casting a goblin king out to give your goblins that you are summoning extra defense and damage. You can only play as a red mana caster at first, which is not my favorite one to play as (so if you’re partial to something else up front … sorry about your luck), and each series of quests that you run all the way through just makes you play another set of quests as a caster that the computer chooses rather than letting you pick your own path. In addition, the individual quests require you to do something in particular, so while the five goblins that you have out may tear into your opponent and take them down to 0, if you didn’t use a certain card then you have to go back and do it all over again.

One really big thing about MTG that was always enjoyable for me was the creature aspect. There was nothing quite like sending four goblins across at an opponent and then using a trample spell to increase all damage by four, or playing spells to boost defense and guard against an attack. Well, there’s none of this choosing who to attack or block here, and creatures will keep running across the line of the arena over and over and over again until they are killed either attacking or blocking the closest thing to them. Part of the strategy to the card game was choosing who to attack and block, and sometimes it was for particular reasons, but unfortunately you have no control over anything that happens once they are out and on the field. Add in a consistency problem since all of the opponents creatures defend them with no problems but yours don’t (and the fact that flying creatures will never-ever block a ground creature) and it gets really annoying really quickly.

The biggest problem that I had with MTG: BG is the overall frustration with the quest modes themselves and one addition that I personally didn’t care for at all. Basically, you never really seem to have enough mana to release what you want to release while your opponent happily cranks theirs up by the second and keeps throwing a ton of stuff at you. After a few seconds, strategies tend to go out the window and instead I started relying on just throwing as many low level things out as I could to use as cannon fodder. The second issue is that casters can block and attack, which is a whole new concept to MTG, and makes it particularly maddening if you cast out a creature, use an enchantment that adds a healthy attack bonus, then sit and watch him get swatted down by the opposing caster in one hit which not only wasted mana to make more cannon fodder, but also resulted in me getting smacked pretty hard and ultimately in me throwing the controller down in disgust.

Overall, I was really looking forward to playing MTG : Battlegrounds, but what I was left with was a lot of disappointment for a long-awaited title to one of my favorite card games. MTG fans need to stay far, far away from this game, as they will probably find the same annoying factors that I found while playing. Gamers who like fighting games may get a little enjoyment out of the fighting game format with magic casting … but it may not last too long there either. Please rent this title before you buy it if you’re still interested, and all I have to say at the end of this journey is if it ain’t broke … don’t fix it. The card game is fun enough as is, and trying to add action or a new style to the game proved not to work on PSX (which I enjoyed more than this surprisingly), and once again proves not to work on Xbox.

Gameplay: 5.5
The whole idea and fun behind MTG is building your own decks and using your own strategies. In Battlegrounds, you have to beat levels of the super – duper frustrating Quest Mode in order to get new cards to use in a 10-card only deck, and on top of it you don’t even get to select which mana caster you want to be. Basically the whole strategy to this mind-numbing game is to grab as many mana crystals as possible and just throw as much stuff out as you can to use as a living wall, then watch in sadness as everything gets killed.

Graphics: 6.0
The backgrounds contained some neat ideas to them, but overall looked kind of flat and dull. The creatures and spell effects also could have been done better in my opinion, and looked more first generation than stuff that we know that the Xbox is capable of.

Sound: 6.1
The music tends to just fill in as background noise to give you something listen to, and the overdubbing of the character voices was a little too overdramatic in a “William Shatner from Star Trek” kinda way.

Difficulty: Hard
Way too frustrating to be even remotely enjoyable for a long period of time. The computer tends to generate mana and cast constantly as they need to, while you always seem to run around frantically trying to grab mana just to throw out more things to get killed. Also, if you had some deck building ability up front to use the casting color that you were more partial to, this may have helped with overall strategy.

Concept: 5.0
While I can appreciate what the developers were trying to do in bringing the cards from the game to life for gamers to use, this whole thing wound up as a frustrating train wreck in my opinion and once again shows why it’s best to leave card games as card games … especially Magic.

Multiplayer: 6.0
Multiplayer is a little more enjoyable since a live opponent can get just as frustrated as you do running around trying to gather mana and get out their treasure trove of two creatures, but it probably won’t be fun enough for either party to play more than a round or two.

Overall: 6.0
After a wealth of thrown controllers and four letter words, I can honestly say that I probably won’t be playing this anymore after the review is submitted. As I said, I appreciate creativity and ideas, but sometimes they just don’t make good video games … and that is what happened here. If you have any possible thoughts that you are willing to brave the brutal aggravation of this game and try it out, I would highly recommend renting it first.