Magic: Legends is the classic card game as an action RPG

When playing the Magic: The Gathering card game, you’re asked to imagine that you’re a wizard who battles other wizards using a book of spells. You can summon creatures to fight on your behalf, use elemental magic to directly attack your foe, or even utilize magical blessings or curses to empower your own creatures or weaken your opponent’s. In reality, it’s a deck of cards you’ve carefully constructed, but the theming feels right while you’re playing. That said, I’ve often found it hard to imagine what all this spell-slinging would actually look like — and Magic: Legends finally answers that question.

Magic: Legends is a multiplayer isometric action roleplaying game in the same vein as the Diablo or Torchlight games. You create a character by picking a class that has a set of unique abilities, which you use to defeat hordes of monsters to acquire better loot and experience you use to level up to make you stronger so you can fight stronger monsters and get better loot, ad infinitum. Where Magic: Legends differentiates itself is not just in utilizing the almost 30 years of lore and locations from the card game, but in actually making the core of the combat system based on the card game. Like the card game, you construct decks of cards, limited to 12 in total, which act as a pool of spells your character can perform.

Like in MtG, these decks are based around a color of mana (red, blue, green, white, and black) whose spells tend to synergize and play in different ways. Blue decks tend to be about controlling the flow of battle, while red decks tend to favor overwhelming the opponent quickly. In the pre-alpha demo I played at PAX East, these spells were assigned to the controller’s four face buttons to act like you have a hand of four cards. What spells are assigned to which button are random, and when you use one, it’s removed and replaced with another card drawn from your deck.

For instance, the four spells mapped to your buttons are: a spell that heals you, one that summons a creature to fight with you, one that makes your creatures stronger, and one that does a damaging blast in front of you. You hit the button to summon the creature, and then that spell would be replaced by something like a spell that weakens an enemy. Of course, you can’t just cast spells willy-nilly as there is a mana cost to each spell that drains your character’s mana bar with each cast — just like in the card game. If you don’t have the right amount of mana for a spell, you won’t be able to do it, potentially leaving you with a spell you can’t use or get rid of.