fighting

It helps if you have played the Magic card game, because it will give you a jump on understanding the rules. It basically plays like a fighting game, but with a strategy twist. You can play through a single player quest mode which familiarizes you with the gameplay quite adequately. Most of these duels are fairly easy, but several of them are very challenging, and require thinking along with quick reactions!
The game also has a single player and Vs. mode arcade battle mode, plus the option of dueling online. It is definitely one of the higher replay and fun factor games for any system. I highly recommend it, even for people who haven't played the card game. It is a fun and challenging game.

Having never played the card game, I bought this primarily because it was X-box live capable and at $30 was a pretty good deal.

In single mode you begin with a cahracter (you have no choice who you start with) and then begin a series of battles. Each time you win you are rewarded with a new spell. Each of these quests consists of about 15 - 20 battles until you get to the "boss" battle. Defeating this boss gets you one of 5 colored gem on the way to completing the entire quest.

As has been noted by other reviewers, the battles tend to be either so easy that you beat them on the first try, or so frustrating that you give up after hours of trying. When games are this tough it's always a signal to me that the game play is so thin that they make it very hard in an attempt to make things seem deeper.

But the more you play the quest and arcade modes, the more spells and characters you can get in order to fight on-line. You can pick your skill lever and your cards and battle it out against friends or foe from around the country.

Frankly I'm a bit disappointed in that it seems there are not many online players for this game. I find it surprising given the popularity of the game, but as I said, the game is not very in depth with only some 70 or so odd spells and I think experienced Magic players may be turned off by this.

Also, thus far there has been ZERO new content to download while a game like Rainbow Six 3 has provided 5 new maps already.

It's not a horrible game but I have to guess it's just not deep enough for experience Magic fans and just not fun enough for new players.

This game provides entertainment, but is hardly worthwhile. Although the visualizations are enjoyable and the content is entertaining, the quest mode is absolutely inane and the gameplay directly contradicts the concepts of magic the gathering in several places.

Certainly there is give for making a game more action packed, Magic is by no means a fast paced game and giving it some life is welcome, but this game forgoes intelligent thought and strategy in favor of button mashing rivaled by fighting games. There is no time to properly form a plan of attack. When reading the rule book you begin to see numerous parallels between the game, such as respawn being equivalent to the end of a turn, however this is not the case, creatures lose toughness permanently until they die. This horrendously favors aggressive styles of play, and on top of that, being able to constantly cast one spell, over and over, completely eliminates the concept of "gas" where once you're out of cards you have to slow down. This is one of the primary concepts that prevents sligh(red) decks from being totally unstoppable, and indeed you learn in this game that raging goblin and goblin hero en masse means the game becomes stupid fast. By the end of the quests you will be harder pressed to exactly execute the only winning combination of buttons possible that you might be better off with a DDR pad, give yourself no illusion of intelligent thought.

Without going into too many more magic specific vocabulary, let it be known that this game is going to turn alot of magic players off, way off. it might even pull out your plug and cut the cord. I bought this game for 10 dollars, so my losses were minimal, but think hard before you purchase this title.