My First Impressions of MAGIC: MANASTRIKE
Netmarble is working on a pretty cool mobile game for fans of Magic: The Gathering. Magic: ManaStrike is set in the Magic universe and is a game similar to Clash Royale and Amity Arena. They were kind enough to let me play around with the game, and I thought I’d share some of my first impressions.
The first difference that I noticed is that while those games play on a vertical field, ManaStrike is horizontal. I honestly don’t know that it matters so much, what the orientation of the screen is, although I did notice that my opponents and I almost always summoned our troops to the bottom lane.
When you go to play the game, you’ll have to create a deck of cards and choose a Planeswalker to lead them. The Planeswalker chosen affects which cards you have access to as it would be ridiculous to have Ajani Goldmane pulling out Black creatures or Blue spells. You then go into battle and it plays just like those other games in the genre, for the most part. One cool difference is that you can summon your Planeswalker to the field up to three times and they’re pretty powerful. Plus, they have abilities that you can activate to increase your defenses or deal more damage, etc. Another bonus of having a Planeswalker out is that, normally, you can only summon creatures on your half of the battlefield. When a Planeswalker is out, you can summon creatures by the Planeswalker, no matter where they are. This can give you a big push.
Something I appreciate about the game as well is that each color has unique skins for the bases and guardians (the towers before the base). In addition, the graphics looked great. You can even toggle the FPS to be 30, 45, or 60 frames per second.
There are some things that I worry about with ManaStrike. For starters, I kept having network problems where I would lag or even disconnect even though my phone had a strong internet connection. I assume that Netmarble is working on improving this before launch, because it could really hurt the game if people are having a lot of lag. Another problem is that like other games of the genre, I feel it’s hard to really gain in-game currency for upgrading cards or purchasing cards. This, of course, gives the game a very pay-to-win feel about it. Combine that with the Magic Pass which can give you bonus rewards (including new Planeswalkers), and it really feels PTW.
Overall, MagicStrike has been a lot of fun. I think Netmarble definitely has some things to polish, but fans will enjoy it. Unfortunately, we don’t have a release date, but you can expect to play on Android and iOS sometime in 2020.
