I have a long history with Magic: the Gathering. I remember buying my first deck of Revised Edition from a hobby shop in the Roosevelt Field mall. I remember hunkering at the folding table in Vin’s basement as we played a 4 hour stalemate with our 12 inch tall decks. I even remember, with no small amount of shame in retrospect, opening my first pack of Ice Age, finding that every single mana card was misprinted, and marching right back into the comic shop and asking that they replace them with “real cards”… god do I remember that part. Still, the last time I so much as looked at magic cards was ’round about 5 years ago (in Japan no less — Brayton invited me to a booster draft in Nagoya), so when I noticed Wizards had published a Magic game on Xbox live arcade, nostalgia took hold of me and I finally gave in and downloaded the trial version last night.

The last time I played a Magic the Gathering video game, it was in ’97, and the experience was what you might call less than overwhelming. The interface was ugly and cumbersome, there was a tacked on and silly overworld map and pseudo-adventure game mode, and, as I quickly learned, many cards didn’t actually function properly, making them useless. The bar, and my expectations, were set pretty low. Imagine my surprise when it turned out to be absolutely fantastic.

For starters, the interface is gorgeous — the table and menu options are clean and functional. Also, whenever your opponent plays a card, pulling one of the triggers will zoom in on it and pause the action so you can read its text. I didn’t get a chance to have a look at the tutorial system, but if the in-game messages are any indication, the developers seem to have taken great care to make sure newcomers don’t get lost. Every time a card is played with an ability that hasn’t been seen yet, it pops up a helpful description to let you know how it’s going to affect your game. If that’s not enough for you, there’s a system by which you can mentor or be mentored by other players online — though I imagine how useful that is depends heavily on the install base.

I’ll be honest, I was a little worried I wouldn’t remember how to play, but it didn’t take long for everything to come flooding back to me. Luana shook her head when I started complaining that the game had given me a green slow burn creature deck to use against red weenie/direct damage. She asked, “Do you even know what you’re doing?”, to which I scoffed and loudly proclaimed that I was, in fact, an expert. I think she jumped when I shouted “How does 15/15 trample work for you, you little bitch?!” as I celebrated my 9th inning victory.

Yeah… it’s safe to say I had fun.

Sure, there are a few niggling details that irk me, but nothing too major. It’s easy to pause the game timer and not notice, it can be awkward to skip the too-long damage animations, and the timing for abilities like regeneration takes some getting used to. That said, it’s fairly likely I’ll be buying this some time in the future — anyone playing?