We all love Magic: The Gathering, or at least enough to be reading about it on MTG Rocks. It’s one of the first card games made that really took off, and the fact that it’s much older than a lot of the people who play it really marks it out as a stellar experience.
However, it’s also a game with some of the most fascinating and flexible lore around. The potential offered by a multiverse is unlimited, and it allows for a lot of creativity in the design space of the cards we play with. It also allows for that same freedom in potential game designs alongside the main card game, yet none of the tie-in games has quite hit the mark yet. Now that Magic Legends, which has been cancelled ahead of its actual release happened, is gone, we couldn’t help but wonder just what kind of game we’d actually want in the MTG universe, and this is the result of that.
What do we want from a Magic: The Gathering video game?
Rather than trying to completely design our own games, we’ve opted to smush together MTG and games that already exist. This makes it far easier on us, because we’re not game designers, and also makes it far easier on you, because you’ve got a reference to look at when we’re waxing lyrical about these highly improbable games. So, sit down with us for a little bit and just imagine the kind of games we could get in MTG if the world was a pure and good place.
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Slay The Gathering
First up is one we’ve sort of just got thanks to Roguebook. Slay the Spire is a titan of the gaming world. While it wasn’t the first game to fuse deckbuilding and a roguelike, it’s the first one that absolutely took over everything. The ability to finely craft your own deck as you fight through battle after battle is one that’s intensely moreish, and it’s a perfect fit for MTG.
You could have multiple classes, one Planeswalker for each color, for example, and then you build your deck as you go through the dungeons. Each level could be a different plane, and the final boss could be one of the great evils, or a specific villain that has a grudge against your Planeswalker of choice. Once you’d finished the game with the five core characters, you’d unlock the final boss in the form of Nicol Bolas.
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Magic Ocean
Star Ocean is an RPG series all about venturing around between different planets. Due to the way that planes work in MTG, you can fairly comfortable just swap planets for planes here, and you’ve got the basis for a rather cool RPG.
It’s not hard to imagine leading a group of Planeswalkers through turn-based battles as they journey from plane to plane trying to solve some overarching mystery. You could literally just have it be about playing through The Gatewatch storyline, and you’d have the chance to follow along with all of the ups and downs of that storyline. It just makes sense.
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Strixhaven: Three Houses
Have you played Fire Emblem: Three Houses? It’s the latest game in a strategy RPG series that has you going into turn-based tactical battles and moving around individual and incredibly powerful units as you try to uncover a deep conspiracy and maybe fall in love with your students. That last bits a little dodgy, but the rest of it is solid.
In our minds, a strategy game iteration of MTG isn’t quite the same as this, but it’s not far off either. You could have your Planeswalkers forging bonds with each other and roaming around the battlefield, but you could also have them summoning units for you to control and slinging spells themselves in a bind. It would be a really cool take on the strategy genre, and there’s a lot of room for some really interesting design with this idea.
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Dishonored: Death of Nicol Bolas
This is probably the most absurd of our ideas, but hey, we’re working with the impossible anyway, so why don’t we go for it? Dishonored is a stealth series where you control a supernatural assassin as they try and get revenge for crimes committed against them and deal with an almost god-like being who gives them power.
We just think a first-person stealth game featuring a Planeswalker would be cool. There are a few options here for Planeswalkers that would fit it too, and each one could have a different playstyle. Maybe you could have Vraska sneaking through the shadows and turning people to stone if they notice her. Or you could have Jace using his illusions to distract enemies before sneaking past them. Actually, wait, we’ve got it. You could have the whole thing set on Ravnica as you go around trying to steal the declaration of independence… we mean, the Guildpact…
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Magic Kombat
Alright, we said that Dishonored was the most outlandish idea, but actually, it’s probably the one where Wizards let us literally rip the heads off of popular characters. Everyone knows what Mortal Kombat is, and having this bloody fighting series filled with your favorite and least-favorite Planeswalkers would be a blast.
Just imagine using Ashiok to make the enemy player’s head disappear into nothingness before having them staggering around like a headless chicken. That’s the kind of good content you can only get in your dreams, because we can’t imagine we’ll ever get the chance to see this gory fighting game. That being said, it is fun to think about, and there’s definitely a Planeswalker, or two, we’ve all imagined beating up at some point.
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