Let me sum this for you:
- Whole zoo of bugs that are never fixed (2013 version is basically 2012 version with the year changed). Anything that can broke, will.
- Pre-made decks that you cannot customize
- A multiplayer mode that (almost) never works. It will always give you the infamous "Game is no longer available" (this when searching for a game...)
- The interface when playing is WAY improvable.
Yes, the single player campaign is not bad, the details and drawings are excellent, but hello, this is a Magic The Gathering game. What we want is build our decks and play against other people (not a stupid AI with bloated decks). This game simply ruins the fun. A waste of money.… Expand

I think they've finally perfected a PC layout for Magic: The Gathering. Ideally, I'd love to see Magic: The Gathering Online switched to this clean format, but for now, the single-player campaign and multiplayer (using only pre-built decks) is a good start. It goes without saying that this incarnation is superior to its 2012 predecessor, but what's more exciting is looking ahead to future incarnations. These are fun decks, but the desire to build one's own deck is something that should be addressed first and foremost in future editions. The vast amount of number-crunching this program does is staggering, and at times it can miss (computer opponent AI occasionally does goofy things no live player ever would). But bottom-line is that there are a lot of moving parts here and Wizards of the Coast has created one of the most faithful computer representations of the card game. If you are a fan of MTG at all, this should be in your collection.… Expand

This game while much more graphically enhanced than Micrprose's game of 1997 but doesn't hold a candle to its grandfather. I could write a novel on all the glitches, problems, rule coding errors but there really is no need as the one major problem it has ruins the game even if it was glitch free. First off, Magic the game itself is just broken (even the real life card game). They have had to think of more and more special abilities for the creatures for too many years and the whole system is just broken. The game no longer is about strategy and tactics as much as it is about "Who is going to get his broken, over-powered game busting card out first." In addition to that fact, Stainless decided to add a sub-routine back in the 2012 edition where the AI could access the library on the fly, get a card it needed for the situation at hand and simply overwrite a card in its hand. I call it "Dial-a-Spell." (This was for Planeswalker difficulty setting to make it more challenging). So, being that there were no core changes to the game engine between 2012 and 2013, the genius types (who had created their own 3rd party program after discovering the Dial-a-Spell sub-routine) were up and running right off the bat with this game. So, if the deck shuffling sub-routine doesn't land screw you (Happens often) or land glut you (Happens often) then you can look forward to seeing some of the Lamest decks ever created. Why they make decks that pure piss peopkle off I do not know. No Skill, No Talent Hack decks that take little to no thought to play. Jace grind deck. No purpose to that deck but grinding people's library into the GY. Takes alot of thought there. Gee, what will I do next? Guess I will grind some cards. LAME. How about Ajani Life deck? Alot of strategy involved there. Cast creatures gain life. Cast enchantments and sorceries gain more life. Cast broken OP Instant win creature game over. Yeah. Blue/white enchantment deck what a joke. Cast OP hexproof/ unblockable creatures, stack a ridiculous amount of enchantments on them attack game over. great fun to play against. Then after all that Lameness, you get to look forward to the deck hackers who type codes on the fly to get exactly what they need at exactly the right time over and over and over. They are NOT hard to spot. They are the ones who take forever to act on any given turn and cause alot of game syncing due to the memory access of their 3rd party program. I have been calling them out as I see them and that usually makes them go into hiding for awhile but this game is a poor excuse for a Magic game. Until they can do something about blocking the 3rd party access cheat and make the decks fully customizeable and STOP making such LAME decks this game will remain a stinker. P.S. Where are the Planeswalkers? My goodness we have had 3 editions of "DUELS of the PLANESWALKERS" and havent seen a single PW yet. Go Figure.… Expand

One of the best tcgs games out there! It is hard and its is difficult to make the right decisions on how you will play your cards and that is the fun about it. Sadly the credits go the real tcg game and not the pc game because it lacks in special effects and has a short campaign it also doesn't let you to customize your deck as you wish and it pretty much limits you on how you play. Finally it s price is only 9 E ,cheaper than buying real cards , and it s a great way to spend some time.… Expand

Here's our video review for Magic the Gathering: Duels of the Planeswalkers 2013... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GMT_HTwXYZg ....... be sure to like and subscribe as we will continue to post new videos in the future of both old and new games as well as discussions and other media. We also would like your feedback and suggestions of titles that you would like to see reviewed as well. We hope you enjoy the review and that it is both informative and entertaining. Thanks for watching and subscribing!....... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GMT_HTwXYZg… Expand

This game offers extremely little deck customization, far off from the card game I grew up with or even the game released in 1997 by Microprose. You would think that a game released over a decade later would have many new and improved features such as multiplayer, right?

Wrong, the multiplayer in Magic 2013 is buggy as all hell. Even getting a couple friends into the same game is fraught with errors and game crashing. When everyone does make it into the game many animations in-game take forever to resolve, drawing the game out far more than is required. Even when you get partway into the game about one in every four games results in freezing where the game will progress no further. Everyone is still connected and present in the room as they can still discuss how much a turd this game is as they bash their heads onto their desks repeatedly.

I will not be purchasing the next year of this title and if I were Hasbro, I would seriously consider dropping Stainless Games as they have definitely left a stain on what was once an amazing game.… Expand

Broken multiplayer! 50% of your games will crash/not start.
Developers do not patch the bugs just keep selling new dlc decks.
The underlying game Magic cards is great. This game is not, constant crashes bugs errors losing sync.

Don't waste your money, you will regret your purchase. This game is broken. Summon a creature with Haste, and half the time the game blows right by your combat phase anyhow if you've no other creatures. Want to bump a creature with its ability? Too bad, if you've already cast a sorcery or instant, the game won't let you, even though it's still main phase and you've a ton of mana lying there. What's the point of playing a game that is won or lost based on effective use of specific abilities, if the game doesn't follow its own rules?

How embarrassing for Hasbro's software development managers that, after all these years, they still haven't developed a decent game engine to handle the moderately complex enough to be interesting algorithms behind this game. Fire some folks, and hire some folks who actually (a) know how to code, and (b) care about the game. We're out there.… Expand

Outraged by the bugs, lack of service and constant loosing your saves on steam. If I should make a suggestion, that would then be " Stay away from product ! "

2013 is a definite improvement over the 2012 version. The decks seem more themed and certainly the synergy between the cards within each deck is greatly improved which I believe makes them more enjoyable to play. The added card options (40 unlockables this year compared to 20 in 2012) really gives you a chance to build your deck a couple different ways. Finally, the balance between decks is much better as well. In 2012 there were certain decks that were very difficult to win with consistently but in 2013 the margin between decks has been narrowed.

There are still some drawbacks- land distributions is still not manually adjustable which can be frustrating when you have so many other ways to fine tune your decks. Additionally the 'card shuffling' is a bit sub-par, leading many times to either not having enough land or having too much in any given hand; however these are not game breaking defects. Finally, the multiplayer connectivity, while improved from 2012, is still lacking in that there are many times when you find yourself unable to connect to your opponents. However, the mid-game crashes that plagued 2012 seem to have been cleaned up and I have only encountered one or two game crashes in over 250 online matches. Finally, I wish to note that many people mark this game down for not allowing full deck building options and I don't think that is fair. This game does not advertise that feature nor would it make sense for it to do so. Magic the Gathering: Online provides that service and charges large sums of money in return. On the other hand, for the $9.99 charge that this game incurs you get 10 decks each in excess of 100 cards, the price to replicate on Magic Online or with physical magic cards would be well over $1000. The game does well what it sets out to do - provide gateway into the world of Magic the Gathering, allowing the player to experience a number of different deck types, colors and themes without the prohibitive cost that acquiring those cards in Magic Online or paper magic would entail. Finally it gives what many magic players really need - an active online community to go head to head against.… Expand

Worst game ever if u own more then 2 computers with steam on them u lose your deck data if u turn the other computer on even if u don't have the game installed on the other computer, so basiclly u wasted a few months of your life cause u turned on your laptop, they offer no fix for this how ever u can buy decks to get back to where u where.... so they can make more money what a scam and a waste of time and money, only recommend this game if u like wasting your life and time to start over from 0 again… Expand

Pretty fun and much better than its predecessor. Worth the money and even more fun with a friend. I wish you could customize your decks a bit further but such is life. Great way to learn how to play the card game or perhaps get a bit better at it/understand the rules a bit more.

This game looks a little nicer and has different cards from last year's version, but it's a lot slower and a lot less interesting to play. The main campaign is short! The 3 against one mode is gone, replaced by "Planechase" where you sit watching 3 AI players auto-resolve their moves against each other for 55 minutes out of every hour you thought you would be playing too. There is still no deck customization to speak of, and the color combinations the basic game comes with, are very very very limited. If you don't have any Magic games + you want to try it out buy the 2012 version instead.… Expand

I've put enough time to beat over 80% of the game and I can honestly say it is a broken piece of trash. I put around 10 hours of it but each hour was frustrating and awful.

Deck customization is limited in a horrible way. You cannot adjust the amount of land in the decks. Some decks have 4-5 more land than I would build a regular deck with and you end up flooded with it towards the end of the game. The RNG seems horribly broken and even with excess land I will sometimes have to re-draw 3-4 times and still end up with only 1 land or plain awful hands (or 2 lands and rest 4+ high mana cards despite the plethora of lower cost cards in the deck) and have to restart the duel. Even using card mana cost ratios similar to what I would use in my real decks generates results that are inconsistent.

You are also limited to 10 different decks, of which only 1 is multi color which limits the experience. Why have two different blue decks? Why not combine the card pool and allow players to have more deck building ability?

Each deck has 30 cards to unlock. You unlock one card with each victory. Unfortunately a large chunk the starter cards for many of the decks are just plain terrible which makes it hard to win the first battles. Too bad alot of the cards you unlock are garbage also and you may end up going through 15 battles and getting none of the cards you wanted to add to the deck.

Some of the animations such as Exalted take forever to resolve and you must wait for a count down timer for each part of the round even though you are playing with AI. Why can't you just skip it? This drags the battles out far longer than they need to be.

It is based off a console control system which makes the deck interface and the main menu a pain to navigate.

All of this adds up to an incredibly negative experience for anyone who has enjoyed playing this game in person. Frustration from start to finish.… Expand

to continue their saga from 2012 of you fighting the boss. getting his life down to -80 an looking for a reason why he still alive when ther is none. coast makes an epic yet cheap cheating game once agian of creatures dying off for no reason to getting online an trying to play only to have it lag every 5 seconds until yer kicked. grats coast you make crap games and take greed to a whole new level...i despise you.… Expand

There is only one MTG game better than DotP 2012 and it's called DotP 2013 :) More manual options, new inetersting decks. A must have for anyone who loves MTG and plays it only casually. If you want to see what MTG is all about this is also the place to start. For £7 it's a steal. The only thing I would add at this point is ability to lower lands number to 20, but that is a minor flaw. Love the equal chances the game gives to all casual fans.… Expand

For those who never played the previous editions: Duels of Planeswalkers does not allow you to build your own deck. It has a number of predefined decks with 60 card plus 30 more that are unlockable in-game by winning matches or by purchasing deck unlocks.

That said, this quite a nice game to play solo or with a friend. The available decks contains some pretty crappy cards. This is very annoying at first - even after unlocking some nice cards you're still stuck with them. However, after playing a while, I find it interesting to beat more powerful opponents with cards you would never put in your deck.

The interface is great and the game flows nicely. Everything is quite self-explanatory and you can easily pause the game the read cards you don't know. This makes this game perfect for beginners, but you can turn off all the tips if you already know the game. It also contains some challenges to make the you more familiar with common strategies - also great for the inexperienced, but reasonably easy for long time players.

There seem to be some problems with multiplayer, although I never had any while playing with my friends. However, I've had a number of crashes while playing Planechase, which is **very** annoying, because they tend to be long games.

I don't think this game will ever have custom deck building like so many people have been asking. Wizards of the Coast wants to sell cards. They already have an online Magic game that requires you to buy boosters, decks, etc (MTGO). Allowing custom builds will threaten to cannibalize their own product.

Bottom line, this is a very nice casual game and definitely worth the price. If you are a MTG beginner (even if you never played it before) or just would like to play a match when there is no one around to play with, this is an excellent game. If you are looking for the full MTG experience and can't get over the fact that you won't be building your own deck, this is probably not your game.… Expand

As compared to the two previous versions, Duels 2013 stands above the others. The additions of both the end step and manual mana tapping (albeit through a clunky procedure) are great features and bring the game ever closer to traditional paper Magic. While there may not be true deck customization, there are certainly plenty of options available. From an unlockable pool of 30 cards (with more to come, surely) one can create a good variety of different strategies all with one central idea for each of the 10 initial decks (once again, more will definitely be added). The campaign actually feels as though it has a purpose and the Planechase campaign is very fun (albeit quite excruciating in certain circumstances). The challenges are definitely difficult in some places and make you think differently than you would expect.

The only real downside I've seen is that the initial decks don't feel as ingenious and creative as those from Duels 2012. However, even if you have the first two iterations of the Duels franchise, 2013 is a must and at $10, how can you go wrong?

Also you get a free 6 card booster in the real world, if that helps at all.… Expand

The only redeeming quality is the price-tag. When Stainless Games first started advertising this game the big highlight was all of the improvements from Duels of the Planeswalkers 2012. Unfortunately, most of them didn't make it into the finished product. Bugs and glitches still run rampant. Combat with more than 4 creatures is still a nightmare (despite screenshots seen in advertisements). You can not edit the amount of land in a deck, which makes certain decks unbalanced. The decks are incredibly bland with uninteresting themes and poor selections of cards. The Planeschase gamemode is interesting until it does something that completely changes the flow of the game. When this happens the game sits there for 10 minutes while all the effects resolve and there is nothing to do but wait while the timer ticks off each one. The list goes on, but you get the idea. All in all it seems that Stainless Games did not learn from their mistakes, nor did they listen to the players. After a second failure I don't think Wizards of the Coast will license Stainless Games to make another Magic game. If you want new decks and new game modes the $10 price-tag might draw you in, but the rule of thumb seems to be that if it's made by Stainless Games then it's going to be poor quality.… Expand

Fun game, looks like the other yearly magic but with some improvement. I'd like for the single player game to last longer, otherwise everything has been polished: the graphics, the combat, the abilities, the gameplay. I recommend it.

MtG- Duels of the Planeswalkers 2013 has several improved features from previous years while retaining the charm and elegance of the core product. Duels is an excellent game to introduce new players to the world of Magic the Gathering. It slowly, but enjoyably teaches players the core concepts of the game. Learning Magic can be a daunting experience because of the depth and breadth of the rules but Duels 2013 makes the process simple by introducing concepts one at a time. Duels 2013 also does an excellent job of showing different strategies players can use when building decks. Every player should be able to find a deck that suits his or her individual play style. There are controlling decks and aggressive decks. There are mill-based decks and burn based decks. Creatures decks and removal decks. One problem with the game is that it lacks full customization options for its decks. Players can substitute a few cards, but experienced Magic players that want a digital version of the game will want more options than what Duels 2013 will provide. Especially after the Campaign mode is completed the game could have more repeatability if players could have more options for constructing decks of their own for multiplayer.

The puzzles are much more difficult than last year but still easy enough to finish without using spoilers. The multiplayer section of the game offers the brand new "Planechase" that mirrors the non-digital release of the product and offers a high variance, but very fun alternative to two-headed giant and free-for-all play. Ultimately, just the campaign mode will give hours of fun for the low price of $10.

The biggest problem with the game is the instability of the multiplayer games. They are difficult to get started and have a lot of connection problems causing players to drop frequently. Ultimately, even with these flaws this is an easy buy. The game should provide significant value to new and old magic players and is a steal at $10.… Expand

I just wanted to play a game where my son and I can build decks and play each other. Apparently such a game does not exist. You have to use the game's pre-made decks with very little customization allowed. The game is also extremely buggy on steam. Multi-player games are very difficult to join and usually one player gets kicked off and the other wins by default.

So happy to have an end step and pick which lands I tap. This is a great intro to the game or way for vets to get a quick MTG fix. IMO it's a lot of fun for the price.