It's been around for twenty years now, and is without a doubt the king of the genre. Magic is the original trading card game and still the dominant force, with even the best alternatives taking its rules as their foundations. The two best examples are extremes - Magic The Gathering, in the form of Duels of the Planeswalkers 2013, and Assassin's Creed Recollection. The App Store hosts plenty of them, from Sega's Samurai Bloodshow to the likes of Playdek's Ascension and Nightfall. I use an iPad, but any tablet is the perfect fit for card games for all sorts of reasons: the physical manipulation of a touchscreen, the automation of the maths, and the size of the screen itself.īeyond even this there's the game concept itself: digital card games are free of the physical restrictions of cards in your hands, and a tablet's form factor lends itself to playing with this. It certainly pulled me into the genre, and I've kept on playing, but in the last eight months I've suddenly gone crazy for trading card games, and it's down to one thing: the tablet. I've played more Magic on PC than in person - the automation of its rules certainly helps, but it's probably more to do with the hassle of actually arranging a match. 'We'd hope some folk might dip their toes into Magic Online after finishing Duels.' It is a big deal for new players, and even as a fairly regular one you forget stuff. Magic is relatively simple next to some of its successors, but even there you're dealing with buff counters, the differences between sorceries and instants, 'tapping' cards, etc. There are two things to acknowledge about card games like this, and they're kind of linked: one is that the rules are often complex, and the other is you have to learn how to physically play the game. In a long arc that encompasses everything from Starcraft 2 to Small World, the strategy genre has room for everything - and one of its most glorious antechambers is the trading card game.
It's a regret because my entire life is spent playing games, and stuff like Magic is of the very best type. I was converted by a chum well into my 20s, and the only reason it took so long was this stupid perception. I especially regret the fact that, despite loving chess and spending all my time playing videogames, I regarded the guys who played trading card games as the biggest dorks in the playground. When I was a teenager I did all sorts of terrible things, from buying Ant and Dec albums to nicking my dad's whiskey.
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