So I bought Magic the Gathering : Duel of the Planesweepers through Steam sales

For the pros :

- I had some friend playing this some years ago, borrowed decks and so on to try but never got into it, I did just get the basics but reading the cards and thinking of the combination gave me headache. So, for magic noob like I am , the game is pretty fine.

- Through your progress in the campaign mode, you get more decks, and each time you win again an opponent with a deck, you unlock a card. Those special cards are pretty badass, so the replay value is fine since if you want to get some more deck you have to beat more serious opponents, then you have to replay the one you beat with your new decks to unlock those special cards. It's fine for me, and so far I had a pretty good time with it.

Now the cons :

- First, the dev's decision to not allow deck modification is a very stupid mistake. Ok, the game has a multiplayer, and I understand that you could have a lot of unbalanced games, but hey, making your own deck is what magic is about no ?

- Consequently, even in campaign mode you can't modify the number of lands cards you have. Good luck with the red deck ! (which needs usually less mana than other colors)

- Also, the game becomes heavily based on luck, especially the first random hand.

Now the worst feature of all :

- DLC is imho pathetic. I bought the core game, and I was amazed by the number of DLC , and I thought you could buy some new decks with DLC. After a closer look, it's quite the contrary. The decks are all part of the core game, but you buy the locked cards of the deck. 

- More patheticness : there's a second type of DLC for each decks, it's called 'Premium Foil conversion'. The foil conversion consists of adding a graphical multicolored, shiny effect on the cards of the deck (linky : http://www.starcitygames.com/images/article/04212005bleiweiss1.jpg). Which means you pay one buck to get a texture. It's like buying clothing in SF4 ! Good idea Stainless games !

A friend of mine bought the entire collection on Steam. I have now to explain him how deep he has been ripped off.

there is DLC for new decks, there are 3 expansions each having 3 additional decks and more cards for the original decks.  All the other DLC you can ignore

Still amazes me.

I might have a look at the expension packs. I need to finish this one for a start.

Sometimes I play Magic the Gathering in the real world, with real cards, but I know just basics..basically basics :D but - it's a beautiful game and I think playing it real is much better than doing it on computer. In this case Reality wins :)

"- First, the dev's decision to not allow deck modification is a very stupid mistake. Ok, the game has a multiplayer, and I understand that you could have a lot of unbalanced games, but hey, making your own deck is what magic is about no ?"

That's a lose for me. I am not the type of magic player that buys a premade deck and plays with that. Creating the perfect deck is where a huge amount of the fun and challenge of Magic lies

except for the part where you need to pour hundreds upon hundreds of dollars into it to be competitive and trust me I speak from experience.

The beautiful thing about the planeswalker game (and I have it on 360) is that it levels the playing fields for everyone.  everyone is reduced to starters, things are much more balanced.

But as for the DLC, my complaint is with achievements in the 360 version.  Buying the DLC increases the work you need to do to get the 100% cards unlocked achievement.  I really should have gotten that one before adding a 4 or 5 new decks to the fold. So, yeah, I'll wait before getting the third DLC.

except for the part where you need to pour hundreds upon hundreds of dollars into it to be competitive and trust me I speak from experience.

The beautiful thing about the planeswalker game (and I have it on 360) is that it levels the playing fields for everyone.  everyone is reduced to starters, things are much more balanced.

But as for the DLC, my complaint is with achievements in the 360 version.  Buying the DLC increases the work you need to do to get the 100% cards unlocked achievement.  I really should have gotten that one before adding a 4 or 5 new decks to the fold. So, yeah, I'll wait before getting the third DLC.

From their perspective, it really, really is.

Well the point of the game is to get people addicted to MTG so they'd go play in game stores or the real online game where you purchase actual packs of cards, they've made very very good money convincing people that a card with an extra layer of shiny on it is worth buying packs and packs of worthless cards in the attempt to get it.

After playing magic as a kid I played a bit a couple years back and was amazed at how well it's been structured to continually gobble up large quantities of people's money. 

Some thoughts about Planeswalkers.

The "fixed deck only" play is more or less set to make online matches as even as possible, but I'm guessing it's also to keep the game as limited as possible for a few reasons.

I don't know if that's to sell as many expansion packs as possible once players get bored of the same pre-built decks, or if Wizards of the Coast want video game players to start playing the physical card game which is designed in a way that it essentially has an unlimited spending cap for card decks, packs and expansion sets which have levels of rarity in addition to being randomly packed. Both, I'd imagine.

The fact that buying the game gives you a voucher for an exclusive physical card that you have to pick up at a M:TG retail outlet pretty much supports this: the card's only useful if you play the physical card game.

I also noticed that the expansion packs are already included in the base game's installation: buying the DLC only gives you a 100KB key to unlock the extra content. So basically it's already in the basic $10 game; you just have to pay more to access it.

I'm guessing that any future expansion sets will simply allow players to unlock more decks as opposed to actually "buying" new decks and downloading more cards.

And this is the real reason for the DLC/expansion set structuring and fixed deck set up of the game: you wouldn't have to buy new decks (or more accurately, pay to unlock them) as you could simply build new decks using the cards you already had access to. Naturally, they want to sell you more prebuilt decks rather than let you build your own.

Pretty sly.

That being said, the game still plays just like the physical card game without having to spend the hundreds on cards it would take to build all of the decks in the video game. Unfortunately, it takes out the most important aspect of M:TG, which is deck building and fine tuning.

But considering the base game and three current expansion sets cost $25 and allow you to play people online, it's still a lot cheaper than buying M:TG cards and playing people locally. As any player of the card game will tell you, $25 buys you next to nothing in physical cards. A mixed starter deck (that is unplayable since they're randomly packed) and about 4 booster packs (randomly packed cards). You'd be lucky to get one half decent playable deck out of that.