Magic The Gathering: Battle Grounds lets you prove your skills as a magic-user by entering an arena to battle your equals!

Choose your champion, then choose a combination of magical colors -- each symbolizes a different personality trait, and defines the magic you'll be able to use

Use your lightning-fast reflexes, strategic brilliance and raw power to overcome your enemies

Start out with a basic deck -- as you advance you'll unlock new cards and greater powers

Try out the single-player Quest Mode, to battle duelist residents for control over creatures & spells

Includes faithful recreations of characters and creatures from Magic - The Gathering storylines

Average Customer Review: ( 24 customer reviews )
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You can choose from various characters, each representing a different style of world. The demo only has 2 worlds represented, but the actual game has 6. Each has his own look and selection of spells and creatures.

The training mode walks you through the basics. You are in essence on a battleground split in half. You can only cast spells on your half of the battleground, and if you stay in your enemy's half for too long you take damage. You gather up mana to cast spells, and the more mana you get, the more powerful spells you can cast.

Some spells create creatures which either attack your enemy or sit still and defend you. Some spells attack your enemy and his creatures. Other spells give enhancements to your own creatures.

Unlike other fighting games, this isn't just about 'attacking blindly until he's dead'. You have to balance your spell usage between defending your own body, creating creatures, enhancing your creatures and taking out your enemy and his creatures. Since the mana supply is not copious, exactly how you balance your mana can make the difference between survival and death.

The quest mode lets you learn new spells and abilities, and practice your skills. The actual combat mode is where you move forward in the rankings.

The game is XBox live enabled (tho the demo is not) which should be the real key to this game. Sure, it's fun to play against computer generated characters - but the real joy will be taking your well-trained character and setting him against the world of other gamers, and seeing how well you rank in that world.

The graphics are rather good, and I really felt like my characters and I were a "team" working together to defeat an enemy. The game isn't complex in the "advanced RPG" way nor do the battles involve multiple button-mashing sequences like, say, Mortal Combat. Instead, it is a fast paced strategy game that exercises your mind as much as it does your fingers, and the winner will truly be the person who is the best rounded in ALL areas.

11 of 14 found the following review helpful:

Rock/Scissors/Paper on SpeedAug 13, 2004
By blakletter
If you're looking for something MTG flavored, you should quite frankly look somewhere else. This is a poorly-executed attempt at changing a deep strategy game into a fast-paced game of counters and tactics. It fails. Miserably so.

Tactics in this game roughly amount to whether you send your MTG-equivalent of rock, scissors or paper against your opponent's selection. There's no more depth to it than that. To make things even more frustrating, the game requires you mash buttons as quickly and almost indiscriminately as possible in order to match up with the computer's spellcaster. Thus your choice of rock or scissors is largely decided by luck rather than any true strategy. And once you figure out what an opposing spellcaster's bag of tricks contains, there's nothing more to beating him than always countering his attack and attacking his weakness- for every opponent you face is a one trick pony.

Nothing to see here folks, move along.

3 of 3 found the following review helpful:

Quicky magic fixDec 26, 2004
By David
This game is a rather misleading remake of " Magic The gathering, Battlemage" originally put out for Play station 1.

The entire game takes place in a small arena thats about two screens wide. Most of the time you look at about 2/3rds of your screen and 1/3 of your opponents screen so you know whats coming. Movement is basically forced by having mana power spheres appear on the arena floor. You start needing to play the single player missions mode, its forced as you have to unlock the cards there. You unlock each color one at a time, with diffuculty that starts expecting you to have no clue as how to play to having expected you to learned a special trick to best them. Its a little repetitive as as soon as you finish the color your considered a beginner again and it has to explain things all over for the next color.

The graphics are rather good, especially compared to its predecessors. Unfortunately you wont really be paying attention to the graphics much as gameplay gets on, mostly you will be watching your mana dots. But it does make watching someone else play interesting. The backgrounds for the arenas are just that, none of the arenas actually affect gameplay, there are no obstacles and while one of them looks rather well drawn, some of them are so similar you would swear there are only 6.

The sound gets repeditive quickly and actualy forced me to take "game breaks" because I was sick of listening to their voices. Haveing different voices call out the cards is better then the static male announcer in Battlemage, but the repeditive nature really can get on my nerves.

Somehow after reading reviews and the box I was given the impression there would be "artifacts" that could be unlocked in this game. Alas myself and most MTG players are forced to learn that this is not true. There are no special items or artifacts included in game play, just a few role play elements added in to break up the repeditive fights.

All in all ends up being an ok game to play now and again if you ever have a spare 15 minutes before school or work, but nothing to write home about.

Now for the bad news for MTG the card game players.

- Each color has about 14 cards. Decks consist of 10 cards. As alot of the cards are similar its just a choice on a couple things and a color will always have the same strategy.

- You can use up to 2 colors, but using a second color drasticaly slows your game play and cripples you. A card of any color requires all mana be payed by that color mana. there is no colorless cost. and most spells have increased costs. the end result is a 2 color deck against a player tends to have lost before they can even start.

- 2 color strategy is almost pathetic, its all lil creature swarm and 1 point direct damage because they wont get the resorces needed to cast anything more.

- Alot of the cards costs or effects are not what your used to. its based off it. Its just altered because of limited card options and the odd rule sets they use her.

- Your character can "swat" things. or in other words attack for 1 point of damage. monster damage isnt healed over time so you can kill large things with a few wacks. this works for your opponent too. Sending a 1/1 goblin at your opponent just gives them mana shards as they will swat it before takeing damage. 2/2 flyer? they can just not block it and swat it twice, and end up takeing two damage before sending something nastyer back at you. This makes for some really lame options such as blocking a 5/5 ground creature with a couple of lil cheep summons and then swatting it.

- The only type of evasion is flying, however its a double edged sword. Flyers cant block ground creatures. Worse as flyers are traditonaly weaker they are more swattable.

Bugs

There are two known bugs, and designers have noticed them and there are a few comments on their forums board. First is that sometimes your saved game will be corrupted. there are three fixes for this. Deleteing the save game; Not playing your X-box for 72 hours so the memory resets; And playing 3+ other games for at least five minutes each so that the error in the save buffer is cleared.

The second bug is that sometimes when you exit X-box live after playing a game it thinks your still playing magic. because of that you cant log back on to play again and are stuck with single player mode. As of this time theres no fix for it, and as far as I understand its permanent.

As its hard, if not almost imposible to find an online game for the x-box this bug has been seen much less.

A lil spoiler, at the end of solo missions you get to fight Mishra master of all colors. Yea I got a laugh out of that one too. Shandlahar seemed to fit the storyline more.

With all the problems this game is at least ok eyecandy and a Quicky magic fix for the normal magic player. I couldnt recommend it to a new player as I'd be afraid it would turn them off of the card game. For the semi-serious magic player all I can say is " Hey, its better then duleing yourself". For the serious magic player, its a good laugh for about the cost of a starter, and you can sell it back for a booster.

3 of 3 found the following review helpful:

Great fighting/strategy game!Feb 08, 2004

It helps if you have played the Magic card game, because it will give you a jump on understanding the rules. It basically plays like a fighting game, but with a strategy twist. You can play through a single player quest mode which familiarizes you with the gameplay quite adequately. Most of these duels are fairly easy, but several of them are very challenging, and require thinking along with quick reactions!
The game also has a single player and Vs. mode arcade battle mode, plus the option of dueling online. It is definitely one of the higher replay and fun factor games for any system. I highly recommend it, even for people who haven't played the card game. It is a fun and challenging game.

5 of 6 found the following review helpful:

Fantastic translationJan 23, 2004
By A. Cantu "Pete"
I've had Magic the Gathering: Battlegrounds for since it came out and I really enjoy it but anyone looking for an adventure game this isn't it.

If you have had any love for the Collectable Card Game Magic the Gathering then you will most likely love Magic the Gathering Battlegrounds available for PC and XBOX. Now it has been changed to be more accesible to Videogamers but this does not mean that it has been dumbed down.

A couple of the biggest changes are that this everything is done realtime and that you have to run around to grab mana crystals. When you begin a duel a mana crystal will apear on your side of the arena. For each crystal you grab you can hold up to one mana in the mana bar. Your mana bar will slowly fill up over time. After you grabbed the crystal a timer will start counting down and after runs out a new mana crystal will appear.

There are only about 70 spells total in the game and this while this is a tiny amount when compared to the massive amount of cards out there but each color is well represented. Green has beefy creatures some with regeneration or trample and it can gain a "mana" advantage. White has creatures with first strike, flying, and has gaind life spells. Red has creatures with haste can pump them up with some spells and has it's burn spells. Black has creatures that are, balance but will hurt you when they respawn, become stronger when they respawn, gain control over creatures that they destroy and also has destroy creature spells as well as drain life spells. Blue has small and big creatures with flying, the defensive horned turtle, and has bounce, counter/steal spells.

There are a few different modes of play available. You have Quest which has I believe up to 70 different single player challeges for you. You will have to play through this to unlock spells. In VS. mode where you can play against someone offline or online. In Arcade mode you play as certian duelist with certain spells and duel against 5 opponents before fighting a level boss and completing one level of difficulty out of four. In Practice mode you pick a duelist and an opponent to duel.

After going through the Quest mode you will have unlocked all of the available spells and with these spells you can create custom spellbooks. In these custom spellbooks you can use up two colors.

The graphics are alright though most of the enviroments are boring. The music is ok, but it would have been nice if they added custom soundtrack support. The number of spells is lower that I would like but they get the job done and more spells will be available through XBOX LIVE and the Official XBOX magazine.

Besides those short comings this game is well balanced, quick paced and alot of fun for Magic fans. The single player is good at training you but the multiplayer is where is at. It might be hard to get someone to play with because it can look intimadating. But even if you can't get anyone to play with you, you will be able to find someone on XBOX LIVE. If you have never heard of Magic and you would like something a little different this strategic/fighter might be for you. I really enjoyed this one.

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