Mage Noir

Mage Noir took me back to the early 1990s, when every other card box seemed determined to become the next Magic: the Gathering. It has a fixed card set, mages with substantial decks, coloured mana, and the customary 20 health; the family resemblance is not being concealed.

The turn sequence is the familiar untap, draw, play, almost to a fault. The interesting decision is elsewhere: rather than build a mana base from sources, each round you fill two “buckets” with three new mana in colours of your choice, then choose one of them.

When spells are paid for, mana returns to the buckets as you decide, so the pool is not private bookkeeping but contested space. You try to leave your opponent with the wrong bucket, push them towards colours they do not need, and read the bluff; it is a proper reworking of the old lands problem, not merely energy tracked with different counters.

That is also where the basic set's originality runs out. The art is middling, the theme familiar, and the four preconstructed decks follow predictable paths: red presses damage, blue assembles combos. Three games produced nothing bad, but nothing that held me either: the finishers lack the weight one expects, and you will often need to chain three or four large combo spells to put the other mage away. I found little reason to dig further into the card pool, or to build decks for both sides of the table.

There is a free trial on Steam, and while the online implementation is not remarkable, it is enough to see the system in action. Mage Noir has a mana idea that card-game veterans should examine, but its basic package does not yet give that idea enough room to shine.