Mage Noir

At first, Mage Noir sent me straight back to the CCG rush of the early 1990s, when everyone was chasing a Magic: The Gathering clone in the hope that it would strike gold. It has a fixed card set, mages with 40+ card decks, mana in different colours, and 20 hit points — yes, not even 21, as if it had no interest in hiding its influences. The untap, draw, play flow is so close to Magic that at first I wondered whether there was anything here beyond a very familiar formula.

The meaningful difference is the mana management. Rather than playing lands and gradually increasing my available resources, each round I fill two “buckets” with three new mana of whichever colours I choose. I then pick one of those two, and when I pay for spells, I return the mana to the buckets however I like. It is a clear answer to the long-running discussion over whether Magic’s land system has aged poorly or ought to be replaced with something more controlled, such as the progressive energy of other digital card games.

The clever part is that the buckets are not merely personal resource counters. How the mana is distributed creates interaction: I try to arrange the choices so that my opponent is forced to take the bucket that suits me. That is where strategy and bluffing enter the picture, and where Mage Noir stops being merely Magic under another name. That idea alone is enough for me to think the game is worth a look.

Beyond that, though, I have mixed feelings. The artwork struck me as mediocre and the theme as rather uninspired, full of the expected identities: red for rush damage, blue for combos, and so on. I played three games using the four preconstructed decks and got a little bored; not because the games were bad, but because the finishers lacked the weight I expected, and it often took three or four big combo spells to take the opponent out. I did not even feel like studying the card pool further or building decks without an opponent. At least you can try it for free on Steam, even if the online mode is nothing special. Good ideas and a fresh mana system, but a basic set that is too basic to win me over completely.