If you've played your fair share of Assassin's Creed games, this collaboration is a good entry point to the long running collectible card game.
I’ve always liked the idea of Magic The Gathering cards, the artwork is gorgeous and who doesn’t like looking at some holographic sparkle but the ever evolving meta felt pretty daunting if I’m honest.
What I do know is video games, and Magic seems to be crossing over with digital games on a pretty frequent basis, it’s a smart strategy to attract some new players and one that doesn’t rely on you knowing what a planeswalker is.
I missed the boat on Fallout, one of my favourite video games series last year when it crossed over but with the launch of Assassin’s Creed tie-in, I was ready to go.
Will you climb up the highest vantage point as this complete Magic The Gathering noob surveys the surrounding terrain and then dives into the perfectly positioned haycart of Universes Beyond: Assassin’s Creed below?
*eagle sound*
I wanted this experiment to start exactly how you would, so that meant cracking the Starter Kit which comes with two pre-built decks ready to play.
Two heroes of the AC games “Eivor, Battle-Ready” and “Ezio, Blade of Vengeance” are the stars of their respective decks and with a quick shuffle we were away.
Magic relies on a resource called mana generated by land cards, you’ll use this mana to cast your spells, summon creatures or create equipment, every turn you’ll have an opportunity to drop a new land onto the field.
With specific costs you’ll want to make sure you match your lands with your card options, as I was picking up creatures to summon I had to make sure I kept up the variety in my land placement so I could pay their specific mana costs.
This was helped by a couple of special dual type lands which could provide one of the two mana types, each deck was built around either plains and mountain or swamp and island.
You’ll want to make sure you’ve got enough lands to power your moves, though even with a pre-built set of cards it was easy to be sitting with a fistful of swamps and islands and nothing to spend them on.
In my first game, my opponent went nine full turns and saw just two creatures in amongst all those spells and lands, all the mana in the world and nothing to spend it on.
I on the other hand had plenty of options to play with, my Italian friend Ezio and I were leaping across rooftops with a good mix of lands, creatures and spells to play with.
With a few creatures on the field, I was starting to attack my opponent and whittle down their health, little by little to start with until bam two of my cheaper “Brotherhood Spy” were stopped dead in their tracks by the equally cheap “Detained By Legionnaires.”
They sat that way for ages, locked up in prison, until I eventually could build up enough mana to cast “Auditore Ambush” a card designed specifically to pull my best card “Ezio, Blade of Vengeance” which had the bonus ability of returning one “Brotherhood Spy” to my hand and sending the offending “Detained by Legionnaires” to the graveyard.
Then I killed Ezio’s uncle.
I know I summoned him, but I mean I had to for lore reasons.
The death of the “Brotherhood Patriarch” is a key inciting moment in the games and had the bonus of giving out a handy little lifesteal from my opponent to me, thanks Mario you were worth 2 life.
After that it was over, with Ezio now on the field and looking for vengeance for his blade, can’t imagine why, swiftly took down my foe and his summoned minions.
I think this is probably the hardest point for beginners, as you’re learning your deck you’ll be limited to discovering as you play, though that is pretty fun to do.
Frankly I was pretty lucky with my draw but it’s tricky exactly to know what is coming up, I’d imagine this is much less of a challenge when you’ve crafted your own deck.
Next game though things were reversed, I was taking a big old trip around the islands and swamps as my opponent pulled a cheap “Bureau Headmaster” which reduced the cost of the power boosting equipment items which appeared quickly and importantly were now cheaply put into play.
Stacking a few of those up alongside the “Raven Clan War-Axe” which also pulled “Eivor, Battle-Ready” into my opponent’s hand and it was quickly over for me.
One of the mechanics I particularly liked was Freerunning which allowed you to reduce the cost of summoning creatures if you had an Assassin out there doing damage already, it meant you could really quickly build up your bureau in no time.
It made me want to play again, just to get even better at understanding what cards I had in my deck and start thinking about what I could use next time round, what cards might complement this particular set… oh no I think I might be in trouble.
It’s incredibly easy and quick to start playing a round and with a simplified format in the starter kit which doesn’t include the more complex legendary Artifacts like the Isu relics or sagas or anything else considered a historic card.
What I really liked was the incorporation of the wild Assassin’s Creed law into the cards available, like it’s really wild these days, but that really lends itself nicely to a fantasy like Magic The Gathering which allows a basically infinite amount of settings.
These cards in this particular set are legal in the Modern format (see Roy’s breakdown of Modern Horizons 3 for more information) so you could roll them into some pretty wild combinations, but the appeal for me is to treat this series as its own themed game.
I did manage to find one of the rarer cards in one of the boosters, the textured foil “Ezio Auditore Da Firenze” which kinda feels like the best card thematically to find for a fan of the games.
It’s fast and fun and for someone who hasn’t played the game outside of a few learn to play games at PAX Australia I can definitely see the appeal, and I'll be playing again.
