I miss you

I miss the Duels community. But this game isn't Duels anymore. It's just Wizards being money hungry. I don't have the time or patience to sit around and manually unlock cards 24/7, and I don't have the money to unlock all the sets. And I don't even want to play unless I have access to all the cards, so it looks like Magic is over for me. All I can do is hope that this Magic Next thing isn't just another greedy money grub.

We had that one day together!

.

Also, for those of you interested in nostalgia, I had this mini-series of throwback videos while I still cared about Magic and YouTube and whatnot. I also had a regular opponent who was my guest, long before he became an esteemed member of our community. I entreat you, watch me get destroyed in these old games against an old friend!

Good lord you were bad at this game. Tried watching the 2014 vid and could not see through the face palm most of the time. Stopped watching at Living Death, it was just unbearable.

I watched the first one myself and had the same reaction. Memories!

Well, I broke down and bought the rest of the sets, and I've been playing and having a lot of fun with this game. I like the idea that this is the final card pool. I didn't enjoy playing when some people had access to cards that I didn't because I didn't have the time or money for them. But now that I have them all, and there's a good amount of decklists for me to try out posted all over these forums, I'm loving this game. I hope that people still continue to post new builds and that as a community we can whittle the card pool down to 30 or so optimized decks. Hakeem, I wish you still cared about this game, because in my experience your decks were some of the best and most fun to play.

This is amazing. What a **** **** way to end this game. In this state? Wow. I guess it's decent and better than least season, but this will probably be the last time I invest in a game from these ****. I supported the game hoping for semi-long term release.

I will admit I was getting tired of playing. I am basically level 20 right now and can barely muster the time to play. But this is ridiculous. I thought we had 4 or 5 seasons left before termination. Holy cow man. These **** people are the worst.

How can anyone defend this lame ass ****. Anyone who invested any money at the start hoping for a viable platform is pretty much just ****. I kind of expected this, but not this soon. Looks like when the player base dropped to a certain level they just said **** it.

Well, that will happen when you infest your game with **** builds that have superior firepower that any random noob can win with. I didn't like the direction this game was going, but the new sets were somewhat decent and we got a couple more answers to things like Planeswalkers.... but damn they could have at least kept this going another year.

How can anyone honestly trust anything this company does? It's very clear they just have ambitious profit hunting campaigns and do not care about the players in any way. It's been like this for years, why would anyone defend them?

"It’s not going anywhere anytime soon. You’ll be able to spend with money on this release with confidence. This is definitely going to be around for a while."

Yeah **** these people.

Good riddance

Depending on when that statement was made(?), Duels arguably has been around for "a while". 2-3 years now iirc?

I do agree with you to an extent. I spent money earlier on (in addition to a LOT of grinding) to keep up-to-date with my collection. If we had known we were going to get cut off like this, I could've withheld a few of those purchases and still had a full collection by now. However it did still keep me ahead of the curve at the time.
Any purchases in this game should've been done with the knowledge that they were a short-term boost but a long-term waste as we would eventually "catch up" with grinding alone. The same way we knew spending $ in the previous DotPW titles would be redundant with the next annual release.

There's also the fact that I've gotten 660 hours entertainment out of this game, which is a pretty good return on ~$100AU or so. I've bought some over-hyped full price "AAA" games ($80-90AU) like Total War: Rome 2 that turned out to be dog **** and only gotten 30 or so hours out of them.
A lot of the NGA regulars around here have clocked 1000+ hours on Duels.

I also spent a couple hundred bucks on Hearthstone and quit after a few months when I realised the whole thing is rigged.

TL;DR - This does suck, but there's worse crimes committed regularly in the gaming industry.

How's Hearthstone rigged?

The "random" cards you get from booster packs aren't random. They'll give you multiple duplicates of the same cards while denying you ANY copies of many clutch cards.
Just when you give up being patient and craft those clutch cards, surprise surprise, they finally drop from packs and have to be disenchanted.
It forces you to get most of your collection via the crafting system rather than receiving them naturally by pack-opening (which is approx. 8x less value for your money).

It also puts new players in a separate pool for X amount of games/wins, so that you have a lot of fun winning and get hooked on the game. Then it secretly tosses you to the wolves (the rest of the community, who are mostly toxic veterans with full or almost-full collections).

Many also suspect a rigged match-making algorithm, which pits your deck against its hard-counter to maintain roughly 50/50 win rates (to keep everyone mildly happy yet feeling like they need to spend more money).

Basically the whole game is designed to manipulate its playerbase and extort as much $$ as possible. Not surprising from the same company that designed WoW to be digital crack-cocaine.

Repost from Magic Duels FB Page:

For the one dude: NO, this game was not even out for 2 full **** years. Stop apologizing for this ****. This was meant to be longer than a 2 year game by anyone's standard. We all expected it to last 3. I don't think anyone on these boards could have predicted the sudden termination.

It's not JUST the termination. It's the way they did it. The way they basically just said **** you to all their fans and did this in the WORST possibly manner. **** god this company can suck my balls.

How I felt hearing the news...