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Wizards of the Coast is casting its spell over Android and iOS with Magic 2014

It's been on the cards

Wizards of the Coast is casting its spell over Android and iOS with Magic 2014

If you go into my local boardgame store on any given Saturday, you'll find a cadre of people hunched over decks of cards, whispering strange rules to one another.

They're all playing Magic: The Gathering, you see.

And while they might seem like part of some sort of cult at first glance, they're actually pretty lovely once you get to know them.

If you love the idea of complex dice-based games but don't like the idea of huddling in a corner of a boardgame store, though, you're in luck.

That, my friend, is because Magic 2014 has finally surfaced on both the App Store and, for the first time in the series, the Google Play Store.

The initial download of Magic 2014 won't cost you anything at all. To start off with, then, you'll get three decks of cards, each of which has five unlockable cards.

You'll also get access to the single-player campaign set across the plane of Shandalar, one Planeswalker to fight, and the Sealed Play mode so you can get a taste for real-world deck building.

If you have a thirst for more trading card game shenanigans, you can then throw down £6.99 / $9.99 for the premium content package.

This package includes seven extra decks, 250 more unlockable cards, 18 extra campaign levels, and four more Planeswalkers to scrap.

By purchasing the premium content package on iPad, you'll also unlock the online multiplayer portion of the game, which enables you to test your card-wrangling skills against friends and foes from all over the world. The Android version only contains an ad hoc multiplayer mode, I'm afraid.

Total package

In truth, we loved last year's edition of Magic: The Gathering.

We loved it so much, in fact, that we handed it a Gold Award and described it as "a superb strategy game that offers up a complete package of single-player and multiplayer card combat."

You can grab Magic 2014 for nothing on iPad from the App Store [download] right now. You can also grab it for nowt on Android from the Google Play Store [download].

Harry Slater
Harry Slater
Harry used to be really good at Snake on the Nokia 5110. Apparently though, digital snake wrangling isn't a proper job, so now he writes words about games instead.