Magic: The Gathering - Battlegrounds

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Battlegrounds
Developer(s)	Secret Level, Wizards of the Coast
Publisher(s)	Atari
Designer(s)	Wizards of the Coast
Engine	Unreal Engine 2.0
Release date(s)	November 18, 2003
Genre(s)	Fighting
Mode(s)	Single or multiplayer
Rating(s)	ESRB: Teen
Platform(s)	Xbox, Windows
Media	CD
System requirements	Windows 98/ME/2000/XP, Pentium III 700, 128MB RAM, 32MB DirectX 8.1 compatible video card, 8X CDROM, DirectX compatible sound card
Input	keyboard, mouse, gamepad

Battlegrounds is a video game based off of Magic: The Gathering collectible card game. The game is based on the creation of heroes and mages that summon forth powerful monsters, spells, and abilities to defeat the enemy duelist. Duelists learn new magical spells by completing the campaign, with more and more spell books becoming available as the gamer progresses. Each spell is separated into one of 5 spell books, each with their own strengths and weaknesses.

Red: Red is the colour of rage, passion, chaos, and destruction. In the game, Red is the "fastest" deck - with many low-cost spells that can quickly overwhelm an enemy duelist. As Red's spellbook increases, many high-strength creatures come into play, with enchantments that make all the duelist's creatures either preternatually fast or strong. Red also has the most "direct-damage" spells that can negate the entire battlefield to strike the enemy duelist, though half of them harm the caster as well. Red's primary weakness is its own inability to take damage and expensive air units, but is probably the most well-rounded of all the game's spellbooks.

Green: Green is the colour of might, growth, bravery, and nature. In the game, Green's main strategy is to take strong creatures and make them stronger. It is also the only spellbook with creatures and spell-abilities that allow its creatures to "Trample" effectively allowing them to continue a ponderous assault until either they hit the enemy duelist, or get killed themselves. They possess amazing abilities such as Giant Growth, which can turn even the most worthless creature into one that should be rightly feared, as well as incredibly fast mana-regeneration and creation methods. Green's main weakness is that it has no way to win other than through its creatures, lacking any direct-damage spells, and only having spells that last until the creature responds, allowing a cheap way to deal with some high-strength units. Green possesses the strongest creature in the game, the Avatar of Might.

White: White is the colour of purity, life, skill, and heroism. In the game, White's forces attempt to achieve strategic advances - as it possesses many strong creatures with the "First Strike" ability - an ability that allows a creature to attack the enemy before being attacked - thus ensuring their victory over even apparently stronger opponents. White also possesses healing spells and abilities that send a packet of health to the duelist either upon summoning or upon striking the enemy. So widespread can this healing ability be that White has a special enchantment that allows the duelist to win by achieving 50 health. White's main weakness is its lack of creature-destroying or direct-damage spells, with the exception of Wrath of God - which destroys all creatures, including the caster's.

Blue: Blue is the colour of knowledge, wisdom, magic, deceit, and trickery. In the game, Blue's forces are highly defensive in nature, attempting to create an impenetrable wall before unleashing a powerful assault of the strongest air units in the game. Blue's magic is highly focused on confusion, such as unsummoning enemy units to remove spell-given "buffs", or counterspelling the enemy's high-strength and normally game-winning spells such as Avatar of Might. In the most frightening circumstances for the enemy, a Blue duelist can even steal his enemy's spell and then use it as his own for a one-time use. Another useful ability is the Clone, which replicates the closest creature - also very useful. Blue's main weakness is their mostly expensive spells, and a complete lack of advancing or strong ground creatures.

Black: Black is the colour of death, decay, doom, dread, and darkness. In the game, Black's forces are of average strength, though Black's real strength is in deadly sorceries and curses that deal direct damage to the enemy caster and instantly kill enemy creatures. Black also possesses two spells that are vampiric - doing damage to the enemy and giving life to the black caster. Black's creatures also possess the most abilities - though not always beneficial. Two black creatures drain their caster's health every time they respawn, and two others harm every creature on the battlefield upon their death. However, other amazing abilities are the ability to take control of enemy creatures, or to gain permanent strength bonuses with every creature they kill. Black's main weaknesses are its cost/benefit spells and abilities that often harm the caster almost as much as they help him, and extremely expensive mana requirements.

Mixing Spellbooks: Like the original cardgame, Battlegrounds allows gamers to mix decks, or spellbooks to mix spell, creatures, and enchantments to - theoretically - make stronger spellbooks. However, also in keeping with the original cardgame, this makes attaining the mana to successfully implement this grand strategy much more difficult, as the caster must obtain mana orbs of two colours instead of just one. Thus, a normal spellbook can possibly out-power a mixed spellbook by either summoning their most powerful spells and creatures much earlier than their opponent, or by swarming their opponent with a frantic number of weaker, cheaper creatures or spells. An important part of the mixed deck is being able to survive these initial assaults until they can cast their target mixes.

A Note on Mana Orbs: Mana is the game's method of casting spells, or summoning creatures. A duelist gains mana by collecting Mana Orbs that appear over the battlefield at timed intervals, with an increasing time delay between the appearance of successive orbs - so while reaching 5 Orbs is quick, it will take more than 4 times as long to reach 10 Orbs. Orbs become permanent additions that appear under your health bar and slowly fill with Mana.