Not one, but two bits of news about Magic the Gathering on iOS. First of all the iOS client for Magic Duels has finally been updated, adding the Zendikar expansion, and solving the connection problem that made it impossible for many iOS players to play the game for several months. I was even able to recover my card collection from the cloud, in spite of having uninstalled and re-installed the game in an attempt to fix it. This good news is somewhat mitigated by the fact that of course Magic Duels lost most of its iOS players during the long outage. Even as a Magic enthusiast I am personally reluctant to spend money on Zendikar cards after the experience of not being able to use the Origins cards I paid for during such a long time.

So maybe the second piece of news is actually better: Another game with the Magic license launched this week on iOS, Magic: The Gathering - Puzzle Quest. That is a rather interesting implementation, which of course is far away from regular Magic rules. But you do have a deck with creatures and spells powered by mana, only that the mana is coming from a Puzzle Quest match-3 gameplay. The genre mix actually works quite well. My only niggle is that I find the software somewhat buggy and clunky, for example when trying to switch between different planewalkers. Elements in the game that were lifted from previous Puzzle Quest games, like the button to attribute xp points to level up heroes from Marvel Puzzle Quest, work less well in this version, not reacting at all sometimes, or with lots of lag.

But apart from the rather fundamental question why Wizards of the Coast only ever licenses software that is very buggy, I have a reasonable hope that I will be able to play Magic in two different forms on my iPad over the holidays. And that would be something to look forward to!