I have been playing Magic Duels for two years, nearly every day, and on two accounts: One on my iPad, and one on the PC. During that time I bought or earned over 5,000 cards (both accounts together), which is about $600 value in cards. Yes, the bigger half of that was earned by playing, but even if you just consider I spent something like $200, it still is a good amount of money for a computer game. The way Magic Duels, and in fact all online versions of Magic the Gathering, are presented is that you don't buy a game, you "buy cards", just like the physical card version of the game. But the latest development kind of removed that illusion. Wizards of the Coast is stopping support for Magic Duels and is launching a new online platform, currently knows as Magic Digital Next. And I feel expropriated, as if WotC just took my virtual cards away from me.

Legally of course I have no rights here. They haven't even announced whether and when they will be shutting down Magic Duels, they just said they won't add any new expansions to it. But expansions were basically the game of Magic Duels: You played one expansion enough to get the gold to buy the next expansion, and then the circle started over. At every expansion the AI was using decks built around that expansion, which renewed interest in the AI opponent. If they just stop adding expansions, the AI (and the players) will just use the same set of decks over and over, until the game gets too boring and everybody stops playing.

The best case scenario is that Magic Digital Next offers me the same entertainment, just minus my existing collection, forcing me to start over from zero. In Magic that usually means having to pay money, because the starting cards you get for free aren't enough to build a variety of reasonable decks. All the cards I have in Magic Duels, and all the gold I earned there is lost.

The worst case scenario is that I won't have any good platform any more to play Magic against an AI. Game developers have become increasingly lazy over the last years. They just don't *do* AIs any more. It is far cheaper to make games that are PvP only, and basically sell your existing customers as "content" to other customers. But real players are a lot less patient that artificial intelligence players: You can't just interrupt your game on your mobile device because of some event in real life, and then continue that same game later, when you have time again. If a game is PvP only, you lose the advantage of playing on a mobile platform, where otherwise you might want to play on the bus or metro until your stop, or in similar situations. Furthermore in Magic it is very possible that one player has a stronger start than another, due to a variety of random factors. Real players tend to quit in that situation. In Magic Duels the AI takes over if you play against a quitter, but what if the new version of Magic Digital Next won't have an AI?

So right now I am not happy at all over the announcement. They are killing Magic Duels off before we even get to see the first demo of the replacement (which will be in September). And they are doing it in the middle of an expansion block, instead of at least finishing that block. And as WotC has repeatedly messed up digital conversions of both Magic and D&D, I am not at all confident for the future of playing Magic on my iPad.