condition: like new
make / manufacturer: God
model name / number: Boy
size / dimensions: 4"

its so crazy how we let fascist "we must protect our children from the enemy" rhetoric invade fandom spaces like this like we have seen all throughout history, right wing homophobes using children as a scapegoat to get people on their side its happening today even ("lgbts are turning your kids trans and gay thru sex and surgery") and anyone who questions it must be a predator who wants to hurt kids too. they are preying on societys duty to protect kids as a way to target anyone who doesnt agree with them because anyone who doesnt agree with someones way of protecting kids must want to hurt them and its the perfect crime. to see spaces of largely young queer people fall for it is disheartening to see given this awful history we had to go thru

We are accepting speedruns, showcases, and volunteers for Fireside Pride 2024 through the end of this month! That leaves less than two weeks to complete your submissions, so if you have some time this weekend, it would be a great time to get started!

Fireside Pride 2024 will be an online event streamed 12/12 thru 12/15 on our Twitch channel - https://twitch.tv/powerupwithpride - and will feature speedruns and other game showcases to raise money for Point of Pride.

Game Submission Form: https://oengus.io/marathon/fp24
Volunteer Form: https://bit.ly/FP2024VolunteerForm
Join the Discord! http://discord.powerupwithpride.org/

Magic Legends launched in a premature early access in March 2021 and then shut down at the end of October before it even got to 'actually' launch. Even though it got hammered a lot by people, I think there were a lot of things nice about it.

When the game launched it had enormous performance issues, it was basically unplayable. This, combined with the initial tutorial being too slow and some predatory monetization, pretty much killed the game because its initial reception was so bad.

The performance issues and tutorial were fixed pretty quick, and the monetization was gradually improved IIRC, but it is long and difficult for games to recover from a bad initial reception, especially if the game has a lot of eyes on it due to the IP. The game also faced a lot of scrutiny because when it was first announced a few years prior it was pitched as an MTG MMO, but really it was just an MTG Diablo style game.

There's a lot of things I loved about the game:

-Great combat variety. You had a set of 12 abilities and you drew up to 4 at once, and you had a few baseline abilities based on your class. The resource system of mana and drawing cards meant I'd end up with with a lot of interesting choices specific to whatever context I was in. It really spiced up normally repetitive and automatic ARPG gameplay for me.

-The gear system was great- no inventory cleanup to do, you essentially just "unlocked" gear. So I got to enjoy the fun aspects of ARPG gear(fancy new gear that changes how I play or makes me think about how I set up my overall stats) without the chores of dealing with trash items or trying to properly store items I maaaay use in the future(or deciding to throw them out because its too much trouble).

^would be better in motion but i love the dreadnoughts.... nice robot

-It was fun building decks of abilities! You could make a deck all about summoning creatures and healing them up with spells/class abilities.
Or one about this one enchantment ( https://magiclegends.wiki.fextralife.com/Fuming+Onslaught ) that let you summon huge creatures for cheap and buffed their attack speed, but they died after 15 seconds.

Or just focus on firing off attack spells and crowd control.
Or focus on buffing your baseline abilities and your survivability.

Or using an enchantment (https://magiclegends.wiki.fextralife.com/Show+of+Dominance ) that makes your creature summons make your strongest creature damage the strongest nearby enemy- encouraging you to summon lots of little fuckos alongside a big fucko.

Or there was a blue enchantment that drew you a card as long as each spell you cast was a different type than the previous one- etc, etc.

It scratched that MTG/GW1/etc itch of making fun synergistic builds with unique playstyles.

-I liked the general art style- spell effects were often satisfying, I especially loved how some of the creatures looked(especially those cool "Dreadnought" robots), the world was pretty, etc...I can tell the art team put love into the game. I don't think it was the best looking and it wasn't particularly unique, but I enjoyed it more than to dismiss it.

-It just scratched a good itch for me. I could just freeform hop into a region at a difficulty appropriate for me and have a fun sufficiently challenging time without grind, enjoying interesting varied combat and just wandering around a pretty world, without fiddling with gear or worrying about respec hoops or having to do things super linearly. Just satisfying and interesting and easy-access and flexible.

For the relatively small amount of time that I played, I had a lot of nice memories with it. Enjoying how pretty one of the hubs was, cooping with my husband and getting excited about escorting a cool robot, Squee, laughing at this one NPC's repeated lines on a janky world quest, HOMARIDS, getting stoked about my Fuming Onslaught build, barely beating some world bosses, etc...

My point isnt that the game was Actually Amazing or something, just that I appreciated it a lot. I'm sure there are some problems I'm probably overlooking. Since I'm almost never fixated on getting the best gear(I just get to where I can enjoy challenging fights and then I stop caring about "progression") its easy for me to overlook how monetization or dailies or whatever affect certain things. Dealing with your 4 spells being randomly drawn on the fly is probably a turn off to a lot of people.

^i loved having so many different creatures at once in some builds lmao, what a menagerie. It gave pretty good "summoner" feels unlike most arpgs

I find it frustrating how a critical atmosphere centered around justified criticisms quickly spirals into a bunch of other random criticisms that can have no relationship to reality. Things like "the spells/cards had nothing to do with mtg at all, it was soullless" even though the game had a lot of cool inspiration for its spells derived from various MTG cards.

You've almost certainly seen completely random games accused of being "just a shitty mobile game" or "looks like a mobile game(aesthetically)" and people are just like "oh yeah, damn, must be right, damn mobile games" without anyone having to prove what the hell that means. There's so many weird dynamics like that for games, including ones where people will memoryhole things about previous games. People convince themselves to 100% write something off because its easier to rate something a 0 or 100 than somewhere in the middle.

The discord server stuck around for a bit after the game was over. There was a dev there who was clearly very sad about what happened- nobody wants to spend years of their life on a project and then see it go out like this. But it was very nice to see that they at least took solace in some of us commenting on things we enjoyed about the game, including one of my comments.(I remember one of the things I said was highlighting how much fun I had with Fuming Onslaught, heh) I'm glad we were able to help them that way.

Nobody wants to make a bad game. The artists definitely poured a lot into it and i definitely felt a lot of the "How can we express this type of mtg card as a fun gameplay idea?" type of stuff in the game, alongside ways it tried to innovate on ARPGs.

I hope some other game takes inspiration from its gameplay design. I think theres some things that they did that were great that make it stand out vs other arpgs, especially for my tastes. But even if that happens its a shame that all the love that went into it is just over.

I wish I could back up the wiki but havent been able to yet, scraping attempts keep getting rejected.

I'm glad I got to enjoy it a fair amount before it was gone.