Mabinogi Duel is a fantasy trading card game for Android (and soon to be iOS as well, in May 2015) with a unique mechanic of no random card draws and a distinct Korean manga art style. Cast spells and summon creatures as you fight your way to the Holy Land in a quest to cleanse your character’s half-elf nature back to being fully human again, with twists and turns along the way.
The game is based on the Korean MMORPG Mabinogi, but you don’t need to know anything about it to play Mabinogi Duel. It is a bold move by a Korean developer attempting to break through into the Western app market – but is it a good game? I think you’ll be surprised. Read on to find out…
The view of a typical duel, with your opponent and story environment featured behind the two rows of the battleground and your hand of cards in the foreground.
Gameplay
In Mabinogi Duel, decks are just 12 cards in size, but you have access to all of them right from the start of the duel – there is no drawing of cards from a random deck. This puts a much heavier emphasis on strategy and skill over luck and randomness (as is often more present in other TCGs) and this really is the game’s strongest aspect. You have to play it see just how genre-changing it actually feels.
Players each control a row of 5 card slots which they play cards to, summoning creatures, building defensive structures and casting spells. Another unique element is the leveling system that occurs in a single game: players and their cards start off at Level 1 with 1 action per turn, slowly gaining experience points during the duel until they are Level 3 with 3 actions per turn. The stats of cards get stronger as you level up and your player health goes up too.
Leveling up costs an action and it is not an automatic process but rather a strategic decision when to trigger it. This becomes a big part of the gameplay as well, sometimes holding off on leveling up in order to play another crucial card first or vice versa.
Each Quest duel is embedded into a story event that is believable and thematic, with on-going dialogue and story events occurring even while the battle unfolds.
On one hand, you have what appears to be a very typical “lane combat” style card game: your units have Attack and Health points, sometimes with an added dimension of the Defense stat which takes twice the amount of Attack points to smash through. Units trade blows at the same time, unless a blow is enough to kill the enemy creature in which case they do so automatically while taking no damage back in return.
What makes the game unique and completely changes the way you approach each duel is the fact that you get to play your deck in the order that you like, and also that cards can be played more than once by paying life points in order to return your entire graveyard back to your hand again. Being able to restore your hand with cards from the graveyard for the cost of an action (and slowly but gradually larger amounts of health) is a stroke of brilliance and I love it. This function gets more costly with every use and there are very few ways to restore a player’s health, meaning that each game is always edging closer to a victor which and prevents any stalemates from occurring.
There aren’t a lot of RNG (random effect) cards in the game, with card effects tending to prefer to point towards a particular aspect of gameplay that will be variable but clearly determinable by looking at the board state. This makes it much more strategic than it’s bigger, more popular rival, Hearthstone that has many more RNG effects.
Paying for cards uses up a number of the resource of that card’s faction (these are discussed below) and you gain 1 of each resource of the factions present in your deck at the start of each turn. At any time, you can press the “Charge” button to gain a resource for the cost of 1 action, but it is randomly selected as to which resource you gain. In the later stages of games, where costs of cards are higher, you will need to Charge quite a lot, and this is where the variance into the randomless card draw system comes in – you won’t always reliably get the resources you need to cast the cards you want (as mono-faction decks are not permitted to be built).
I can’t stress enough how much I love this system already, and even though I have a hand full of cards with no surprises about what is possible for me to play, it still feels much more exciting than you’d think. Knowing what possible strategies you can execute at any given time, simply by a calculation of how many actions and resources it will take for you to get there with little variance to stand in your way, you can respond to your opponent’s threats in a controlled manner that just isn’t always possible in certain games like Hearthstone. For that reason alone, I think this system is going to prove the game worthy as a mobile competitor to Blizzard’s behemoth (albeit at a shorter game length, but just as strategic).
The menu system is a little bit Asian in its style of scrolling vertically to get around, but since there are just a few options on each page it doesn’t feel clunky. In fact, the opposite: it’s a beautiful user interface to both navigate and behold.
Modes and Features
Unfortunately Mabinogi Duel‘s campaign is staggered by the use of the dreaded ‘stamina system’ which recharges slowly over time, but I didn’t find it a hindrance and I’ve been playing for many hours in a row today with no breaks preventing me from continuing due to running out of stamina. (Many other game modes don’t even use the stamina which makes me wonder why it’s even necessary at all.)
The single-player campaign takes the form of a string of Quests as you embody a half-elf, half-human male who is on a journey to a place called the Holy Land. Here, there is magical water that will apparently “cleanse” him of his half-elf blood, since being half-elf is a mark of disgrace in his home village. Accompanied on his journey by a band of eccentric characters, we soon find out being half-elf is rather rare and a whole bunch of people turn up wanting a piece of him for their own nefarious reasons.
Quest duels are punctuated by story events and dialogue in a way that makes them actually feel relevant to the story and a part of it, rather than an awkward mechanical interjection. Occasionally your cards or objectives change depending on the enemy and the story event which makes for some rather unique encounters – one even saw you taking up the “deck” of a much more powerful character that you had no possible way of losing the match with, yet for the sake of story you got to beat a bad guy into a pulp just to show off to you, the player, how powerful this ally character is. Was it useless gameplay-wise? Completely. Did I care? Not at all – I was too busy being impressed with cool it was, and how it actually added to the sense of engagement with the story and it’s characters.
The way the campaign actually uses the gameplay engine to tell aspects of the story made me all the more interested in the story it was telling, especially when it added unique victory conditions or cards for you to use.
Mabinogi Duel‘s Arena is the closest thing to a “constructed” format for the game – you take your deck in with you and you play against all the other registered players’ decks, but the computer controls their’s. This may disappoint many people, but you need friends in order to play a live, person-to-person match in this game. There is also a random deck version of the Arena. Both versions reward large amounts of gold, premium currency and coupons for booster packs.
Drafting is another AI game mode, unfortunately, but for what it lacks in real-world opponents it more than makes up for in ingenuity of method. You are presented with a grid of cards (see below image) and you may choose to “hold” certain rows of those while having the opportunity to replace all of the cards that are not being held, up to a maximum of three times. This puzzle-like grid sort of reminds me of a gambling slot machine with it’s “hold” buttons, but it actually works really well. You have to compromise on what cards you want by sometimes holding a row that has 1 or 2 cards you don’t really want and it is a challenge all of its own to make a deck you feel happy with.
At the end, you choose which three factions of the cards you’ve selected that you want to keep and the game builds you a deck out of those, randomly replacing the rest until you have a total of 12 cards for a full deck. You then get to play against the AI, running a gauntlet of rounds depending on the difficulty you want to attempt, with varying gold rewards and a card prize. Draft mode is really fun and doesn’t cost you anything to play so you can do it repeatedly, enjoying the challenge of constructing a new deck each time out of this strange mini-game.
This drafting method is almost a kind of puzzle, and it’s bizarre how well it works while also providing a unique challenge of its own in forming an ideal deck.
SoulLink is one of my absolute favorite things about Mabinogi Duel. You have a cable on the screen which you’re instructed to “pair up” with a friend’s phone end-to-end to plug in to each other. It creates a digital link between your profiles and you’re given several options for what you can do with the other player. You can play a friendly match with them (which is the only way to play a true, live, player-versus-player game so far from what I can tell).
You can also pay a small gold fee to play a “Champions Duel”, which helps players advance their level but only the winner gets to take the experience points. It states that only people above Master class 1 can attempt this mode, which is exciting because it makes it sound like it is the only way for advancement of higher level players – does this mean real-live tournaments are in the game’s future? That would be extremely interesting.
Lastly, you can actually trade cards with each other live, something that a lot of digital collectible card games don’t actually do, hence not qualifying as actual ‘TCGs’ anymore. A unique aspect of the trading which I liked was that it showed the relative values of each card in gold, and if you are making a trade that is too skewered in favor of one person, the game won’t let you make the trade. This is likely to protect new players from being forced into unfair trades, and it’s an interesting decision on behalf of the developers to integrate a feature like this.
You will receive a red warning and a block to the trade if the value of one person’s offer is much higher than the other’s. This might annoy more advanced players but I appreciate the function it may play in protecting newer players.
Deckbuilding and Strategy
The current pool of cards is promised to be at around 1000 cards, released in content updates as “Generations”, but even the first generation has nearly 200 cards to play around with. This is a LOT of cards, and shows that the developers are true to their word that this is going to be fully fledged TCG by all traditional means.
Currently there are several factions in the game which you are free to mix as you please, up to a maximum of three factions: Light, Dark, Nature, Mana and Gold. Each have their own thematic and mechanic focus, with some variations. Nature loves big creatures with heal effects and ranged attacks. Dark loves dealing damage, killing, and using the graveyard for effects. Mana is very control-based with bounce, clone and movement effects. Light loves to gain resources and add defense to cards, while Gold is good for rounding out decks with neutral-type cards that fit with most other deck strategies.
Given that the game’s focus is on no randomized draws for your deck, you are literally free to find the card synergies you like the most and carry them out, near reliably, each and every game. In theory, it sounds awful – surely someone will come up with the most powerful deck and never play anything else? However, from playing with the various factions they all appear incredibly balanced and I feel like the variance in the resource system accounts for enough of a buffer between any deck and it’s ideal execution in-game.
Deck building even functions like you’re pulling cards out of a traditional card binder, further blurring the game’s distinctions between the digital and the physical. It feels incredibly nostalgic to flip through binder pages full of your own collection and I love this.
Final Thoughts
Mabinogi Duel, in three words… Blew. Me. Away. I came to the game with no expectations about what I was about to encounter and I am extremely impressed. In my opinion, this game completely changes the gaming standard for TCGs on mobile/tablet devices. It has the feel of a traditional TCG while somehow scaling down the length and complexity without compromising on the strategy and player skill requirements of the genre. In ways that Hearthstone can feel a bit too hefty a game for phones and tablets, Mabinogi Duel scales perfectly into the platform by delivering as strong (if not stronger) gameplay in around half the time and with a lot of polish added on top.
Many mobile TCGs end up throwing the baby out with the bath water in an attempt to appeal to a casual audience, leaving you with a clickfest that doesn’t really reward player skill or strategy. I truly believe Mabinogi Duel has proven that this approach is simply an excuse for lazy game design. Mabinogi Duel does not compromise on gameplay design in its attempt at mass appeal; in fact, it gracefully and successfully achieves the middle ground that it is seeking to embody whilst proving that authentic TCG design is at the heart of this game’s motivations.
From the strategic mechanics and deck building options, to the unique drafting mode, to the nostalgically heart-warming emphasis on face-to-face dueling and card trading; Mabinogi Duel feels like it is hearkening us back to the golden age of people-centric TCG communities without compromising on delivering an exciting, video-game like player experience as well.
It’s not without some flaws, for sure (especially with bugs plaguing the early stages of Open Beta), but these are minor enough that they can be ironed out over time and it is always possible to implement new game modes in the future. Overall, the language localization seems to be incredibly successful so far with only a few minor issues that betray its origins as a non-English game (if the art style didn’t already give that away).
Nevertheless, Mabinogi Duel has me excited about faster-paced mobile TCGs again in a way that I haven’t felt for a long time. It appears to be a further step into the new, golden age of truly authentic TCG experiences that are being born at the moment in digital form. I hope the eccentric name won’t put people off: you absolutely have to check out this game if you have even a passing interest in the genre.
For more screenshots, click here.
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