Gameplay and Strategy

The Economy of War

Art of Magic bears a strong similarity to the collectable card game Magic: The Gathering in its style of play. Many Magic world champions have said that a game of Magic is over before you sit down to play. Building your deck is where the true strategy is, everything else is just details.

Holding a place of power

It's a lone mage, no enchantments, no creatures... Time to go jacking.

Art of Magic is going to keep you clicking and sweating, but like M:TG, your overall strategy is presented before you even start the game. As a wizard there are three poles of influence that spells draw from: Chaos, Neutral and Lawful. In addition, every wizard is given a number of talismans, which are the foci for the spells he or she will be casting.

Each of these talismans is essentially three spells in one, depending on which pole you associate them with. A moonstone talisman can actually cast three spells; Dragon's Breath, an arcing flame that shoots from your wizard's mouth, Dryad, a summoning spell which brings you a servant of the forest to fight with, and Excalibur, an enchantment that calls a powerful sword that attacks everything immediately adjacent to the creature or mage it's been called to protect. However, you must associate your talisman with the proper pole (Chaos, Neutral, or Lawful) before you can cast one of those spells.

Iron Skinning up some dragons	Oww, troll hammers.
Dryad=Minotaur food	Trolls and minotaurs

Power points

Your battlefield will have several power points throughout the map. They work a lot like the shrines in Sacrifice - they're objects on the map which helps you become more powerful. In order to draw power from these places of power you must control them, or have a unit upon them. The more places of power you control, the more mana you will regenerate, which then allows you to create more units and to cast more spells. However, if you go too far, and gather too many power points, your opponent will inevitably find chinks in the armor that your overextended army will produce. You can have only so many units around, and when half of them are spread thin around the map, covering power points - well, you get the idea.

As you go into battle, you will be presented with a limited number of each pole, and a limited number of talismans. It is your job to then develop a strategy around how to place your talismans. The most common strategy, and one you will most likely do first is to place a good assortment of talismans in summoning, and then enchantments. You summon forth a couple of dragons, and a couple of dwarven board riders to support them, and then cast a few bloodlusts and iron skins to keep them in the battle. This is a standard strategy, but given the amount of spells each talisman has, the player has access to quite a bit of variety.

Serious clickfest	Illuminating the night
Ahh, winged creatures don't like tornadoes very much, now do they?!	Our intrepid hero

Changing up

If you should so choose, you might only invest in one summoning spell, faerie, a cheap unit that is very weak, but moves incredibly fast to allow you to keep good control of places of power. You then invest the rest of your spells in offensive spells like fireballs, apocalypse, and various healing spells and enchantments to keep your wizard alive. A single wizard, properly equipped, can rip through most armies if the enemy wizard doesn't have something to stop a rampaging tornado or apocalypse.

This is featured even more in multiplayer and custom games, as you can custom design your character entirely to yourself. If you should choose to go heavy on your creatures, you can raise your max number of controlled creatures, and lower your number of talismans to focus on your dragons and the enchantments you are going to place on them. Likewise, if you would choose to go the previous route and let your wizard do all the fighting, you might only get a control of five, enough to keep a few faeries on places of power, and spend the rest on raising your mana max and the number of spells you have available to you.

The possibilities and combinations available in Art of Magic are almost endless.