Wizards of the Coast sues copycats

kotaku.com/wizards-of-the-coast-is-suing...tm_medium=Socialflow

Thought it would be an interesting thing for some of you to read.

Every card on the Hex TCG website could be played in an M:tG game, the M:tG colour identity is totally lifted into Hex TCG, this is a pretty blatant ripoff. At a quick glance of the cards, knowing the rules to M:tG I could play Hex if you put a deck in front of me and probably get 90%+ of the rules right.

Is Hex TCG cheaper? Have we found a cheap way to play Magic??

Black Barney wrote: Is Hex TCG cheaper? Have we found a cheap way to play Magic??

Yes, boosters are $2 instead of $4.

Yeah, there's making a clone and there's directly copying every single mechanic, the theme and many of the cards. It's as much of a rip-off as it gets.

I mean, it's so obvious they simply took some of their favourite cards and copied them, down to the mana cost and theme. Hell, they didn't even change the name of some of the cards:
imgur.com/a/nHV7g

Shameful.

I wish they had called it Magik or Magica instead of Hex, that would have been perfect.

I'm not one to be overzealous in supporting lawsuits, but this one is well-deserved. This seems even worse than the GW/Chapter House suit given that Hex isn't just making components for Magic, it's a ripoff of the game in almost every way. Yeah, I'm sure the Hex folks will claim that there are "digital only" features to some of the cards (e.g. permanent bonuses to enchanted creatures, etc.) but it's just too close. Shut it down or change it significantly.

Also, Hex just looks like a worse version of Magic. The digital art is poorly rendered and unimaginative. Card abilities are all things we've seen before with new "not-magic" names. Not all magic sets are amazing, but most sets/blocks are pretty memorable (the Dark, Ice Age, Urza block, Innistrad).

One possible positive outcome that Hex might precipitate (along with the popularity of Hearthstone) would be that WotC starts feeling a bit less secure in their market dominance. Ideally this would motivate them digitally "print" more scarce format staples so that playing online isn't so prohibitively expensive. They should also improve their MODO client, which looks like it was programmed in the late 90s. I don't play online, but as a vintage enthusiast I'd still like to see a decent implementation of the upcoming online vintage masters set.

I wish they would take some of their lawyer money and spend it on programmers to port MODO to Mac.

How is Cryptozoic tied to this? They seem to have been around long enough to know better. Maybe they do know better? Are card layout and text/effects protected in a case like this?

You don't fool around with the colour pie.

jeb wrote: I wish they would take some of their lawyer money and spend it on programmers to port MODO to Mac.

That was the first thing I looked for when I got this Macbook, the one you probably saw my post of on FB. Oh well, at least I got Pokemon Online.

It's absurd that they don't have MTGO for Macs. I have a Mac, as do most MTGO users I'm friends with; we all use Bootcamp to give ourselves a Windows partition purely for playing MTGO. Which is ridiculous.

Related to Magic Online: Josh Look's wife's first Magic art (the rest of the card just looks like shit because of the new client):

www.wizards.com/magic/magazine/article.aspx?x=mtg/daily/ld/299

Nice art. And what a great card to get to be your first for MtG!