Moddin’ Magic: How to revive old Duels of the Planeswalkers

You just love the digital experience Duels of the Planeswalkers. Of course you do. You enjoy playing highly synergistic and flavourful decks made of cards you could never hope to acquire, where the computer does the rules for you and you don’t even have to take a shower! Who would not love that. However, after about 100 hours, the decks that come with the game may become slightly stale. Too bad the series was discontinued after Magic 2014 and we will never get any more. Maybe you just want to know what it feels like to kill an opponent before she even takes one turn, but Wizards would never implement such decks. Thank the Above for modders!

What are mods? Where to get them?

Sometime, somewhere, somebody cracked the encryption that is used to store decks and opened the gate to all manners of decks. Fair Standard creature decks? Modern boredom control? Legacy turn-one combo? You need only ask. There are even mods that add fully custom deck building, a feature that would be really neat as an addition to the game. Just head to a source like this site, download the data the forum post says you need, drop it into your Magic installation folder, and you’re ready to go! Your new deck will be available to play just as if it was Avacyn’s Glory or that one terrible reanimator deck. To uninstall, delete the data you added this way, or delete the folder and let Steam re-download all proper data.

But won’t I be banned and also imprisoned and stuff?

No, there is little chance of that. No one will sue you unless you do something silly like play It That Betrays on turn one in multiplayer. These are not that type of alteration, anyway. Speaking of which, you won’t be able to play with other people unless they have the exact same decks (i.e. mods) as you do. So you get to play with friends, but don’t run any risk of death, legal prosecution, or worse yet, Steam account banning. The AI doesn’t play well with some decks, so playing with friends may be better regardless.

But the engine can’t handle all these complex things!

Absolute nonsense. Wizards has been lying to you. There is no Throat Wolf Santa. The sheep will kill us all. Most importantly, you can implement just about anything into DotP if you just set your mind to it. Or you just let somebody else set her mind to it and then play with the results. Also great. Combos, dual lands, even planeswalkers. If it can exist on paper, it can exist in-game. So? What are you waiting for? Get modding and don’t forget to nag all your friends to play with you. Just be sure to agree on a format.