As background, I'm an avid Hearthstone player, generally love these one-on-one games, and have been a fan of Mage Wars... but had really never played it! I knew that the Spellbook idea was really unique, and I was not mistaken.
In more detail, consider this (always considering base rules only, not card effects):
Magic the Gathering - you get cards out of a large universe and shuffle a deck. You get an opening hand (luck of draw) and you will draw one card per turn. To pay for cards, you use cards to generate the resources you need, that are available to you each turn. Each start of turn it is back to zero.
Hearthstone - you get cards out of a large universe and shuffle a deck. You get an opening hand (luck of draw) and you will see draw one card per turn. To pay for cards, you use mana. Each player has mana, which on each player's first turn is one, then next turn each player gets two mana, etc. increasing by one mana a turn. Unspent mana at the end of a turn is not kept to the next.
Finally, Mage Wars (academy). You get cards out of a large universe and place them in a spellbook. You have no opening hand, every time you want to play a card, you can play any card in your spellbook (no luck of draw!). Each player has mana, which is kept so you can do mana management across turns.
The spellbook, but also the mana management, are what make this game unique and I think quite entertaining. Without a physical board (as Mage Wars non-Academy has) this is much like hearthstone - just one "area", so there's no movement, which simplifies things and makes it a quick game. Note that I have found games actually need about an hour, sometimes a tad more; to make it 30 minutes both players would probably need to be quite the speed players. It isn't the game per-se, just that looking through a spellbook obviously takes time (indecision time).
I suggest anybody, really anybody who has any inclination to play a head-to-head game get this core set. The price is incredible low, two spellbooks, lots of cards, all the tokens you need to get going. Can't wait for the expansions to Academy.
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Two times missing parts
No idea if I like the game or not because after ordering it twice I got two didn't have any of the components in it. I attached a picture of the two boxes I got with what was inside of them. The first one just had the beastmaster binder with 2 decks of standard playing cards and the second one had the wizard binder with two shopping bags in it. No idea who is to blame but be wary of ordering from here.
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