Might & Magic: Duel of Champions

» see duelofchampions.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

Ubisoft announced Might & Magic: Duel of Champions on 23 April 2012 and opened a closed beta in France the same day. It was a free-to-play online collectible card game set in Ashan, the world of the later Heroes of Might and Magic games, and it was built by Ubisoft Quebec. The first set had 224 cards. The beta accounts were wiped on 4 September 2012 and the open beta began nine days later. The official release followed on 19 December 2012 together with the first expansion.

The design borrowed from Magic: The Gathering and dropped its land cards, so resources simply grew by one every turn. Each deck was led by a hero card whose three scores decided which cards could be played. Creatures stood in two rows of four slots, melee in front and ranged behind, and could only hit what stood across from them. A new account got a 59-card starter deck for one faction and earned the rest through boosters of twelve cards.

A Steam release followed on 7 November 2013, and a console version subtitled Forgotten Wars reached PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 in July 2014. There was an iPad version until September 2015. I missed all of it. The game ran from 2012 to 2016, when I was around thirty and working, and a free-to-play card game with four currencies was not going to get its hours from me.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ a year without updates ~

In May 2015 development moved from Quebec to Ubisoft Chengdu. On 13 October 2015 Ubisoft announced that the game would receive no further updates, eleven days after the Steam page had previewed a new Draft tournament mode. The servers stayed on. The closing notice later described this as a kindness: by ending updates, it said, "we were able to offer you the game for a prolonged period of time".

~ the parting gift ~

The end was announced on the official forum on 23 August 2016 and on Steam three days later. The console version was delisted on the day of the forum post and lost its online play on 24 September. For PC the date was 31 October 2016, when the game would close and take its website and forum with it. "Know that this was not an easy decision for us," the notice said.

The real-money shop was closed at once. The in-game shop stayed open with a permanent discount, which the notice called "a parting gift", and players were told to "go crazy and have fun" with whatever they still owned. There would be no refund for currency already bought and no conversion to another Ubisoft game. The notice ended by pointing at the Ubisoft Club, which was giving away one old game a month for the company's 30th anniversary. MMOBomb counted two other Ubisoft free-to-play games being closed that week and ran the story under the headline "Ubisoft Cleaning House".

~ 996 cards, all unlocked ~

By the end the game held 996 cards across six factions. In 2013 it had been big enough for a world championship called Road to Paris, won by a player named Avkall, whose Stronghold deck Ubisoft then sold as a World Champion 2013 pack. In January 2019 fans brought up a private server with the same rules and every one of the 996 cards unlocked for everybody. The old address duelofchampions.com now carries a guide site that describes itself as a fan-kept archive.

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