I'm playing Magic the Gathering 2012 with my girlfriend on Steam, and I'm finding that the turn timers go by too quickly. I can see why the timers are needed for competitive play online against random opponents, but it feels like there ought to be a way to turn them off if both players agree. Competitive play doesn't have to be serious like a real tournament, after all.
Is this possible?
Under settings-->advanced, there is an option called Hold Priority: You must hit continue to end each of your main phases.
You still have to hit "freeze time" quickly enough to counter-act spells, or play instants at just the right time, though. Knowing the shortcuts makes this a bit easier: Freeze time default to space bar, while continue defaults to tab.
Yes you can pause it, even in multiplayer. Simply press space bar to pause the game and give you enough time to choose your card.
Once you choose a card, press continue to play it, and the timer will become un-paused and continue counting down. If you still need more time to think of your other cards, press the space bar after playing each card so that the timer will pause again.
Yes it works online as well, but please don't pause the game for every single card in multi-player, people will most likely become annoyed. Its fine to do it once a turn, figure out what you are going to do, then do it, but I believe you get 60 seconds per main phase in multi-player (or something around that long) which should be enough time to play all the cards you need after you have paused once to think about it.
Happy playing!
You can't turn off the global timers in multiplayer in any version of the game. You can pause the game with spacebar on steam and with X on Xbox. You can pause the game at almost anytime, but I have noticed that while certain abilities resolve, especially during your opponents first main phase and during certain activations, the game doesn't do a very good job of recognizing the pause on the Xbox. I haven't have the same problem with the steam version.
