As I understad it, a Warrior or Shadow would need the advantage "The Gift" to be able to use magic. But do the Mystic archetypes need it as well?  Such as the Wizard or the Warlock?  I can't seem to figure that out.  Or does no one need it, and taking that advantage just lets you see magic and gives the bonus to MR.

Thanks for the help,

Deverash

Im pretty sure that you need to take "the Gift" advantage to use magic at all, sort of like you need to take one of the psychic advantages in order to use psychic powers.

It seems to be the settings way of demonstrating the relative rareity of magic in the world, so of course you could change it depending on what kind of game you wanted to run (you could make that advantage give some other benifit such as more innate magic for example)

You need the Gift. And you need the advantage to gain access to 1/all psychic powers. It would be unbalanced either.

Remember classes are only patterns for spending points in Anima, if a wizard could do magic without the Gift it would mean that his class gave him a monstrously huge power for free... compare to the Assassin for example...

Excellent.  I was hoping that was the answer, to be honest. :)

A similar note:  You still need to spend a Power Point to gain access to the Discipline that you got from Access to a Psychic Discipline.  The Advantage gives you the right to spend PP on it, not the power.  The same is true of Free Access.

I highly agree on this point, many other RPG's use the odd powers as a sponge to keep the charcter balanced with the person next to him.

Ex, a stright out fighter will have more stats or skills based on the fact he has more build points, thus making up for the fact he can not attempt magic or mental powers. Where as a mage has spent time working out his or her magic and thus suffers from lack of skills or attributes.

This also works out will for the Min-Max players or the players who want a well rounded character.