koichi_hirose, in comments here (and if you haven’t nominated me as a G20 Voice blogger yet, then by all means do so!) requests the following post:
My request: what you think about the current state of Magic The Gathering, about the recent blocks, or what decks you prefer yourself.
In general, I’m extremely impressed with Wizards/Hasbro as a support system for Magic and always have been; they’ve got a core understanding of the concept of not just keeping the brand stable but growing it whenever possible, and of designing the game not only for the hardcores but for the casual player as well.
Personally, I barely play Standard (IE “the last few expansions” for nonplayers) right now. I have one Standard deck built – a green/white Elves deck, the cheapest possible deck I could make that was still reasonably competitive (six rare cards) – and I play it every once in a while when I’m in the mood for a constructed tournament. (I will almost always prefer to draft or play sealed deck rather than play constructed.)
Of course, right now Magic’s Standard environment is kind of warped because some of the tribal archetypes introduced in the Lorwyn block (decks built around a single type of creature, such as Elves, Faeries or Treefolk) are so powerful and synergistic compared to anything else that the environment becomes a rock-paper-scissors game of Faeries/Kithkin/Red Deck, and the Alara expansions will be largely window dressing until those tribal decks disappear in October when Lorwyn rotates out of Standard.
(Which is another reason draft is more fun: when I drop a Woolly Thoctar it doesn’t die thirty seconds later, but instead has the impact that a massive fatty creature should have.)
I more frequently play casual vintage multiplayer (using a lot of proxy cards) with my roommates and friends, and that’s good fun, and the Alara cards have been far more effective in that environment. Magic’s a far better casual game than most CCGs and always has been, which is why it’s had so much staying power where most CCGs haven’t.
Related Articles
14 users responded in this post
I… didn’t understand that. I finally don’t understand M:tG lingo! I’m free! FREE!
You’ve just activated my trap card!
You know, I played the game for about a year back in, like, 1995. I thought it was incredibly fun. Unfortunately, it was also incredibly expensive and everyone else who played it was an asshole. Literally – every single person I ever encountered who played the game was someone who you could not pay me to be in a locked room with, let alone sit down to play a fun card game. To say nothing about the few times I bothered to go to the game store to play, and got blown away by someone with an incredibly powerful deck that just killed me in two turns. Really made me want to continue with the hobby.
if they ever came up with a good computer version – which I am amazed they haven’t done – I’d probably play that.
Dude, you are a prime candidate for the glory of the Cube.
Behold the Cube, in all its glory:
http://www.starcitygames.com/php/news/article/11755.html
http://www.tomlapille.com/cube/cube.html
Take the 50 best cards of each color, the 50 best artifacts, the best lands, and, as Erwin put it, “Stir.”
It’s really great for fun, casual drafts with insane plays and sick decks. Plus, opening a “booster” where your first-pick choices are Black Lotus, Time Walk, and Sol Ring, and the worst card in the pack is Ravenous Baloth, is pretty hilarious.
Just so you know, they did.
I’ve been on the outskirts of Magic for a few years – drafting once every few months or so and not really following the formats – and everything was cool with the new blocs until I found the “Mythic Rare” and flipped my shit.
The absolute worst thing about the game is how players can “buy” their way in, dropping a few hundred dollars on a deck to get cards that are just categorically out-and-out better than equivalently castable commons and uncommons.
The idea that they have to add “rarer-than-rare” cards to a game that is already financially top-heavy pissed me off to no end.
Beyond that, I’m continuously impressed that they can release edition after edition without letting the game get stale. I just wish they didn’t have to do it at the expense of my pocketbook.
My request was handled! and first! Yay! Thanks, it’s cool to know, I myself have only begun Magic this year, and love it. It’s way better than Yu-gi-oh!, which I played before, where non-creature cards don’t have a particular color, and so may be played in any deck, and so certain cards become necessary for every kind of deck, which greatly reduces the gameplay. In Magic, you have at the very least five colors to choose from.
Zifnab: it could be worse: in the Yu-gi-oh! card game, there must be a dozen different kinds of rarity (off the top of my head, common, rare, super rare, ultra rare, secret rare, parallel rare, ultimate rare, golden rare… I am not making this up)
As for the expensive part, it’s better to have many friends who play it, so you can exchange cards you don’t need and so, spend less money. That’s what I did, and I already have two decks to play with. I should try a draft sometimes
My friends and I played on and off for years. It was a big part of our social network when we were in high school- on weekend we’d go over to each other’s houses and play that and video games all night. We were such dorks we even played over the phone using the honor system. :-p
We dropped it senior year, then picked it back up again in college only to drop it again. It was just way too expensive to keep up with and playing in tournaments competitively just got boring because the same three deck types always won. A lot of the fun of playing it when it first came out was coming up with original decks to play against friends/others but it’d become such a freaking science that it stopped being creatively fun and started becoming tedious.
We did try picking it up again one last time a few years ago when we all had decent jobs that afforded us an expensive pass time. We wanted to try and go competitive, pooled our resources, dropped well over a grand or two a piece, and it still really wasn’t enough. We’d play amongst ourselves for fun, but there was only three of us and eventually it just got boring. I really miss magic though. It was an extremely fun thing to do with friends.
See, that looked like it might be cool, but then I looked around and for some reason they replicated the “real world” purchase model online – you buy cards online in digital boosters, for the same price you pay for real-world cards.
Why not just have a digital game where you pay and get all the cards, ever? Like, I go into Best Buy and pay $40 for a Magic computer game and just, you know, open the box and play it. I mean, seriously, what is the point of that kind of model? Besides the fact that there are people who are apparently stupid enough to pay for an exact digital approximation of the same gaming experience they get in the real world…
Because they need a financial model to ensure that their servers don’t collapse, much like any MMORPG.
What’s stupid about it? Believe me, the worst thing about playing any collectible card game is storing all the fucking cards. And the tradeoff of sociality is convenience – if you want to play in a tournament or draft at your leisure, there’s always something going on with MtGO.
In any case, if your gripe is “I’m paying for fake cards,” Magic Online actually offers a redemption scheme wherein, if you get a full set of digital cards of a given expansion, they will let you trade them in for for-reals cards.
Tim, when I played Magic, there was a freeware game called Apprentice that let you build any deck you wanted. Not much in the way of graphics, but you can’t beat the price. I couldn’t tell you if it’s still in use, though.
Reality check.
The ‘Mythic Rares’ are slightly rarer than rares from old sets.
The rares are more common than old sets (because there are less rares per set, so if you open X packs you get more of each individual rare than you would in an old set).
The Mythic Rares are mostly the big critters and planeswalkers that collectors and little kids are after. The only Mythics from Alara that were decent were Elspeth, and maybe Ajani Vengeant (and that one I got 4 copies of as promos just for attending prerelease and release tourneys).
All the old rares that everybody needed 4x, like rare dual lands, Mutavault, Bitterblossom, etc… are all going to be stuck at the rare slot, so they are now MORE COMMON than they used to. And cheaper.
Oh, and ‘I’m paying for fake cards’ is funny. It’s not like that Black Lotus has 1000$ worth of cardboard…
Do you ever play EDH? Elder Dragon Highlander is a fun, all expansion format where your wonky rares can all have a home, and where big, fun smashy plays are the order of the day.
Check out http://forum.dragonhighlander.net/EDH_Forum/ for more details.
My friends and I got tired of paying the money for Standard as well, so Sealed and EDH are now our main means of entertainment, Magic-wise.