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22 years in, Magic: The Gathering is the brainiest it’s ever been (2015)

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Re: 22 years in, Magic: The Gathering is the brainiest it’s ever been (2015)

#61

Post by rkowalick »

sturmeh wrote: post #23
rkowalick wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I pretty much refuse to play any format other than booster draft. Flat price, loads of fun, and easy to get into for a brief period of time since you only need to know about the set you are drafting.

Pauper is cheaper on average, and highly competitive and fun.

I just find it hard to think about playing with every set of magic cards. With booster draft, there are only a few hundred cards that you even have to worry about.

Another unlisted benefit of draft vs. pauper is that almost any store selling Magic cards will have a weekly draft.

Re: 22 years in, Magic: The Gathering is the brainiest it’s ever been (2015)

#62

Post by klodolph »

dbg31415 wrote: post #4
adamnemecek wrote: post #2

Magic is probably my fav board game, too bad that you have to put in so much time and money to have fun and the value of cards deprecates so quickly. I tried Hearthstone to scratch that itch but that game is just gutted MtG.

What's a reasonable price to spend? You would probably spend you $15 to go see a two hour movie... I bet you can get away with spending under $7.50 per hour on M:tG. But it is a very expensive game if you buy all the cards and only play it once. I still have cards from the 90s, I don't think I've bought anything in 20 years. Still fun game to play on board game night with friends.

Sealed league. Get a group of people, everyone buys 10 packs for $26, you get to open six of them and you play. Every two weeks you open another pack. Ends up taking 10 weeks and nobody spends more than $26, maybe a little more if you buy card sleeves, iPhone apps to track life, or whatever.

What makes it fun is that you're playing against people with the same size card pool as you. Draft is cheaper ($7.80) but it's over and done in a few hours.

Re: 22 years in, Magic: The Gathering is the brainiest it’s ever been (2015)

#63

Post by touchofevil »

MaxfordAndSons wrote: post #54
touchofevil wrote: post #29

This is nowhere near the brainiest Magic has ever been. I've been playing almost since the beginning and it's been disappointing to see how the game has been simplified. It seems like all competitive standard decks now are creature decks, which is a shame because control and combo decks used to be a huge part of the meta game and required a lot of skill to pilot. I think Wizards deliberately eliminated combo and cont…

I've been playing since Ice Age, and my first competitive deck was Enchantress combo, so I totally feel you regarding mourning the relative power decrease of combo (and hard control) as archetypes. But you do spell out the exact reasoning for this, and I'm inclined to agree with Wizard's decision making here. I play mostly Modern and Legacy nowadays, in part because I prefer the older, more complex interaction heavy…

Agreed. I think Wizards made the right call for Standard in terms of attracting and retaining new players. It's good to hear from another person who got in around Ice Age (same here) and enjoyed the complexities of that era of Magic deck building. I think Magic appealed to the "mad inventor" side of my personality, which is why I miss the more diverse possibilities (hard control & combo) that used to exist in Standard. And I remember the Enchantress combo deck! Good stuff!

Re: 22 years in, Magic: The Gathering is the brainiest it’s ever been (2015)

#64

Post by duaneb »

emidln wrote: post #38
thiagoharry wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can print any card and paste on top of cheap cards, just to play with friends. Its nice to do this with the duel decks for casual fun. If you do this just to play with friends, DMCA never would discover. But of course you can't play tournaments doing this.

For testing I use an open-source program called Cockatrice (search google/github for it). It comes with a utility that can scrape the official wizards card db and then can connect to a multiplayer server. It doesn't support rules enforcement (it's a virtual tabletop), but it does work on Windows/Mac/Linux and gets out of your way enough to be excellent at testing with friends (particularly friends who may not live ne…

Yup, cockatrice is hands down the best way to try out a deck or play style for free. It's how I built all of mine before spending a dime!

Re: 22 years in, Magic: The Gathering is the brainiest it’s ever been (2015)

#65

Post by endemic »

JPKab wrote: post #51
GarrisonPrime wrote: post #15

"The brainiest it's ever been" makes it sound like it's ramping up the intellect. I guess they're saying that because of the end of the "dumbed-down" core sets, but I doubt it's the case for the game as a whole. I tried getting back into Magic after an 8-year hiatus, and so many of the rules had been changed and simplified that many of the subtleties I enjoyed from before were no longer options. Felt like I was payin…

I remember playing the game in the late 90s, and trying again in the early 2000's. The strategy and game-play dynamics were awesome. Not so awesome: the fact that the amount of money a player spends acquiring rarer cards and assembling a deck dictates their success. It's a pay-to-win game and I fucking hate games like that. Not unlike paintball, he who spends the most on gear wins.

> It's a pay-to-win game

After selling my collection of cards, I find that I can still enjoy playing the game using the "draft" format: invest $9 or so for three packs, then have a pleasant evening of play. No more expensive than seeing a movie, and the playing field is more or less level.

Re: 22 years in, Magic: The Gathering is the brainiest it’s ever been (2015)

#67

Post by edem »

GarrisonPrime wrote: post #15

"The brainiest it's ever been" makes it sound like it's ramping up the intellect. I guess they're saying that because of the end of the "dumbed-down" core sets, but I doubt it's the case for the game as a whole. I tried getting back into Magic after an 8-year hiatus, and so many of the rules had been changed and simplified that many of the subtleties I enjoyed from before were no longer options. Felt like I was payin…

That's why a lot of players are playing on Vanilka WoW servers. After the game became mainstream they had to dumb it down to fit a wider audience.

Re: 22 years in, Magic: The Gathering is the brainiest it’s ever been (2015)

#69

Post by lukifer »

GarrisonPrime wrote: post #15

"The brainiest it's ever been" makes it sound like it's ramping up the intellect. I guess they're saying that because of the end of the "dumbed-down" core sets, but I doubt it's the case for the game as a whole. I tried getting back into Magic after an 8-year hiatus, and so many of the rules had been changed and simplified that many of the subtleties I enjoyed from before were no longer options. Felt like I was payin…

If you're looking for another way to scratch that itch, look into Netrunner. The game and the culture are both fun and creative, and it's possible to build competitive decks for about a hundred bucks (as an LCG, all cards come as full playsets, so you know exactly what you're getting).

It's more fun in person, but there's also a free community-made site where you can play online, and most players are happy to teach: http://jinteki.net

Re: 22 years in, Magic: The Gathering is the brainiest it’s ever been (2015)

#70

Post by rkho »

JPKab wrote: post #51
GarrisonPrime wrote: post #15

"The brainiest it's ever been" makes it sound like it's ramping up the intellect. I guess they're saying that because of the end of the "dumbed-down" core sets, but I doubt it's the case for the game as a whole. I tried getting back into Magic after an 8-year hiatus, and so many of the rules had been changed and simplified that many of the subtleties I enjoyed from before were no longer options. Felt like I was payin…

I remember playing the game in the late 90s, and trying again in the early 2000's. The strategy and game-play dynamics were awesome. Not so awesome: the fact that the amount of money a player spends acquiring rarer cards and assembling a deck dictates their success. It's a pay-to-win game and I fucking hate games like that. Not unlike paintball, he who spends the most on gear wins.

It's a pay-to-be-competitive game. Nobody is spending absurd amounts of cash for a deck and expecting to win a competitive event strictly because of it.
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