The Twenty-Five Year Journey of Magic the Gathering
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The Twenty-Five Year Journey of Magic the Gathering
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Re: The Twenty-Five Year Journey of Magic the Gathering
#2> In the game, players were fashioned as “planeswalkers,” who cast spells and travel between planes of existence. The spells themselves were the cards, ...
I played 1999-2004 and now 2016+, mostly non-tournament casual for this exact idea that most players seem to have forgotten. Decks with an emphasis on flavor feel more in line with the core theme of the game, and it's a very rewarding experience to roleplay a Planeswalker using their library of spells.
Many new players (especially tournament-minded) seem to treat the art and flavor as tertiary to the mechanics. One person told me they'd still play the game even if it was black text on plain white cards. Apparently the point was to win, not enjoy the aestetic.
Win or lose, I enjoy the fact that my decks have a rock solid roleplay theme and are usually under $40 each.
Re: The Twenty-Five Year Journey of Magic the Gathering
#3The article seems to gloss that this is one of the most potent pay to win loot-box hustles of all time, primarily targeting minors. The game is amazing but has this sleazy side. For this reason most grown-ups I know jumped to one of the living card games, Netrunner or Game of thrones.
Re: The Twenty-Five Year Journey of Magic the Gathering
#4I credit Magic: The Gathering for quite a few points on my SAT Verbal for all the arcane vocabulary the cards taught me! The art was/is fantastic too.
Re: The Twenty-Five Year Journey of Magic the Gathering
#5I credit Magic: The Gathering for quite a few points on my SAT Verbal for all the arcane vocabulary the cards taught me! The art was/is fantastic too.
Necromancer, tabernacle, exsanguinate, odious... the list goes on.
Re: The Twenty-Five Year Journey of Magic the Gathering
#6While the game is great, I find the random card dynamic of the card packs pretty troubling. There is no legitimate gameplay reason why you can't just buy the cards you want for a flat rate.
Re: The Twenty-Five Year Journey of Magic the Gathering
#7In line with the spirit of the article, WotC needs acknowledge and amend this horrible mistake:
http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?multiver...
"Invoke Prejudice" Whenever an opponent casts a creature spell that doesn't share a color with a creature you control, counter that spell unless that player pays X, where X is its converted mana cost.
Also note that the multiverse ID is 1488!!!
This is no coincidence, not a dumb joke. These are hate symbols that can and should be removed from the game.
Re: The Twenty-Five Year Journey of Magic the Gathering
#8In line with the spirit of the article, WotC needs acknowledge and amend this horrible mistake: http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?multiver... "Invoke Prejudice" Whenever an opponent casts a creature spell that doesn't share a color with a creature you control, counter that spell unless that player pays X, where X is its converted mana cost. Also note that the multiverse ID is 1488!!! This is no coin…
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Re: The Twenty-Five Year Journey of Magic the Gathering
#9The article seems to gloss that this is one of the most potent pay to win loot-box hustles of all time, primarily targeting minors. The game is amazing but has this sleazy side. For this reason most grown-ups I know jumped to one of the living card games, Netrunner or Game of thrones.
My usual analogy is golf.
If you show up to play a round of golf, and your opponent has a nice set of professionally-made clubs while you're using some sticks you carved by hand, you're probably going to lose, badly. But that doesn't make golf "pay to win" -- at the competitive level of golf, everybody has made the investment in that baseline of good equipment, and you're back to practice and skill as the differentiator.
Magic is similar. If you show up to a constructed tournament with whatever you could cobble together from a few booster packs, yeah, you're going to get crushed by people with competitive decks. But at the competitive level, everybody has made the baseline investment to have access to the full card pool, at which point you're back to skill (of designing/choosing/playing decks) as the differentiator.
Anyway. Top-tier Standard decks are in the couple-hundreds-of-dollars range, and even if you just go out and get the cards for one of those decks and nothing else, there's enough value in the cards that you can trade/sell and get back not 100% of what you paid in, but enough to make switching to a different deck not all that bad.
Re: The Twenty-Five Year Journey of Magic the Gathering
#10While the game is great, I find the random card dynamic of the card packs pretty troubling. There is no legitimate gameplay reason why you can't just buy the cards you want for a flat rate.
This is just one of the reasons why Limited (building a 40 card deck from only packs that you and your group open) is clearly the best way to play Magic. Another: even though it seems more variance-prone, it's arguable the most skill-testing format in the game.