Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Magic the Gathering players lament the loss of 30-year history

mtgrocks.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 155 posts

Re: Magic the Gathering players lament the loss of 30-year history

#81

Post by j_4 »

EamonnMR wrote: post #59
shostack wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Between this and the recent attempt at looting the D&D community for all it's worth that horribly backfired ( https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2023/01/dd-maker-retreats-fro... ) what is there not to hate? As far as I'm concerned I'm done being charitable to them. They've never been fantastic, and Hasbro has clearly been demanding their dues forcing this. My biggest hope is the Magic community has a great open alternati…

It's very hard to do an open alternative to MTG. MTG's ecosystem is very closely tied to the economics of the physical cards driving the development and community (ie card shops.) Tools for playing magic without cards of course exist, but the vitality of the community depends on the constant refreshing of the environment tied to carefully balanced development.

Of note here is Null Signal Games - https://nullsignal.games/

Android: Netrunner was a great cyberpunk-themed, asymmetrical card game which ran 2012-2018, and ended because of a licensing disagreement between FFG and WotC.

Null Signal Games is a donation and volunteer-driven organization which has been shepherding the game - designing new sets, commissioning artists, providing prize kits, and organizing big events to let the game continue. For the most part, they've been knocking it out of the park. New cards are freely available as print-and-play files. Proxying is allowed and encouraged.

Just to not give a purely rosy picture, I'll note that they foster a very combative social justice element which drove some heavy-handed choices and sour community interactions, but on the whole it's been a laudable effort, and continues to do great work.

Re: Magic the Gathering players lament the loss of 30-year history

#82

Post by courgette »

asciimov wrote: post #61
courgette wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a box with some third and fourth edition decent card somewhere. Some first edition lands, because that’s all my 15 yo ass could pay for. Same as you m, unclear where it is.

I'd like to imagine they, like other tcgs from that era, ended up in a landfill after a parent decided to toss those "baseball" cards telling you years later, "...but you don't like baseball anyway".

Oh that definitely what happened and I’m not even mad. That’s on me. Keep your own shit if you care enough.

To come back to the discussion at hand…maybe someone who care should have back to article up?

A webscrapper and a zip, then torrenting it.

Re: Magic the Gathering players lament the loss of 30-year history

#83

Post by adql »

WirelessGigabit wrote: post #80
snickmy wrote: post #76

Back in 1998, when I was a 12y old, I started a website about Magic. I was an italian kid that didn't know any english, with a pentium 2 and a cracked version of front page. fast forward 3 years from there, I was running the the biggest italian magic community with ~15k concurrent active users daily, with one of the biggest deployed use cased of a asp/access database (because hosts were charing a lot more for php+sql…

I'm actually surprised that ASP & Access were cheaper than PHP & (assuming) mySQL. In Belgium it was the other way around. PHP and MySQL was cheap, anything Microsoft related was more expensive.

...probably running on pirated windows lmao

Re: Magic the Gathering players lament the loss of 30-year history

#84

Post by adql »

vlunkr wrote: post #39
monero-xmr wrote: post #8

Major franchises that have a lot of nerd crossover (marvel, Star Wars, etc.) keep a lot of influencers on the payroll as “advisors” or various types or consultants for events like this. Expect some mea culpas and some Twitter threads from respected people saying, “WotC made a terrible mistake but with the latest changes it’s better now.” Someone at corporate will take a public decapitation as the fall guy with a nice…

Do they really pay influencers? I’m skeptical. There seem to be a limitless supply of megafans who will defend the bad decisions of corporations because they’ve invested their personality in it, not because they’re getting paid.

Payment doesn't neccesarily need to be money. Send some pack here, give early access to some info there and it's really easy to cajole average youtuber to shill for you just because they want to keep the priviledges of getting the stuff early to review (as that keeps viewers on channel)

Re: Magic the Gathering players lament the loss of 30-year history

#85

Post by lisper »

klodolph wrote: post #78
lisper wrote: post #73

I have never played MTG, never even read the rules (are there rules?) But I watched the video [1] linked from this text: > Whether it’s a crazy top-decked Lightning Helix... and listening to the play-by-play I swear to God I felt like I was watching a Simpsons parody of a geek convention. I had absolutely no idea what was going on, on idea what half the words meant, and no idea why everyone freaked out at the end. Ca…

I took a quick look at the video. Quick info—you can deal damage to creatures and players. Creatures die if they take enough damage in a turn, and the damage resets each turn. Players die if they take 20 damage total over the course of the game. Craig is “chump blocking”—he’s getting attacked by strong creatures, and uses weak creatures to block them. The weak creatures (the “chumps”) die, and the strong creatures re…

So... he drew to an inside straight and won?

But... don't players get to stack their own decks? Would he not have known what was on top?

Re: Magic the Gathering players lament the loss of 30-year history

#86

Post by mnky9800n »

TOMDM wrote: post #38
Our_Benefactors wrote: post #3

WOTC doesn’t care about hardcore fans who have history with the franchise, they just care about creating limited run products to juice the fans. It’s been impossible to take the game seriously from a competitive standpoint for about the past decade where they’ve continued to move further and further from the block-core annual release cycle.

The only way to get companies like this to cooperate with what the fans really want is to vote with your wallet. The DND community recently won a large battle against WOTC over the proposed open gaming license changes. Fans saw wizards taking away some of the freedom that made DND great and decided they wouldn't put up with it. Huge numbers of people cancelled their subscriptions and paizo, DND's biggest competitor a…

yeah i mean this is why i stopped buying magic cards, stopped drafting, stopped doing anything related to the game. It stopped being fun. It became obviously "pay to play". Same with dnd. i stopped playing new editions. Why do i need to learn new rules, buy new books, etc.? It is a complete waste of resources. Especially given that

https://www.d20srd.org/index.htm

exists. The real fun of both magic and dnd was creating a story with someone else. You don't need new content for this, you just need some friends. This is what WOTC is afraid people will realize. Their products already exist and can be had for essentially free. You don't need them to tell you what to do.

Re: Magic the Gathering players lament the loss of 30-year history

#87

Post by smagut »

snickmy wrote: post #76

Back in 1998, when I was a 12y old, I started a website about Magic. I was an italian kid that didn't know any english, with a pentium 2 and a cracked version of front page. fast forward 3 years from there, I was running the the biggest italian magic community with ~15k concurrent active users daily, with one of the biggest deployed use cased of a asp/access database (because hosts were charing a lot more for php+sql…

What was the website name? I started playing Magic in Italy around 2002/3, maybe I've stumbled upon your site

Re: Magic the Gathering players lament the loss of 30-year history

#88

Post by michaelt »

shostack wrote: post #27
monero-xmr wrote: post #8

Major franchises that have a lot of nerd crossover (marvel, Star Wars, etc.) keep a lot of influencers on the payroll as “advisors” or various types or consultants for events like this. Expect some mea culpas and some Twitter threads from respected people saying, “WotC made a terrible mistake but with the latest changes it’s better now.” Someone at corporate will take a public decapitation as the fall guy with a nice…

Between this and the recent attempt at looting the D&D community for all it's worth that horribly backfired ( https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2023/01/dd-maker-retreats-fro... ) what is there not to hate? As far as I'm concerned I'm done being charitable to them. They've never been fantastic, and Hasbro has clearly been demanding their dues forcing this. My biggest hope is the Magic community has a great open alternati…

> what is there not to hate?

Presumably what monero-xmr means is: If you're MTG fan, the thing not to hate is MTG, and MTG+WOTC are a package deal.

Much like Star Wars fans have learned to put up with Disney's attempts to wring every last dollar out of the franchise.

Re: Magic the Gathering players lament the loss of 30-year history

#89

Post by thaumasiotes »

j_4 wrote: post #81
EamonnMR wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's very hard to do an open alternative to MTG. MTG's ecosystem is very closely tied to the economics of the physical cards driving the development and community (ie card shops.) Tools for playing magic without cards of course exist, but the vitality of the community depends on the constant refreshing of the environment tied to carefully balanced development.

Of note here is Null Signal Games - https://nullsignal.games/ Android: Netrunner was a great cyberpunk-themed, asymmetrical card game which ran 2012-2018, and ended because of a licensing disagreement between FFG and WotC. Null Signal Games is a donation and volunteer-driven organization which has been shepherding the game - designing new sets, commissioning artists, providing prize kits, and organizing big events to…

> Just to not give a purely rosy picture, I'll note that they foster a very combative social justice element which drove some heavy-handed choices

This is also true of WotC.

Re: Magic the Gathering players lament the loss of 30-year history

#90

Post by rcxdude »

lisper wrote: post #85
klodolph wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I took a quick look at the video. Quick info—you can deal damage to creatures and players. Creatures die if they take enough damage in a turn, and the damage resets each turn. Players die if they take 20 damage total over the course of the game. Craig is “chump blocking”—he’s getting attacked by strong creatures, and uses weak creatures to block them. The weak creatures (the “chumps”) die, and the strong creatures re…

So... he drew to an inside straight and won? But... don't players get to stack their own decks? Would he not have known what was on top?

No, you shuffle your deck (and in tournament play your opponent will cut your deck as well). There are some cards which allow you to partially manipulate or inspect your deck by looking at the top card and/or putting cards on the top or bottom, as well as cards which allow you search your deck for cards, but anything which allows you to look at your whole deck will generally also require you to shuffle it afterwards. (there are combos which allow you to stack your whole deck but they're generally not as good as combos which just let you draw your whole deck).
Post reply on HN