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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)

#121
post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My biggest problem from a couple years back was just one kid who's parents dropped like $600 on his deck and just played to be smug about his 30 damage turn 3 on friday nights. I've always loved trying to make competitive decks with as little money as possible though, maybe it's just me being silly.

Competitive Magic has a financial barrier to entry, yes, and always has. In that sense it's no different from any other hobby (and is cheaper than quite a few). Also it's generally a very bad idea to try to build your own decks from scratch if you want to be competitive. Although things shift far more often (due to new sets and rotating formats), competitive Magic is similar to chess in that you're better off studyin…

Competitive only in the sense of having interesting, non-standard games (that weren't a face roll) at nothing really higher than Friday meetups at the games shop, sorry if that wasn't clear. Anyone can fork out for the latest comp winning deck, read the overview to see how you play the cards and roll the local meetup, I was simply saying that isn't where the fun is for me.

And yes, we spent our fair share reading up and talking to other players about their meta decks, that in itself is great fun also, just of a different kind.

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

#122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Doesn't having that card in your library nearly guarantee an infinite descend into madness?

If you're playing the card, then it is no longer in your library. (Remember, your library is your undrawn stack of cards.)

It would be fun to build a library of just those cards.

Infinite recursion until opponent stops acknowledging you and packs up his things and goes home.

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

#123
post #42

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…

Are there any other games that are "Brainier" than Magic?

Lots. Try 1830 and its million variants.

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

#124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From what I heard, it costs a lot of money to purchase a competitive Magic deck, but the cards tend to hold their value so you can just sell them once you're done playing it. Compare to, say, Hearthstone, where the digital cards have zero resale value, but the up front cost is substantially lower.

What I typically do when a new set comes out is to buy 3 to 4 "boxes" of the set (around 100 booster packs). Over the next couple of months I'll draft the set with friends or we will do casual sealed tournaments etc. (You need 24 boosters for an 8 man draft or 6 booster per person to run a sealed tournament.). There is a group of us who get together every fortnight or so to play limited like this - usually over a few…

I've always wanted to get in to some regular in person gaming like this with friends, my circles are just a little too small and disconnected to sustain it though.

I think I might start trying to be the organizer more, it might just be that everyone is waiting to be asked :)

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

#125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Doesn't having that card in your library nearly guarantee an infinite descend into madness?

If you're playing the card, then it is no longer in your library. (Remember, your library is your undrawn stack of cards.)

[deleted]

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

#126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you're playing the card, then it is no longer in your library. (Remember, your library is your undrawn stack of cards.)

It would be fun to build a library of just those cards. Infinite recursion until opponent stops acknowledging you and packs up his things and goes home.

I think you've underestimated the stubbornness of magic players :-P

(There's also a deck card limit of 4 of any one card. ;) )

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

#127

"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 disagree. I've played MtG three times in my life: back in 1997, in 2004, and in 2016. I'm currently in a sealed league at work, and we're finding that Kaladesh is pretty rich with organic complexity. In my experience, it requires a lot more mental effort than I remember using a decade ago, and the people I'm playing with have expressed similar sentiments. The set seems to be particularly sensitive to issues like ti…

I suspect both you and your opponents have become more complex as players in the past 20 years, regardless of how Magic may or may not have changed.

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

#128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you're playing the card, then it is no longer in your library. (Remember, your library is your undrawn stack of cards.)

It would be fun to build a library of just those cards. Infinite recursion until opponent stops acknowledging you and packs up his things and goes home.

As another comment mentioned, you can't play more than 4 of a card in a deck.

But Magic didn't start out that way -- you could have any number of cards in a deck. (The creator, Richard Garfield, assumed that most people would only have a few hundred cards, so no one would have that many of any specific card.) I don't know exactly when that rule was introduced (Shahrazad was printed in Arabian Nights, the first Magic expansion), but let's ignore the rule.

So you build a deck with only Shahrazad and Plains (to cast spells, you need to pay the casting cost. And that cost is "white mana", which you get from a card called Plains). If you don't have any other cards in your deck, you can't kill your opponent. So you have to rely on the opponent losing another way.

There's a rule in Magic that if you have to draw a card, and can't, you lose. This is called "decking" your opponent. So if we keep recursing, eventually one player will run out of cards. But note that in most formats of Magic, there's no maximum size of your deck. Most formats have a 60-card minimum. So if you build a deck with 50 Plains and 50 Shahrazad, you'll have more cards in your deck at all times.

If you go first, each player draws an initial 7 cards (down to 53 in their deck; 93 in yours), and then on turn 1 draws another card (down to 52 in theirs, 92 in yours). On turn 2, you draw a card (91) and play Shahrazad, so each subgame consists of your opponent's library going down 8 cards, and your library going down 9. So start again. After the next recursion, they have 44, and you have 82. Then 36/73, 28/64, 20/55, 12/46, 4/35, and you win. You pop up a level (to the 4/35 game), and your opponent loses half their life (down from 20 to 10). You play another Sharazad game, and again you win, and in the 4/35 game, they go to 5 life, then you Shahrazad and they go to 2, then to 1, and you win. So at each level, you need to win five times (the branching factor is five). And there are seven levels, so there are 5^7 (78,125) games that you need to win through decking your opponent.

You can't pull this off in a tournament; you only have an hour to play each match (that is, 3600 seconds), and you have to win two games to win the match.

So if someone tries to Sharazad you in a tournament, they'd definitely be able to beat you, given enough time. But all you have to do is not resign, and they won't win; you'll tie the match. That's better than conceding.

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

#129
post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

This is how I got in to MtG, and can confirm that its super fun. If you're lucky enough to find a group of friends that will participate, don't let the opportunity pass you by.

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

#130
post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree. I've played MtG three times in my life: back in 1997, in 2004, and in 2016. I'm currently in a sealed league at work, and we're finding that Kaladesh is pretty rich with organic complexity. In my experience, it requires a lot more mental effort than I remember using a decade ago, and the people I'm playing with have expressed similar sentiments. The set seems to be particularly sensitive to issues like ti…

My biggest problem from a couple years back was just one kid who's parents dropped like $600 on his deck and just played to be smug about his 30 damage turn 3 on friday nights. I've always loved trying to make competitive decks with as little money as possible though, maybe it's just me being silly.

I've always loved trying to make competitive decks with as little money as possible though, maybe it's just me being silly.

I like to do this too

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