As an eight year old getting into magic around the tempest days, part of the braininess was in the extensive vocabulary in the card names! My MtG circle was a seriously literate group of elementary school kids.
22 years in, Magic: The Gathering is the brainiest it’s ever been (2015)
41–50 of 135 posts
Re: 22 years in, Magic: The Gathering is the brainiest it’s ever been (2015)
#42This 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?
Re: 22 years in, Magic: The Gathering is the brainiest it’s ever been (2015)
#43I appreciate the article is trying to get people to check out MTG, but it's just inaccurate. http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?multiver... is vastly more meta, and complicated to the point where it is outright banned from the game for being a waste of time in all practical sense. And that card was printed in 1993.
I was just about to post about Shahrazad! Totally agree! Shahrazad: Players play a MAGIC subgame, using their libraries as their decks. Each player who doesn't win the subgame loses half his or her life, rounded up.
Re: 22 years in, Magic: The Gathering is the brainiest it’s ever been (2015)
#44Earlier 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 $7.50 per hour on M:tG. But it is a very expensive game if you buy all the cards and only play it once. I still have cards from the 90s, I don't think I've bought anything in 20 years. Still fun game to play on board game night with friends.
Easy. You can spend 50-100$ on a more or less competitive Modern or Standard Deck and have fun with it for years.
You can see actual competitive decks here:
https://www.mtggoldfish.com/metagame/standard#paper
https://www.mtggoldfish.com/metagame/modern#paper
You occasionally get Standard decks in your price range making top 8, but almost never in Modern. It's really stretching it to call the budget Modern decks "competitive".
Re: 22 years in, Magic: The Gathering is the brainiest it’s ever been (2015)
#45This 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?
I got hooked on Magic early and didn't feel much need to branch out to other games. I did play a bit of Texas Hold'em later and thought that was okay. A lot of people in comic shops (where Magic is played) play WarHammer 40K and Settlers of Catan, so you could have a look at those games.
Re: 22 years in, Magic: The Gathering is the brainiest it’s ever been (2015)
#46Earlier quoted context omitted.
Can you be more specific ? While teaching my children to play m:tg I had the same impression as you describe, but I wasn't exactly sure what aspects I was missing ...
For me, damage not going on the stack was a big change. That's probably better for the game, but eliminates a lot of tricks. Also, the cards printed these days tend to not allow you to hose yourself. Take things like detention sphere, that say "exile a non land permanent you don't control." It used to be that those types of cards would exile any non land permanent, do a skilled opponent could, in certain situations,…
Removing damage from the stack actually makes the game more complex. Previously, it was always correct to stack damage first. There was zero penalty. If you knew the rules then you got to make the optimal choice.
Now you actually have to choose. Do I want this creature to deal damage or do I want to get the benefit of some effect due to sacrificing it or whatever. Sakura-Tribe Elder got worse but it got much more strategically interesting.
Re: 22 years in, Magic: The Gathering is the brainiest it’s ever been (2015)
#47I still have a deck from the very early days of Magic with a Mox somewhere lying around.
We've earned some money back helping people find out what's in a pack before they've opened it.
Gladly I've sold most of the stuff before the first MG bubble burst.
Re: 22 years in, Magic: The Gathering is the brainiest it’s ever been (2015)
#48Earlier quoted context omitted.
For me, damage not going on the stack was a big change. That's probably better for the game, but eliminates a lot of tricks. Also, the cards printed these days tend to not allow you to hose yourself. Take things like detention sphere, that say "exile a non land permanent you don't control." It used to be that those types of cards would exile any non land permanent, do a skilled opponent could, in certain situations,…
Removing damage from the stack actually makes the game more complex. Previously, it was always correct to stack damage first. There was zero penalty. If you knew the rules then you got to make the optimal choice. Now you actually have to choose. Do I want this creature to deal damage or do I want to get the benefit of some effect due to sacrificing it or whatever. Sakura-Tribe Elder got worse but it got much more str…
I stoped playing right around the time this change was implemented. What I felt back then was that while you are right in principle, in theory what happened was that the power level of a lot of interesting cards dropped so much they weren't playable anymore. So while my Mogg Fanatics got more complex, it didn't really matter because at that point I had to drop them from my deck, usually replacing them with something more dumb and mana efficient.
Re: 22 years in, Magic: The Gathering is the brainiest it’s ever been (2015)
#49"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…
Can you be more specific ? While teaching my children to play m:tg I had the same impression as you describe, but I wasn't exactly sure what aspects I was missing ...
Generally speaking, the cheap decks people start the game with aren't very interesting to pilot. They don't have enough removal, which is one of the primary ways players interact with their opponent's board. They definitely don't have boardwipes, which means just playing the best creature in hand each turn is usually the right play. They typically don't have much card selection. And most complexity is concentrated at higher rarities, so these decks tend to have simple cards.
That's not to say that all cheap decks are boring, or all tournament decks are interesting, but cards like, say, Duskwatch Recruiter, Dromoka's Command, or Despise, for example, just offer more choices than Craw Wurms or Grizzly Bears.
Regarding what others have said:
Damage not going on the stack was a good change IMO. Sacrificing Mogg Fanatic was always the right play; now it's less obvious. I agree with akud on detention sphere vs. O-ring.
Hexproof over Shroud was a mistake; with that said, they seem to have figured that out, and we're getting cards like Pristine Skywise or Dragonlord Ojutai instead.
I'm sad to see Protection be replaced by Indestructible. Morph/Manifest and DFCs show that they're not entirely shying away from complex mechanics.
Re: 22 years in, Magic: The Gathering is the brainiest it’s ever been (2015)
#50Earlier quoted context omitted.
The cost and effort of printing duel decks is never going to be less than just buying the product.
Eh, that's only true if you are cash rich and time poor. A booster box with 36 booster packs costs ~$100. At 15 cards per pack, that's 540 cards per box. The latest set has 249 cards, so a box will probably get you close to 2 of each card. But to be guaranteed to have all the cards you want, you may need to buy a second booster box and do some trading/purchasing of individual cards. Total cost is at minimum ~5¢ per c…
It's even worse if you consider rarity. A pack has one slot for rare cards, three slots for uncommon, etc. 1/8 of the time the rare card will be a "mythic rare". The latest set has 53 rares and 15 mythic rares, so the chance of having even one copy of a particular rare card in your box is 1-(1-1/53×7/8)^36 or 45%. For mythic rares the probability is only 1-(1-1/15×1/8)^36 or 26% that you'll even have one copy. Then consider the number of times you'll want a "playset" of a card, which means four copies.
The only sane options I can see are:
* Play limited formats
* Play casual with proxies
* Buy individual cards