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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)

#91
post #30
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.

fyi, your cards from the 90s might be worth thousands of dollars.

I have a bunch of cards from the 90s but haven't played in decades. What's a good way to figure out which ones are valuable? I had a few beta cards, but mostly the series after that (name escapes me).

Also, where's a good place to sell? Online or in-person?

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

#92

I still have a tonne of magic cards from the 90's. I wonder how much I could sell them for..

I had a nearly full box of 36 unopened expansion packs, from summer 1994, sitting in my old bedroom closet that my dad recently found.

Very annoyingly, the glue on the packs failed after 22 yrs, causing most to open up. Bummer.

I'm curious what they could have been worth if the glue didn't fail.

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

#93
post #71
post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I play EDH/commander. There a $50 budget deck can readily beat a $2000 deck. I have won and lost on both sides of that equation. EDH started as a community driven format with no official support. The community decided that your deck must be exactly 100 cards with no duplicates except basic land. This slows the came down and forces more board interaction. On top of that 1 of your hundred cards must be a Legendary crea…

> There a $50 budget deck can readily beat a $2000 deck.

For more info on that, including what percentage each archetype makes up of the total Commander metagame and what each costs: https://www.mtggoldfish.com/metagame/commander/full#paper

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

#94
post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You can buy the vest type2 deck for maybe $400 a year. If you want a level playing field, you can have it... Not free but neither are most addictions.

$400 is about $350 more than I would have thought reasonable to spend on a card game when I was a teenager (15-16), and my parents would have thought $50 too much.

I spent about £25 on cards, and was probably given another £25 or so by a wealthy friend. The game was fine when played against others who had a similar investment, but the group stopped playing because of eBay: our friends with real money could buy what they wanted, and the rest of us could never beat them.

I think it was the first thing we did which showed who had money and who hadn't. We could take cheap plastic Warhammer figures, paint stars on them, and declare them to be powerful wizard-mages. Computer games were easily copied, it didn't matter who owned a board game. M:tG ruined the equality...

I looked into the game again about a year ago, but there were so many new rules (new abilities, new card types) -- I decided I didn't want to spend that much time on one game.

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

#95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The fact that the rarity top-end is only "Mythic Rare" makes it more tame than most modern TCGs.

They just permanently introduced expedition cards which are even rarer In the current set they're known as "inventions"

These are just fancier promo reprints of cards already available in other ways, though.

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

#96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The fact that the rarity top-end is only "Mythic Rare" makes it more tame than most modern TCGs.

They just permanently introduced expedition cards which are even rarer In the current set they're known as "inventions"

Those are just alternate versions of existing cards.

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

#97
post #4

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.

Thanks for making me think about this. Every time I play my favorite deck I spend $5-10 for entry for a local tournament, which lasts about 4 hours. Adding in the cost of the deck, I'd need to play it for over 200 hours before it becomes cheaper than $7.50 an hour.

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

#98

"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…

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.

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

#99
post #22

I 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.

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

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

#100
post #37
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.

> You would probably spend you $15 to go see a two hour movie I wouldn't. > spending under $7.50 per hour That's absurdly expensive.

The average price of a movie ticket is $8. The average price of the popcorn is also $8.

(Lots of citations with a Google search.)

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