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    Magic the Gathering

    Come on, some of you OTF-ers out there must be into Magic the Gathering. Here is a thread for all that.



    Yeah, I have never played it. It seems to be crazy obsessive for those that do get involved though (Catan being its board game equivalent that gets people all freaky).

    So, if you *do* play this, can you explain how any of it works? I have no understanding.

    #2
    You've drawn me out with your Catan comparison. Catan might have enthusiastic players but nothing like magic.

    Now I've not played either in 15 years or so and even when I played magic I used other people's decks or did poorly in a draft.

    Assume everything I type is true generally but exceptions can be made.

    1. The game

    Two players (you can play with more but it becomes less competitive). Each has 20 life points, the winner is the last person standing. Each has a deck of cards that they've put together themselves. The conceit is that each player is a wizard of some sort attempting to defeat his opponent in battle. There are five types of magic, each generally having their own style and decks will generally stick to using one, maybe two colours. For example red tends to be fire and direct damage, blue is water and dispels.

    At the top level there are two types of cards, land and spells (spells can be split down into god knows how many types). You can play one land a turn, land is keyed to a particular colour, you use each land once per turn to generate the magical cost of playing all the other cards. Each spell has a cost to play it written on it.

    Spells get very complicated but you have creatures which you summon and they stay in play or there are other spells which have an effect that happens.

    It gets complicated from here, I knew someone who was a top level competition judge and he get sent (flights and accommodation no pay) around the world to adjudicate at tournaments as well as assessing other judges and doing tests himself.

    But that's just a game.

    2. Beyond the Game

    As I mentioned above people design their own decks of cards with combinations that work well together. I'm not sure how to explain this as I'm not certain how it all works.

    There are sets of cards, several hundred different cards that are in a release designed with some theme in mind. These are packaged up in booster packs of 15 random cards, 1 rare card, some uncommon and the majority common. (Is this an innovation? Are some baseball cards designed to be rarer than others?). And the rare cards tend to have a better in game effect as well.

    Oh, you can have a max of 4 of the same card in a deck and decks are designed to be as small as possible (40?) to maximise the chance of getting your best cards in hand.

    All well and good, but then 9 months or so down the line another set will get released, and so on and on for the past twenty years. And if you're just playing with friends then you can make your decks from any of these cards.

    But, that many cards with there own little rules written on them have some weird interactions, and some overly powerful ones. So at the competitive end of the game you can only have cards from the most recent 2 or three releases in you deck which means that the designers can manage card interactions slightly better and also forces changes in the metagame. It doesn't always work and you'll see cards getting banned because of some unforeseen effect.

    So, it's really expensive getting all the best cards, the cards are constantly becoming 'unusable' at top level but it's been going for 20 years and outlasted any number of other customisable card games (CCG). I used to play Jyhad (later Vampire: the Eternal Struggle) a CCG designed by the Magic designer and based on the White Wolf Vampire roleplaying game setting. I think it's a better game but it didn't last.

    One alternative to CCGs that has emerged recently is the Living Card Game. It advances in sets like Magic but rather than getting random cards from a booster pack you buy all the cards in the set at once. It is much cheaper. Android: Netrunner is a good example of this, it's an asymmetrical cyberpunk game, one player is a corporation the other a hacker.

    And I've no idea why I've written all this.

    Comment


      #3
      Thanks for that Levin. I 'did' MTG when I was in lower secondary school (roughly 1994-96), but it really is ruinously expensive. That said, of course, the only reason I stopped was because kids in my group moved on to Warhammer... The game itself was pretty good fun.

      The concept of LCGs is a new thing to me, so thanks especially for that. I see that both Warhammer and W40K have these now through Fantasy Flight Games (though Wiki suggests that they have now stopped making them).

      Comment


        #4
        An ignoramus writes:

        How does Hearthstone fit into this? Is that a CCG or LCG?

        And Gwent, the card game in the Witcher console games that I think is getting a physical release? (or at least its own electronic spin-off)

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          #5
          @Kevin, cheers. It is a really well designed game isn't it? It's just that it will consume your life. Not only in the amount of money you need to spend if you want to be competitive but the amount of time designing and tweaking decks can take. I think one of the reasons I never got into it was because I was already neck deep with Games Workshop. Jyhad came later.

          It's quite a simple concept with rules that are massively complex because they have to provide a framework for any number of interactions and cards that can do things in different ways.

          I've only played Android of the LCGs but it's a very good game (even if I didn't like the whole cyberpunkness of it).

          @Crusoe, I can't help there I'm afraid. It looks like a CCG (the initial C can also stand for collectable) but I've not played it.

          Comment


            #6
            Thanks Levin.

            I really do find the idea of the game fascinating. It is ever so slightly mystifying how it managed to become such a big thing without me really ever encountering the game at all.

            Comment


              #7
              One of the MtG artists lives in my village. We sometimes walk our dogs together.

              </humblebrag>

              Comment


                #8
                I was mad into this for about 18 months in the mid-90's when the first set (Limited Edition Beta if you're geeky enough) was released in the UK. I was determined to collect the full set - all 302 cards - until I realised how expensive the rare cards were (and that's not counting the ultra-rare ones like Black Lotus and the Mox jewels*). It was fun to play with the other couple of guys I knew who had also bought a few sets but tournament play against people who had shelled out hundreds of pounds on killer decks was pretty futile.

                The advent of 'Living Card Games' was very welcome as it did away with the need to buy boosters in the hope of getting the cards you were after (there was no way I was going to swap cards - I left school 32 years ago, thank you). Dominion is my card game of choice now, it's well worth getting the basic set and giving it a go.

                Dominion on Board Game Geek (includes description, reviews, photos etc.)

                Dominion strategy (the lowdown on all the cards)

                Play Dominion online (it's free to play with the basic cards, and as it uses accurate card likenesses, it looks great)


                * My local board game shop did at one point have for sale at £600 an album containing precisely one of each card. Given that some of those cards now go for thousands of pounds, I should have scraped together the asking price.
                Last edited by Mumpo; 05-10-2017, 13:55.

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