Magic: the Gathering (A revue)

Talk about the new set of Magic: the Gathering intrigued me. I haven't played MtG in probably 12 years or so, but I decided to try a draft event at my local hobby store.

The bad news is: it's still MtG, I still don't think it's a great game. I think a draft or sealed environment is fun. I'll go play the occasional draft or sealed tournament and eventually build a few fun decks.

The good news is, the theme of the latest set is fun. There are lots of werewolves, vampires and zombies. There are two-sided cards for shape-shifters (yep, just like Rage!) Also, I've always liked Black/Green, and they made cards in this set for opposite color decks.

I was drafting black and green cards, but it looks like a lot of the "V:tES" cards were blue cards. "Murder of Crows" is a strong card I drafted a Sensory Deprivation at the end of a round when there wasn't anything good to draft (that was the ONLY card I drafted that wasn't green or black or colorless!)

Also, if you need zombie tokens they are available in the set as well. So all in all, it's an interesting diversion. It may be Garfield's way to suck V:tES players back into MtG, but it might work. I'll play enough to build a few decks to carry around with me. Worse case scenario, they will be used as separators in my card boxes. Otherwise, I'll have a few decks on hand for a quick game between rounds at tournaments.

I drafted this set, and thought it was quite poorly designed.
The two-faced cards are especially anoying to use. Either you use sleeves, and have to unsleeve them every once in a while (which can happen every two turns, and you can have more than one of them...), or you play without sleeves, and the MTG team provided official proxy cards standing for two-faced cards in decks (they have the proper back).

Some cards are just incoherent. "Whenever you would put a counter in play, put two instead". That looks quite exactly like what we call a forkbomb in computer science...

Zombies, Vampires, *Wooden Sticks* are cool. The artworks are great - especially Sensory Deprivation's . The rest is MTG... white with weenies, green with average sized creatures, red with fast damaging cards, black with non-black control, and blue with some good control

@Pascal: I thought the two sided cards were implemented as well as they could. (which is to say, it's gonna be a Pain in the Ass no matter what)


Well I must be a masochist, because I went to another M:tG event. I wanted some new cards to hopefully put together a better deck for shits and giggles. This time it was a sealed deck tournament, six booster packs, no draft. So, it cost me twice the money as the draft, and i got the same number of cards that I want for my deck. At least i have trade fodder, but for now I'm saving the rest to make another deck or two.

I got some good green and black cards again, so I put together a green/black deck. Well, lets put it this way: Everyone else was playing Red. I got trounced by red/blue, red/black the most.

It took me a couple rounds to put two and two together: since it was a sealed deck, all of the remaining cards (and any number of lands) were our sideboard. So in round 3, in the second game I swapped my whole deck for blue/red. I can close to winning that game.

Well, the two-headed dragon that chased me from Magic 12 years ago reared it's ugly head again:

Head One: Magic is a bad game. Maybe it's from all my years of V:tES. Maybe my brain isn't wired to understand the game. But the game isn't that great. It's like an arcade machine designed to eat your quarters. There is no game balance, because if you have a bad draw: you lose. In V:tES you can go turns without seeing a master card, but the game isn't over for you. In Magic, you don't see enough land or too much, the game is over for you. Even with a good deck.

Head Two: The competitive nature of the game. In magic, players spend much more money per deck than you do in V:tES typically. It started out at the deck registration when at least one person got a "game loss" for failing to register his basic lands. Later, my second opponent was very grumpy from the first round, making the game less enjoyable (good thing I have to ease the situation )

In the third round there was a little disagreement about going back to remedy a mandatory action (which I agreed not to go back because it would have affected too much, and not worth the effort), and at some point in the argument he told me "just learn how to play magic better!" and he was all like "we are both going to get warnings if we call a judge over here."

What ever happened to "it's just a game?" At least I still have fun losing at V:tES.

direwolf wrote:

Well, the two-headed dragon that chased me from Magic 12 years ago reared it's ugly head again:

I always called "Head One" the "Elaborate Mexican Standoff" Head. Everyone draws opponents, shuffles cards, draws hands, mulligans/or not and then you wait to see who is the person who draws their 'combo' first. It's like replaying the Cold War with less nukes and sexy spies.

"Head Two" was always "Type One Syndrome" or the "60-card Home Deposit". There was a guy who played at my FLGS who had a Type-1 Deck that was literally worth the same as a house deposit (something like $55,000US). It had Mox-this, Beta Edition that... plus it was horrible to play against because he'd got it tuned to the point where if he didn't kill you in Turn 1, he killed you in Turn 2. You had 1 turn to shut him/it down.


Then one day I played a game of VTES with a Thrown Junk Nosferatu deck. It was basically all rushes, all the time... with the visuals of some Ugly guy standing at the back door to some kind of Sewer Lid Forging Company or with the world's biggest change-dispenser as he tossed Sewer Lids at everything. Ninja of Death... I've let that two-headed Dragon go eat the halfling...**


**If you don't get the reference
"Who needs to outrun the Dragon? All you have to do is outrun the Halfling..."

I also like new set of MTG. Amazing theme and cool mechanics. But yea the fact stands that it's still MTG . I feel MTG works well as competitive game but it just so expensive to get in that game. New cards comes way too often and old cards rotate and becomes useless. Also MTG draws some too competitive players and games can be very boring with very little discussion or interaction. Drafts work well tho.

I also tried new Commander multiplayer format but felt like just playing inferior Vtes. There are so much better card games to play. MTG is like necessary old and popular gateway game to find better games. Same as Risk or Monopoly with board games.