Yeah, I would second that it's not hard to get into. I wouldn't call myself that good of a player, but I think I'm probably at least as good as one of the guys I work with, who says he's been doing it since he was in the 4th grade of elementary school (though, he has more cards).

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be immersed

I've only been playing for about two years, but just the other day, I picked up a friend's legacy(the possible card pool is every card in Magic, with a banlist) deck, and after about a 5 minute primer, I proceeded to use it to help him test some other decks for a legacy tournament.

Legacy is hard, though, play skill has an even higher impact on the game. I played BUG Aluren, and man is it fun! Pernicious Deed is just a horribly unfair card compared to anything in Standard right now.

Every single card in the Legacy deck(minus the basic lands) were cards that did not come out while I've been playing, but just learning the fundamentals of how to play and being a decent player in general let me perform as a decent test partner.

Whew. What a lot of work!

I just finished putting all of my cards into excel. I made different columns for different attributes that a card might have (eg. trample, lifelink, infect, etc.), so that I can quickly query for cards that I have of a particular attribute. This didn't work for all cards, because some cards have unique abilities, but I tried to make as many categories as possible.

In any case, all of the cards I have are inputted, now. The only thing I wish I had done differently at this point is to be more specific with spell casting cost. I listed casting cost as a single number so that I could sort it easily, but I should have added columns for casting cost of different colors, so I could tell the difference between something that is two colorless and 1 blue mana, and something that is 1 colorless and 2 blue mana, for example.

Either way, it has worked out for organizing my cards so far. I made a deck yesterday pretty quickly, because I could query the types of cards I wanted.

I also put all of the cards of each color in alphabetical order, so that, when I find a card in excel, I can quickly find it in real life.

It took a lot of time, but I'm glad that I did it.

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be immersed

Been playing since Time Spiral block myself, though the rising price is putting the game on the backburner for me. Constructed and 1-v-1 guy all the way, though I can be bothered to play the occasional Cube draft. FFA multiplayer is a messenger of doom from hell and makes the game about politics instead of Magic.

Loved Time Spiral-Lorwyn Standard, nowadays I mostly play German Highlander and Pauper, as other formats are simply uninteresting. Would've perhaps gotten into Legacy, but of course the f**kers had to ban Survival. So much for that, then.



Tell me about it :'(
Any good new Constructed card is Rare or worse, Mythic and thus costs a million (hello, 12/15ths of a pack of Limited chaff)

Been contemplating selling my money cards (Wasteland, Swords (RU, GB), Force, Tropical Island etc.) and just proxying the stuff since I only go to like one Highlander tournament a year or something anyway.



Heh. Yeah, after you reach a certain level the choice is usually obvious or between two clear lines of play (The evaluation may be hard, the plays themselves not really). At least unless you play something monstrous like Meandeck Tendrils (Vintage), Doomsday (Legacy) or Pattern-Rector (Highlander). Then you likely do have a fuckton of playlines to consider.

But yeah. Those decks are considered hard. For a reason. Certain old boardgame is like that. Every game.




Don't. There's a free program called Cockatrice that works on 'doze/Mac/Linux and saves you from paying real-world prices for virtual stuff with the same horrid ripoff scheme. (I mean, 20 bucks for a virtual card? Seriously?



Used to tear Brilliant/Clarion Ultimatums and Altar Golems to pieces myself. Certain Johnnies at the cardshop were crying in anguish at the just punishment meted out to craptastic cardboard. Said Johnny now aspires to play Smash competitively.



1. Sell collection to bot for tickets.
2. Sell tickets on eBay or something
3. ??? (Don't restart the game unless you plan on playing w/Cockatrice or similar)
4. Profit.



R.I.P. Momentary Blink, best common ever.



Duels is horrible. Apart from the puzzles, which are brilliant. You just know something good is going to happen when you get an assignment of "Kill opponent. Now." and are given a Protean Hulk on the field.


@ Kirby:
I'm so screwed up my head handles the "what is in my collection" part
Congrats on starting on UB control and inventing RDW.
You might want to use either Gatherer or Magiccards.info for finding new cards for your decks and things like that. They have powerful filtering tools that make it really convenient to see if what you find exists.


Violence's explanations thus far have been good, but his terminology is a bit off. It's not card power, it's card advantage. THIS is card POWER.

Anyway, this post turned out to be somewhat of a monster, but that's what you get for making a six-page thread about my #1 hobby

Whee! It's that time of the year again! What time of the year, you ask? The time when Finland's biggest PnP RPG/card game/tabletop wargaming/??? convention is held, and apart from Yomi, I've been playing a ton of Magic, almost exclusively German Highlander with Pattern-Rector as my weapon of choice. I've got to say, I doubt I've ever played a Magic deck that is so thoroughly enjoyable for so damn long. There have been decks that are as fun as Pattern-Rector, but they've all lost their luster eventually (just too easy, I guess).

So, ladies and gentlemen, the best deck in the game:
Warning: Contains a monster. A beautiful, beautiful monster, but a monster nonetheless.

(Think this is hard enough for you Violence? )

Apart from gushing over that one deck, I'd recommend anyone who's played the game a bit longer to try German Highlander. It's an amazing format:
1. Normal rules, none of this weird Commander bs.
2. The big singleton decks bring back a small bit of the feeling of the old times when decks were made out of singletons out of necessity. It also encourages trading within a Highlander community because no one really needs more than a copy or two of any one card.
3. Eternal format, but costly (mana-wise) cards are still actually relatively viable, unlike in Legacy.
4. The lack of any single card is rarely an obstacle to the deck functioning well (except in special cases like mine)

I just recently found my old MtG deck hehe. Half of it seems to be from VI and the other half has no set indicator, I guess they didn't use them before that? The older ones also use terms like Bury instead of Destroy and says "Summon Orc" instead of "Creature - Orc". Had already forgotten what old cards were like, been around 13-14 years since I played

I got the Duels of the Planeswalkers game on STEAM recently since it wasn't that expensive and it was a really nice way to re-learn the rules and test myself a little bit. Not being able to create your own decks kinda kills it for me in the longer run though. But fun for a while anyway.

Also bought a 2012 Core Set Fat Pack a few days ago for fun. It was still a bit exciting to open boosters. Only got 1 mythic rare(Sorin Markov, I'm building a vampire monoblack deck), but it the one I actually most wanted so it works out good. Too bad I can't get a nocturnus without dipping into 2010.. Such a moneysink

Nice to hear that you still enjoy the game Mike (even if it's become more of a chore money-wise nowadays).
I don't like Duels much myself (so annoying that you have to ask for permission to stop the action and do stuff when normal Magic is founded on the principle of GIVING the game permission to continue).
The puzzles on the harder end are genuinely amazing, though. They could've made some more so it would've been a better value for money (the rest of the game is bad), but yeah. Good stuff anyway.


Since someone once said that God kills a kitten every time a booster is opened without using it for Limited, I present two ways to use single boosters with a friend:

1. Minimaster / Pack Wars
Needed: 2 boosters, 2 players, 6 of each basic land.
Setup: Both players open their booster (cards face down so that you don't see any), remove the token, shuffle booster contents and 3 of each basic land together.
Play a game of Magic! It'll most likely be hilarious and weird. The occasional Minimaster never gets old. It's a good way to save kittens' lives and make drawing those bad rares a little less painful (since they're often completely bonkers in Minimaster)

2. Danish Minimaster.
Danish is a format where:
1. Mana is infinite
2. X costs can be 3 at most.
3. All lands have Cycling and "When this enters the battlefield, return it to it's owner's hand".
4. Players have no starting hands and draw one card per turn.

Danish Minimaster saves you the fuss of having basic lands with you. Just remove the token from the booster and start the madness.
Note: Danish doesn't have centrally defined rules, so some players may play it so that lands can never enter the field at all, that everything you can do must be done (ie. pay kicker costs, play everything ASAP and so on), etc, but these rules are the ones I like most. They preserve the madness and original spirit of the format but do give room for some personal choice in when to play cards and whether to cycle lands with special abilities.


I also mentioned Pauper previously. It's a format where decks are built entirely out of commons, and every card that has ever been Common (according to Gatherer) is allowed (except for two banned cards: Cranial Plating and Frantic Search).

The format is ridiculously cheap compared to other Constructed formats: the most expensive cards are Lotus Petal and Daze at about 3-4 $/€ a pop and Sinkhole at 20-30 $/€. Of those, Sinkhole is largely a sideboard card and easily substituted by much cheaper, if a bit weaker options.

Some might think that the format is rather dull, but nothing could be further from the truth. The format is surprisingly one of the fastest in Magic (Only Vintage and Legacy top it at the moment), enjoying a decent variety of different decks from mana-ramping control to green decks focused on Giant Growthing Infect creatures for blazing fast wins to monoblack discard to red burn to Tortured Existence-based graveyard shenanigans.
To see what's hot in tournament Pauper can easily be seen here ("Event Coverage" box in lower right, check the Pauper Dailies).

Here's two tournament listings that demonstrate the diversity in a format that makes it easy to check cards you don't know yet:
http://www.wizards.com/Magic/Digital/Ma ... rn/2608839
http://www.wizards.com/Magic/Digital/Ma ... rn/2608845

EDIT: Incidentally, Pauper is also the one legit reason for using Magic Online. The commons are generally ridiculously cheap to buy from bots, and the Pauper tournament community active enough to fire about 2-3 twenty-man tournaments a day. Whatever rares you pull from prize packs (or, more often, the unopened packs themselves) can be sold to fund more tournaments, keeping your costs very low if you're good.

Wow, I've killed literally thousands of kittens over the years, then.

It was a pretty long time since I last played magic the gathering. I think the last champion I heard of was Daniel Zink, who made use of a combination of Mirari cards.

I am not that familiar with the cards now and the other add-ons but I am still pretty interested over playing it. Probably start getting a box of booster packs again. That is how I got most of my rare cards before because there was no solid fan base near my area.

Right now, some of the best ways to start Magic are the Deckbuilder's Toolkit that has tons of decent (and bad) cards you can build a deck out of. Gives you good staples, a decent amount of land (4 Terramorphic Expanses and 20 of each basic), plus a few boosters to spice things up. The decks end up being strong Limited decks (of 60 cards), pretty much. Good stuff all around.

The other good starting point are Event Decks. Why? Well, they're Wizards-made preconstructed decks. Which surprisingly do not suck all that much. They're not the best, but you do get tournament staples in good numbers with those.

The other WotC starter products I really dislike. The precons (now called Intro Packs) just suck, as usual. Stay away from them.

Caveat, if folks would like to play with the event decks, I'd avoid the equipment one... you can technically use it in tournament play, but the best two cards in it (stone-forge mystics) are technically banned. (They made an exception for that one deck, as long as you make NO changes to it... most mtg players are experimental folk, and that probably won't fly) you'll get better value out of one of the others, which have great cards that you can use in other decks as well...

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Tactics yes, Tact no...

Found this fun little random mtg card generator, some of the stuff that comes out is really neat:

http://www.toothycat.net/wiki/bnf.pl?pa ... dGenerator

on the other hand, sometimes you get stuff like this

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Tactics yes, Tact no...

I like the idea that it's not so much an ability as a warning. "Careful! Opponents may cast instants at any time. Be vigilant!"

I love some of the abilities.









And this hilarious land:

Found a better introduction to the Pauper format than anything I could ever come up with.
http://www.starcitygames.com/magic/misc ... auper.html

Read it, folks, and save your wallets from the cardboard crack!