(to the tune of "Dreidel Dreidel Dreidel")
I have a deck of durdle, it has a lot of Blue
Stay awake until the end and it will durdle you
Oh Durdle Durdle Durdle, it has a lot of Blue
Durdle Durdle Durdle, is gonna durdle you
I'm turtled in my durdle, while you try something mean
now watch your smile fading as I Syncopate eighteen!
Oh Durdle Durdle Durdle, you try something mean
Durdle Durdle Durdle, Syncopate eighteen!
I'm playing with my durdle, watch you lay down your side
then make you pick them right back up with Devastation Tide!
Oh Durdle Durdle Durdle, go on and build your side
Durdle Durdle Durdle, Devastation Tide!
I'm having fun with durdle, got Tamiyo and Jace
and now the judges come around and say pick up the pace
Oh Durdle Durdle Durdle, Tamiyo loves Jace
Durdle Durdle Durdle, let's pick up the pace!
I love to play my durdle, cuz aggro decks are gay
and combo decks can bite my ass cuz durdle's how I play
Oh Durdle Durdle Durdle, all your decks are gay
Durdle Durdle Durdle, that's the way I play, HEY!
Saturday, December 1, 2012
Tuesday, November 13, 2012
Survey the Wreckage
In this post, I'd like to talk in broad strokes about what's changed in Magic, for better and worse, from my perspective. There are folks who've been in it since Revised (and before), such as Heather Dawn of the Planeswalker Asylum podcast, but they've experienced the transitions gradually. I on the other hand left one game and came back to a different one.
Thumbs up: modern card design
The new card design is amazing. I have some pre-modern cards given me by friends, and I almost can't stand to look at them, they're so godawful ugly by comparison. The new layout is easier to read, has a cleaner font (particularly for the titles), and the inclusion of rarity hints in the set icon is frickin' brilliant. I can't say how much more I love this layout than the old one.
Thumbs up: better art
Like the design, the art has seen a considerable upgrade. I should probably state outright that I'm not a model for art critics by any stretch of the imagination. I grew up on Tor Fantasy's line of Conan novels (many penned by Robert Jordan before he lost his mind and did all that Wheel of Time crap), and their Boris Vallejo covers defined my tastes. In short, if you wouldn't see it airbrushed on the side of a van, I'm not sure it's art.
Thus, the (9th?) M12 edition Llanowar Elves looks a whole lot better to me than the (Alpha) Revised Llanowar Elves, which looks "like a bleedin' Picasso" (free Llanowar Elves to the first person who can tell me where that's from). At the very least, most of the art has progressed to Larry Elmore quality (another great artist from my childhood), and some of it is hang-it-on-my-wall good. I particularly love the current art for the classic angel cards (Serra Angel, Archangel), the newer angels, and of course Doorkeeper is the most hilariously cute card I've ever seen.
Thumbs sideways: crossing the circle
I always liked the pairing of "allied" colors. I liked the flavor it gave the game. It seemed to me that the game had more personality when Red hated Blue, White hated Black, and so forth. The game mechanics are more interesting with the possibility of pairing opposed colors, but it seems to have come at the cost of a thematic component that was unique to Magic. And don't even get me started on this three-color nonsense.
Thumbs down: this three-color nonsense
This is no doubt just a cranky old player struggling to adjust, but I'm having enough trouble as it is building good two-color decks, and now it seems that adding a third color is almost expected. My first reaction to Nicol Bolas and his elder dragon buddies back in the day was that he was a joke card. Nobody would ever seriously play that, right? And besides, three colors means that two of your colors are opposed and working against each other… oh, right.
Then I saw Nicol's planeswalker variant played in all seriousness at FNM. I even heard one wag yapping about playing five-color control, and almost fainted from the absurdity. On top of that, mono decks are now a thing, which as I said in my last article, used to be the sole province of morons. What is the world of Magic coming to? Is there anything that didn't change?
Thumbs way up: lands are normal again
I remember opening my first Ice Age pack, seeing the new snow-covered lands, and thinking "what is this crap?" I'm completely thrilled to see that WotC has aborted that nonsense. So lands changed, then unchanged.
Thumbs down: power inflation
That was my first reaction. Now I've made my peace with the fact that creatures are bigger, generally cheaper, and their upkeep costs are smaller to nonexistent. It was quite a shock though to see my first Grove of the Guardian crank out a frickin' TOKEN that was every bit as powerful as the crown jewel of my old Revised collection, Force of Nature, with no upkeep. Which brings me to...
Thumbs up: tokens are a thing
As I wrote in my first column, my local Magic community didn't really know what to make of tokens back in Fallen Empires. Sure, you could crank out chump blockers, but it never really seemed like you were getting your money's worth as compared to straight-up creatures.
Now, there's tokens everywhere. I've seen Zombie tokens, Angel tokens, about a billion different versions of Human and Wolf and Ooze and Wurm tokens, and better still, they're semi-officially supported by WotC with token cards. Best of all, my favorite colors get Populate as an ability. I haven't figured out how to make it work competitively yet, but it's cool nonetheless.
Thumbs up: sleeves
Rumors of individual card sleeves were whispered during my first go-round with Magic, but we dismissed such rumors as the fevered rantings of potheads and folks who'd read the Necronomicon. Being manly men, we asserted our neanderthal primacy by proclaiming that anyone who'd use such things, if they even existed, was a nancy-boy who didn't deserve a seat at the table. Pull out your Moxes and your Black Lotus and shuffle them up like a man!
Now I see that sleeves are ubiquitous and generally expected. I momentarily resisted, remembering the testosterone-laden chest-thumpings of my past, then I visited a store where a box of random commons sat on the counter. I picked up a handful of them and started to flip through them, only to have my efforts foiled by the grotesque and multitudinous layers of schmutz on each and every card. My overactive imagination immediately conjured a montage of nose-pickings, zit-squeezings, food-fingerings, and other grossness now stratified and breeding pestilence on the very cards in my hand. I discovered I could scrape the crap from the cards with my fingernail and almost retched.
After a thorough hand-sanitizing, I asked for a pack of playing sleeves and got to work sleeving up my decks. Then I sleeved all my rares. Then I couldn't stand that part of my collection was sleeved and part wasn't (OCD ENGAGE!), so I sleeved every last card. My collection currently has around 5000 or so cards, and every single one of them is sleeved, most in cheap penny sleeves, but a fair number in playing sleeves. It keeps my inner germophobe placated. I try not to dwell on the fact that they're in different sleeves… it makes the CIA mind control lasers twitch.
Thumbs down: foil cards
Speaking of OCD, foils seem deliberately designed by WotC to inflame that obsessive collector part of me that can't stand not having a full set of anything. I have to work very hard at convincing myself that foils are actually flawed cards and that I don't like them (even though they're shiny and preciousssss). Thus, at the very least if I've got a foil and you've got the non-foil version of the same card, I will trade you straight up. No lie. And I don't want to know the price difference. Hell, if it's a common I might just give it to you.
Thumbs down: foreign language cards
I realize that any game with an international market will need to make international game materials. I really do. But I hate with a passion having some Japanese or Russian card played on me. The game is complicated enough without having to look up the oracle text for every card I'm unfamiliar with, IN THE MIDDLE OF A TIME-LIMITED MATCH. I mostly like the new rules layouts with the turn phases and the stack and all that, but holy crap do I wish there was some kind of meta-rule restricting cards to local languages, or forcing players of foreign-language cards to bring handouts consisting of photocopied English versions for their opponents to reference.
Thumbs down: Phyrexian mana
OMG I was so happy to see that rotate out, just a month or so after I came back to the game. Watching Blue players kill my dudes with Gut Shot by paying 2 life instead of having anything Mountain-like on the board was just infuriating. I came back in after Scars block was already settled and starting to collect dust, but just before it rotated out, and Phyrexian mana felt a lot like cheating from this newb's perspective.
Thumbs up: formats
As my last article should have made plainly clear, I love having officially sanctioned formats and variants. It means that everybody gets to play the kind of Magic they want to play, and (hopefully) reduces the opportunities for jerkwad arguments over what is and isn't allowed. I don't see myself playing Legacy or Modern any time soon, but I'm glad there's an avenue for players with appropriate collections to use them without resorting to the Magic equivalent of the MMORPG noob-slaughter.
Thumbs way, way up: computerization
Back in the day, the only things we really had for card lists and valuations were our local game store and the trade rags. It seems like one of them was called Scrye. Is that still around?
Anyway, today there are many ways to manage the vast swaths of data associated with the game, and that is an absolute godsend. I personally use Decked Builder for the Mac, iPad, and iPhone. I like being able to build a deck virtually, filtering for Standard-legal cards in my collection, instead of screwing with the physical cards and then having to vet them individually after the deck is built. The only thing that bugs me about it is that it doesn't include support for identifying foils, and the deck simulator doesn't support counters or tokens. Deckbox.org is a cool site that seems to do the same thing, but it doesn't look like it supports identifying the set a particular card came from (or identifying foils). I'd love to see something with an easy bulk import, foil support, and a deck simulator that allows you to battle it out with friends including full token and counter support. I've looked, but haven't found it yet.
On my iPad, I also have MTG Trades, an app that helps identify the going value for a card by using the prices published at various sites, and remembers your trades for you if you're anal like me and always need to have your inventory database up-to-date.
The internet is a stabilizing factor in individual card prices; when players can easily hop on the internet and order cards from 1200 miles away and get them in time for FNM, it tends to prevent local bubbles from forming.
The internet also means that net-decking is a thing, which tends to disappoint the consummate tinkerer in me. I like winning, but I really prefer winning with the deck that I built against the deck that you built. Net-decking may show one of us to be a better player, but it means that constructed formats don't really force a test of deck-building skills. I guess that's what sealed events are for.
Of course, I couldn't mention computerization without bringing up MTG Online, which in my book is either a cynical marketing scheme or a giant missed opportunity or both. I don't like having a separate, virtual inventory of cards that cost just as much as the cards I buy at the store. I haven't done much with MTGO because if I'm going to shell out $4 for a pack of 15 cards, I think I ought to have some cards in my hand at the end of the transaction. It bugs me. It feels like a TSR move. (Kids, TSR owned Dungeons and Dragons before Wizards of the Coast, and while they would let you buy the product, they would also sue you into poverty if you tried to do anything creative with it.) It seems like the program would be better as a promoter of physical card sales, by letting players try out deck ideas without regard to card price or availability, and learn how the game is played in a structured environment that demonstrates triggers and the stack and so forth for you.
The interface is also clunky as hell. It feels like it was written by a third-rate software shop, like something Electronic Arts would publish. Where's the modern HTML5 interface so we can just log in with a browser? Where's the cross-platform compatibility? Come on, we have 1st-person shooters releasing to all platforms with photo-realistic graphics and amazing physics models, pushing 100 frames per second -- why can I feel myself aging between "click on land card" and "land card graphic turns sideways to indicate it's tapped"?
All in all though, computerization is a huge boon to almost any tabletop game, and Magic probably benefits more than most. I'd love to hear about other collection management and deck building sites that folks know about, as well as software that you've found useful on any platform. Leave comments below or hit me up on Twitter, where I'm @smacketybap. Maybe next time I'll get around to talking about some decks…
Decked Builder: http://www.deckedbuilder.com
MTG Trades: http://www.mtgapps.com/mtg-trades/
Thumbs up: modern card design
The new card design is amazing. I have some pre-modern cards given me by friends, and I almost can't stand to look at them, they're so godawful ugly by comparison. The new layout is easier to read, has a cleaner font (particularly for the titles), and the inclusion of rarity hints in the set icon is frickin' brilliant. I can't say how much more I love this layout than the old one.
Thumbs up: better art
Like the design, the art has seen a considerable upgrade. I should probably state outright that I'm not a model for art critics by any stretch of the imagination. I grew up on Tor Fantasy's line of Conan novels (many penned by Robert Jordan before he lost his mind and did all that Wheel of Time crap), and their Boris Vallejo covers defined my tastes. In short, if you wouldn't see it airbrushed on the side of a van, I'm not sure it's art.
Thus, the (9th?) M12 edition Llanowar Elves looks a whole lot better to me than the (Alpha) Revised Llanowar Elves, which looks "like a bleedin' Picasso" (free Llanowar Elves to the first person who can tell me where that's from). At the very least, most of the art has progressed to Larry Elmore quality (another great artist from my childhood), and some of it is hang-it-on-my-wall good. I particularly love the current art for the classic angel cards (Serra Angel, Archangel), the newer angels, and of course Doorkeeper is the most hilariously cute card I've ever seen.
Thumbs sideways: crossing the circle
I always liked the pairing of "allied" colors. I liked the flavor it gave the game. It seemed to me that the game had more personality when Red hated Blue, White hated Black, and so forth. The game mechanics are more interesting with the possibility of pairing opposed colors, but it seems to have come at the cost of a thematic component that was unique to Magic. And don't even get me started on this three-color nonsense.
Thumbs down: this three-color nonsense
This is no doubt just a cranky old player struggling to adjust, but I'm having enough trouble as it is building good two-color decks, and now it seems that adding a third color is almost expected. My first reaction to Nicol Bolas and his elder dragon buddies back in the day was that he was a joke card. Nobody would ever seriously play that, right? And besides, three colors means that two of your colors are opposed and working against each other… oh, right.
Then I saw Nicol's planeswalker variant played in all seriousness at FNM. I even heard one wag yapping about playing five-color control, and almost fainted from the absurdity. On top of that, mono decks are now a thing, which as I said in my last article, used to be the sole province of morons. What is the world of Magic coming to? Is there anything that didn't change?
Thumbs way up: lands are normal again
I remember opening my first Ice Age pack, seeing the new snow-covered lands, and thinking "what is this crap?" I'm completely thrilled to see that WotC has aborted that nonsense. So lands changed, then unchanged.
Thumbs down: power inflation
That was my first reaction. Now I've made my peace with the fact that creatures are bigger, generally cheaper, and their upkeep costs are smaller to nonexistent. It was quite a shock though to see my first Grove of the Guardian crank out a frickin' TOKEN that was every bit as powerful as the crown jewel of my old Revised collection, Force of Nature, with no upkeep. Which brings me to...
Thumbs up: tokens are a thing
As I wrote in my first column, my local Magic community didn't really know what to make of tokens back in Fallen Empires. Sure, you could crank out chump blockers, but it never really seemed like you were getting your money's worth as compared to straight-up creatures.
Now, there's tokens everywhere. I've seen Zombie tokens, Angel tokens, about a billion different versions of Human and Wolf and Ooze and Wurm tokens, and better still, they're semi-officially supported by WotC with token cards. Best of all, my favorite colors get Populate as an ability. I haven't figured out how to make it work competitively yet, but it's cool nonetheless.
Thumbs up: sleeves
Rumors of individual card sleeves were whispered during my first go-round with Magic, but we dismissed such rumors as the fevered rantings of potheads and folks who'd read the Necronomicon. Being manly men, we asserted our neanderthal primacy by proclaiming that anyone who'd use such things, if they even existed, was a nancy-boy who didn't deserve a seat at the table. Pull out your Moxes and your Black Lotus and shuffle them up like a man!
Now I see that sleeves are ubiquitous and generally expected. I momentarily resisted, remembering the testosterone-laden chest-thumpings of my past, then I visited a store where a box of random commons sat on the counter. I picked up a handful of them and started to flip through them, only to have my efforts foiled by the grotesque and multitudinous layers of schmutz on each and every card. My overactive imagination immediately conjured a montage of nose-pickings, zit-squeezings, food-fingerings, and other grossness now stratified and breeding pestilence on the very cards in my hand. I discovered I could scrape the crap from the cards with my fingernail and almost retched.
After a thorough hand-sanitizing, I asked for a pack of playing sleeves and got to work sleeving up my decks. Then I sleeved all my rares. Then I couldn't stand that part of my collection was sleeved and part wasn't (OCD ENGAGE!), so I sleeved every last card. My collection currently has around 5000 or so cards, and every single one of them is sleeved, most in cheap penny sleeves, but a fair number in playing sleeves. It keeps my inner germophobe placated. I try not to dwell on the fact that they're in different sleeves… it makes the CIA mind control lasers twitch.
Thumbs down: foil cards
Speaking of OCD, foils seem deliberately designed by WotC to inflame that obsessive collector part of me that can't stand not having a full set of anything. I have to work very hard at convincing myself that foils are actually flawed cards and that I don't like them (even though they're shiny and preciousssss). Thus, at the very least if I've got a foil and you've got the non-foil version of the same card, I will trade you straight up. No lie. And I don't want to know the price difference. Hell, if it's a common I might just give it to you.
Thumbs down: foreign language cards
I realize that any game with an international market will need to make international game materials. I really do. But I hate with a passion having some Japanese or Russian card played on me. The game is complicated enough without having to look up the oracle text for every card I'm unfamiliar with, IN THE MIDDLE OF A TIME-LIMITED MATCH. I mostly like the new rules layouts with the turn phases and the stack and all that, but holy crap do I wish there was some kind of meta-rule restricting cards to local languages, or forcing players of foreign-language cards to bring handouts consisting of photocopied English versions for their opponents to reference.
Thumbs down: Phyrexian mana
OMG I was so happy to see that rotate out, just a month or so after I came back to the game. Watching Blue players kill my dudes with Gut Shot by paying 2 life instead of having anything Mountain-like on the board was just infuriating. I came back in after Scars block was already settled and starting to collect dust, but just before it rotated out, and Phyrexian mana felt a lot like cheating from this newb's perspective.
Thumbs up: formats
As my last article should have made plainly clear, I love having officially sanctioned formats and variants. It means that everybody gets to play the kind of Magic they want to play, and (hopefully) reduces the opportunities for jerkwad arguments over what is and isn't allowed. I don't see myself playing Legacy or Modern any time soon, but I'm glad there's an avenue for players with appropriate collections to use them without resorting to the Magic equivalent of the MMORPG noob-slaughter.
Thumbs way, way up: computerization
Back in the day, the only things we really had for card lists and valuations were our local game store and the trade rags. It seems like one of them was called Scrye. Is that still around?
Anyway, today there are many ways to manage the vast swaths of data associated with the game, and that is an absolute godsend. I personally use Decked Builder for the Mac, iPad, and iPhone. I like being able to build a deck virtually, filtering for Standard-legal cards in my collection, instead of screwing with the physical cards and then having to vet them individually after the deck is built. The only thing that bugs me about it is that it doesn't include support for identifying foils, and the deck simulator doesn't support counters or tokens. Deckbox.org is a cool site that seems to do the same thing, but it doesn't look like it supports identifying the set a particular card came from (or identifying foils). I'd love to see something with an easy bulk import, foil support, and a deck simulator that allows you to battle it out with friends including full token and counter support. I've looked, but haven't found it yet.
On my iPad, I also have MTG Trades, an app that helps identify the going value for a card by using the prices published at various sites, and remembers your trades for you if you're anal like me and always need to have your inventory database up-to-date.
The internet is a stabilizing factor in individual card prices; when players can easily hop on the internet and order cards from 1200 miles away and get them in time for FNM, it tends to prevent local bubbles from forming.
The internet also means that net-decking is a thing, which tends to disappoint the consummate tinkerer in me. I like winning, but I really prefer winning with the deck that I built against the deck that you built. Net-decking may show one of us to be a better player, but it means that constructed formats don't really force a test of deck-building skills. I guess that's what sealed events are for.
Of course, I couldn't mention computerization without bringing up MTG Online, which in my book is either a cynical marketing scheme or a giant missed opportunity or both. I don't like having a separate, virtual inventory of cards that cost just as much as the cards I buy at the store. I haven't done much with MTGO because if I'm going to shell out $4 for a pack of 15 cards, I think I ought to have some cards in my hand at the end of the transaction. It bugs me. It feels like a TSR move. (Kids, TSR owned Dungeons and Dragons before Wizards of the Coast, and while they would let you buy the product, they would also sue you into poverty if you tried to do anything creative with it.) It seems like the program would be better as a promoter of physical card sales, by letting players try out deck ideas without regard to card price or availability, and learn how the game is played in a structured environment that demonstrates triggers and the stack and so forth for you.
The interface is also clunky as hell. It feels like it was written by a third-rate software shop, like something Electronic Arts would publish. Where's the modern HTML5 interface so we can just log in with a browser? Where's the cross-platform compatibility? Come on, we have 1st-person shooters releasing to all platforms with photo-realistic graphics and amazing physics models, pushing 100 frames per second -- why can I feel myself aging between "click on land card" and "land card graphic turns sideways to indicate it's tapped"?
All in all though, computerization is a huge boon to almost any tabletop game, and Magic probably benefits more than most. I'd love to hear about other collection management and deck building sites that folks know about, as well as software that you've found useful on any platform. Leave comments below or hit me up on Twitter, where I'm @smacketybap. Maybe next time I'll get around to talking about some decks…
Decked Builder: http://www.deckedbuilder.com
MTG Trades: http://www.mtgapps.com/mtg-trades/
Monday, October 22, 2012
Standardize
I was first introduced to the concept of a format -- meta-rules limiting which cards could be played -- by my friend Carl, who it turns out really didn't want to play Magic. Being a man of high ambition, Carl wanted to play the recently released DOOM, and had quit his job to do so when it launched the year before. When computers for DOOMing were unavailable and it came down to card games, Carl wanted to play a different game called "creature beatdown". Creature Beatdown used Magic cards, but it wasn't Magic.
I distinctly remember our first game… Carl said "here, let me show you my black deck", and we proceeded to play. My favorite color combination was and is Green/White (Selesnya fo' life, dawg!), and the fact that Carl wanted to play mono black was a little weird to me. During the time of Revised, only one kind of player generally played mono: morons. But Carl had a trick up his sleeve.
A couple of rounds into our game, Carl had beaten on me for a few points when I finally drew the card I was looking for and triumphantly plunked it down.
"Circle of Protection: Black."
Carl's reaction was immediate. "A COP?!?! Dude, what the hell?"
I was confused, and offered an intelligent rebuttal: "Buh?"
"Dude, we don't play with color-screwers."
"Guh?"
"Cards that mess with other people's colors. We don't use them. It's weak."
"But those are about a third of the cards in the set."
"Yeah, but they suck. You need to retune your deck."
Here, I had a problem. I wanted to play Magic, but the game Carl wanted was some limited subset of Magic. My other Magic-playing friends (of which there were 3) were unreliable, and Carl and I were always hanging out. So if I wanted to play a game that looked like Magic, I'd have to play by Carl's rules or he just wouldn't play.
We finished the game (I won, given that I had color-screw cards and he didn't), he moaned and complained the entire time, and then I begrudgingly pulled out my CoPs, my Karma, my Wards, my Lifeforce, my White Knights, and so forth, replacing them with the crap creatures remaining in my collection. I tried to put up an argument: "But if you don't limit yourself to one color, color-screws won't hurt as much. Besides, you can answer them with dispel effects and so forth."
Carl dismissed these points as "weak" (it's interesting to note that he thought color-boost cards like Bad Moon were just fine).
I wound up having two decks: one deck for Creature Beatdown with Carl, and another deck for playing my other friends. Unfortunately I didn't have a lot of money (and thus not a lot of cards), so I wound up having to scratch-build a deck from the same card pool depending on which friend was coming over.
Later, Carl and I played a game in which he showed off his all-artifact deck, powered (naturally) by the various Urza's lands. He dropped Colossus of Sardia, and I immediately responded with Disenchant.
"DUDE! I thought I told you we don't play with color-screws."
"I took them all out. You watched me."
"Colorless is a color! Get rid of your Disenchants, your Shatters, your Shatterstorms…"
I started to wonder if playing with Carl was really worthwhile. It was actually another game that convinced me to stop playing with him: Richard Garfield had followed Magic: The Gathering with Jyhad, a vampire-themed, White Wolf-inspired collectible card game with the interesting twist of having political interaction in addition to combat. I built a deck with just enough combat power to stay alive, and packed it with political power cards. I proceeded to win a 6-man free-for-all with it, literally voting myself to victory.
Soon after, I sat down to play Carl. One of my first vampire drops was Lucian, the Malkavian Justicar, who could almost single-handedly win any vote that came up. He hurt like hell to put in play, but he was worth it.
"Dude, if you're planning to do any of that political crap you might as well just put your deck away. We don't play with political cards."
So we just didn't play.
Fast-forward almost two decades, and I'm re-entering the world of Magic. At first I quailed a little at the thought of competing with almost 20 years' worth of cards that I had never seen, but then I learned of Standard -- a glorious format that forced everyone to use currently in-print cards. I cringed at the idea of coming to FNM with my wussy little deck, fearing all the while that I'd run into another Carl situation, so I asked Bryan at Wizard's Norman a bunch of stupid-sounding questions about the format, the rules, and the customs of the local community. I read obsessively about the format's official rules, intending to rules-lawyer the hell out of the first person who told me I couldn't play a card just because they didn't like that style of play.
Thankfully, none of that happened, and as most well know, the group at Wizard's Norman is cordial and polite almost to the point of obsequiousness. I can't imagine a better group for my return to Magic, and the joy of gaming is not lost even when being beaten by the Wizard's crew, but of course there is a downside…
In the end, Carl won. Color-screws are all but gone. Creature beatdown is the norm. Mono decks are viable. Worse, I spent my first FNM getting destroyed by Delver of Secrets decks while remembering how I used to keep Tsunamis in the sideboard to ruin Blue's day.
I distinctly remember our first game… Carl said "here, let me show you my black deck", and we proceeded to play. My favorite color combination was and is Green/White (Selesnya fo' life, dawg!), and the fact that Carl wanted to play mono black was a little weird to me. During the time of Revised, only one kind of player generally played mono: morons. But Carl had a trick up his sleeve.
A couple of rounds into our game, Carl had beaten on me for a few points when I finally drew the card I was looking for and triumphantly plunked it down.
"Circle of Protection: Black."
Carl's reaction was immediate. "A COP?!?! Dude, what the hell?"
I was confused, and offered an intelligent rebuttal: "Buh?"
"Dude, we don't play with color-screwers."
"Guh?"
"Cards that mess with other people's colors. We don't use them. It's weak."
"But those are about a third of the cards in the set."
"Yeah, but they suck. You need to retune your deck."
Here, I had a problem. I wanted to play Magic, but the game Carl wanted was some limited subset of Magic. My other Magic-playing friends (of which there were 3) were unreliable, and Carl and I were always hanging out. So if I wanted to play a game that looked like Magic, I'd have to play by Carl's rules or he just wouldn't play.
We finished the game (I won, given that I had color-screw cards and he didn't), he moaned and complained the entire time, and then I begrudgingly pulled out my CoPs, my Karma, my Wards, my Lifeforce, my White Knights, and so forth, replacing them with the crap creatures remaining in my collection. I tried to put up an argument: "But if you don't limit yourself to one color, color-screws won't hurt as much. Besides, you can answer them with dispel effects and so forth."
Carl dismissed these points as "weak" (it's interesting to note that he thought color-boost cards like Bad Moon were just fine).
I wound up having two decks: one deck for Creature Beatdown with Carl, and another deck for playing my other friends. Unfortunately I didn't have a lot of money (and thus not a lot of cards), so I wound up having to scratch-build a deck from the same card pool depending on which friend was coming over.
Later, Carl and I played a game in which he showed off his all-artifact deck, powered (naturally) by the various Urza's lands. He dropped Colossus of Sardia, and I immediately responded with Disenchant.
"DUDE! I thought I told you we don't play with color-screws."
"I took them all out. You watched me."
"Colorless is a color! Get rid of your Disenchants, your Shatters, your Shatterstorms…"
I started to wonder if playing with Carl was really worthwhile. It was actually another game that convinced me to stop playing with him: Richard Garfield had followed Magic: The Gathering with Jyhad, a vampire-themed, White Wolf-inspired collectible card game with the interesting twist of having political interaction in addition to combat. I built a deck with just enough combat power to stay alive, and packed it with political power cards. I proceeded to win a 6-man free-for-all with it, literally voting myself to victory.
Soon after, I sat down to play Carl. One of my first vampire drops was Lucian, the Malkavian Justicar, who could almost single-handedly win any vote that came up. He hurt like hell to put in play, but he was worth it.
"Dude, if you're planning to do any of that political crap you might as well just put your deck away. We don't play with political cards."
So we just didn't play.
Fast-forward almost two decades, and I'm re-entering the world of Magic. At first I quailed a little at the thought of competing with almost 20 years' worth of cards that I had never seen, but then I learned of Standard -- a glorious format that forced everyone to use currently in-print cards. I cringed at the idea of coming to FNM with my wussy little deck, fearing all the while that I'd run into another Carl situation, so I asked Bryan at Wizard's Norman a bunch of stupid-sounding questions about the format, the rules, and the customs of the local community. I read obsessively about the format's official rules, intending to rules-lawyer the hell out of the first person who told me I couldn't play a card just because they didn't like that style of play.
Thankfully, none of that happened, and as most well know, the group at Wizard's Norman is cordial and polite almost to the point of obsequiousness. I can't imagine a better group for my return to Magic, and the joy of gaming is not lost even when being beaten by the Wizard's crew, but of course there is a downside…
In the end, Carl won. Color-screws are all but gone. Creature beatdown is the norm. Mono decks are viable. Worse, I spent my first FNM getting destroyed by Delver of Secrets decks while remembering how I used to keep Tsunamis in the sideboard to ruin Blue's day.
Friday, September 28, 2012
Memory's Journey
I should probably start off with an introduction, since most of you don't know me. My name is Tom, I'm 42 years old, a professional software engineer, and I'm coming back to Magic after having been away for about 16 years. I have a bunch of hobbies, gaming being one of them, and I consider Magic a subset of gaming, albeit a pretty big one.
I first started playing in late 1994 when Revised was the core set and Fallen Empires was the new hotness. It had these bizarre token generators that divided us over whether they sucked or rocked. Token decks weren't even a thing in my local community, and most of my friends disregarded the token cards in Fallen Empires as worthless -- except the one guy who liked keeping token generators for feeding his Lord of the Pit.
Alpha, Beta, and Unlimited cards were vanishingly rare in my part of the country (Bowling Green, Ohio) at the time, and prices were ungodly for single cards. Twiddle -- I kid you not -- was an $8 card. The internet wasn't happening yet, and since we couldn't easily order up an envelope full of cards from across the country, we were slaves to the local card economy.
At the time, I didn't really have my career off the ground yet, and spending $3 for a booster pack on a wage of $5/hour, when weighed against my other obligations (rent, utilities, gas, car insurance, and oh yeah -- food), just didn't seem like a good idea. I still did it, and earned a lot of evil looks from my wife, but I never really got into the "buy a box of boosters" thing because that was something rich people did. I wasn't sure, but I could imagine Vince Neil sitting in his Beverly Hills uberpad surrounded by boosters, opening them willy-nilly and wallpapering his den with Fallen Angels. (Kids, Vince Neil is/was the frontman for Motley Crue, one of the hardest-partying hair-metal bands of the 1980's. Go download "Kickstart My Heart" from iTunes and try not to pull a muscle while rockin' out.)
Sometime later I moved to Detroit and no longer knew any local gamers, so I found a kid (a coworker's son) who had a massive Magic addiction and gave him my entire collection.
Fast forward to August, 2012. I've moved to Oklahoma, changed jobs a number of times, and wasted 7 years on World of WarCraft before my guild dried up and blew away (I was a tankadin before it was ezmode, punk!).
Unable to wrangle the schedules of my friends sufficiently to keep our Pathfinder game running, having no hope of getting enough futurist geeks together to launch a respectable Eclipse Phase game, and still feeling the desperate burn of my inner gaming Jones, I knew I had to do something. The parameters for that something were: It had to not matter if any or even all of my local group could show up for our Friday night game. It had to be something I could do on my own if necessary. It had to be something that would tickle the obsessive-compulsive gamer geek within in such a way that he would stop wailing away in the middle of the night, dragging his chains across the attic floor.
I came to the inevitable conclusion that it had to be Magic, because there was no way in hell I was going to be caught dead at 42 playing Yu-Gi-Oh or Pokemon. I could just see the cops rolling up on me, a childless middle-aged man standing outside Norman HS, scoping for 15-year-olds who wanted to "play a game" with me. That's an article I didn't want my church friends to read in the police blotter the next day.
Anyway, I ran out and grabbed a couple of the new deck-builder kits and proceeded to whip up a few decks for the purpose of introducing my friends to Magic. In the process, I discovered that somebody went and ruined changed the game so radically that it turns out I only knew the very basics of how to play any more. From my perspective, Blue is the new Black, Black is the new Red, and Red wants to be Black and Green at the same time. What happened to interrupts, mana burn, and banding? What is this "Standard" thing everyone's talking about? And WTF is a Phyrexian mana symbol?
The one thing that has dramatically improved at first glance is the graphic layout of the cards, and the art is crazy good compared to what it used to be. I totally want a poster-sized print of Defy Death for my office wall.
In the future, I'll be discussing my reactions to the new state of the game, my memories of the way it used to be, and talk about decks I'm building or have built. Given that I am effectively a noob now that y'all have gone and changed everything, these are not going to be fantastic tournament decks. Rather, I'll be talking about cards and deck ideas that interest me, and since I can't seem to organize my cards without building a deck thanks to a tendency toward OCD-like behavior, what you'll probably find is casual and (hopefully) fun to play theme deck ideas that I started screwing with because the cards caught my fancy.
I'm attracted to the Pauper/Peasant formats as a result of my first go-round when I had no money, I'm more or less morally opposed to paying real (read: folding) money for a single card, and thus will rarely post a deck that would cost you more than $20 to buy outright. Tournaments are cool and all, but first and foremost a game should be be fun to play. Maybe I'll even learn something -- it can happen, I've seen me do it.
I first started playing in late 1994 when Revised was the core set and Fallen Empires was the new hotness. It had these bizarre token generators that divided us over whether they sucked or rocked. Token decks weren't even a thing in my local community, and most of my friends disregarded the token cards in Fallen Empires as worthless -- except the one guy who liked keeping token generators for feeding his Lord of the Pit.
Alpha, Beta, and Unlimited cards were vanishingly rare in my part of the country (Bowling Green, Ohio) at the time, and prices were ungodly for single cards. Twiddle -- I kid you not -- was an $8 card. The internet wasn't happening yet, and since we couldn't easily order up an envelope full of cards from across the country, we were slaves to the local card economy.
At the time, I didn't really have my career off the ground yet, and spending $3 for a booster pack on a wage of $5/hour, when weighed against my other obligations (rent, utilities, gas, car insurance, and oh yeah -- food), just didn't seem like a good idea. I still did it, and earned a lot of evil looks from my wife, but I never really got into the "buy a box of boosters" thing because that was something rich people did. I wasn't sure, but I could imagine Vince Neil sitting in his Beverly Hills uberpad surrounded by boosters, opening them willy-nilly and wallpapering his den with Fallen Angels. (Kids, Vince Neil is/was the frontman for Motley Crue, one of the hardest-partying hair-metal bands of the 1980's. Go download "Kickstart My Heart" from iTunes and try not to pull a muscle while rockin' out.)
Sometime later I moved to Detroit and no longer knew any local gamers, so I found a kid (a coworker's son) who had a massive Magic addiction and gave him my entire collection.
Fast forward to August, 2012. I've moved to Oklahoma, changed jobs a number of times, and wasted 7 years on World of WarCraft before my guild dried up and blew away (I was a tankadin before it was ezmode, punk!).
Unable to wrangle the schedules of my friends sufficiently to keep our Pathfinder game running, having no hope of getting enough futurist geeks together to launch a respectable Eclipse Phase game, and still feeling the desperate burn of my inner gaming Jones, I knew I had to do something. The parameters for that something were: It had to not matter if any or even all of my local group could show up for our Friday night game. It had to be something I could do on my own if necessary. It had to be something that would tickle the obsessive-compulsive gamer geek within in such a way that he would stop wailing away in the middle of the night, dragging his chains across the attic floor.
I came to the inevitable conclusion that it had to be Magic, because there was no way in hell I was going to be caught dead at 42 playing Yu-Gi-Oh or Pokemon. I could just see the cops rolling up on me, a childless middle-aged man standing outside Norman HS, scoping for 15-year-olds who wanted to "play a game" with me. That's an article I didn't want my church friends to read in the police blotter the next day.
Anyway, I ran out and grabbed a couple of the new deck-builder kits and proceeded to whip up a few decks for the purpose of introducing my friends to Magic. In the process, I discovered that somebody went and ruined changed the game so radically that it turns out I only knew the very basics of how to play any more. From my perspective, Blue is the new Black, Black is the new Red, and Red wants to be Black and Green at the same time. What happened to interrupts, mana burn, and banding? What is this "Standard" thing everyone's talking about? And WTF is a Phyrexian mana symbol?
The one thing that has dramatically improved at first glance is the graphic layout of the cards, and the art is crazy good compared to what it used to be. I totally want a poster-sized print of Defy Death for my office wall.
In the future, I'll be discussing my reactions to the new state of the game, my memories of the way it used to be, and talk about decks I'm building or have built. Given that I am effectively a noob now that y'all have gone and changed everything, these are not going to be fantastic tournament decks. Rather, I'll be talking about cards and deck ideas that interest me, and since I can't seem to organize my cards without building a deck thanks to a tendency toward OCD-like behavior, what you'll probably find is casual and (hopefully) fun to play theme deck ideas that I started screwing with because the cards caught my fancy.
I'm attracted to the Pauper/Peasant formats as a result of my first go-round when I had no money, I'm more or less morally opposed to paying real (read: folding) money for a single card, and thus will rarely post a deck that would cost you more than $20 to buy outright. Tournaments are cool and all, but first and foremost a game should be be fun to play. Maybe I'll even learn something -- it can happen, I've seen me do it.
Subscribe to:
Comments (Atom)