Magic: The Gathering

I played from around Stronghold/Exodus to Onslaught I think it was, more when I was a younger teenager. It was actually my parents (who are really not nerds, strangely enough) who got into it with some of their friends, and then I slowly absorbed it. We all fell out of it with one or two resurrections. I still have a couple thousand cards under my couch back home. I miss it from time to time.

I've thought about getting back into it, but the game has moved so far beyond me that I don't know if I really could.

I still play every week with around 15-20 guys at a local store. When I moved here, from KY, M:TG was one of the ways I managed to make new friends. While I do occassionally play in tournaments (I'll be going to World's this year, since it's in Memphis) we mainly use it as an excuse to sit around and shoot the shit. I started watching the Wire because one of the guys in my group suggested it (and gave me Season 1 to watch), and I'm trying to get a few of them turned on to Supernatural now.

The game itself is getting a little stale, but there are enough variables (Standard, Extended, Legacy, 2HG, Multiplayer, Type 4, etc) that I don't think I'll get bored with it anytime soon.

Not sure about MTG movies. Seems like a very bad idea unless the right people (and significant $$$) are attached.

The movie thing pissed me off, I always had my nerd hope that I'd be the one to make that movie.

To me, the Phyrexian Dreadnought is still one of the most badass fantasy creatures ever. I want to see that on a screen.

About a year or so ago, a friend of the missus mentioned that he had a collection gathering dust. As fate would have it, so did I, so next time I saw him I dug it out of the garage.

We played a few games, and he had some impressive early gems. Black Lotuses, entire decks of dual lands ... I think he had four time walks and four ancestral recalls in one of the decks. I mentioned that he was being pretty casual with some very valuable stuff (shuffling, not plastic sleeves, etc.). He asked me to look through his cards. I concluded after about 15 minutes that he had a 25-50K collection. He had multiples of many, many cards I had never seen before or only seen once or twice, and a crapload of Betas (even the Beta normal lands are worth a bunch).

He watched his cards with much suspicion after I told him.

That bastard.

I still remember the single tournament my parents went to (I wasn't playing yet). This was right as Exodus came out. My father sits down across from my Mom, opens his first booster pack and finds a Sliver Queen. He got called a few names.

Fuckin' nerds.

EDIT: Thinking back, I remember my Mom also opened a very rare card from that set, a Lotus Petal or some shit like that. It was one of the more expensive cards for awhile.

Lotus Petal was okay ... zero casting cost for one many of any color. A marginally valuable card for its kind.

Now everything not on the "Never Reprint" list is basically worth nothing, as they've reprinted everything under the sun.

I started playing around the time the Arabian Nights expansion came out, and stuck around until Mirage. I just got tired of all the new mechanics, all the errata, all the "this card is legal in this format but not in this format". And the fact you had to keep buying to stay competitive.

Basically, what kills every collectible market ... eventually ... the desire to maximize profits leads to churning out unneeded or ill-conceived new products with ever increasing complexity.

Sold my cards last year, but I still enjoy the game. Especially drafts, which I love and am pretty good at, and which you don't need a big, nerdy collection for.

edit: See, I have the opposite opinion as Dickson. The new cards are what make it great - cracking packs and having to figure out what's good, what's synergistic... that's what the game should be about. Not making one good deck and using it until the end of time.

Was Mirage when they started making cards waaaay too useful? I started around revised, and stopped when they starting making things too powerful. Basically, my friends little brother bought two booster packs that had more awesome cards than my whole collection. Then again, I had fairly boring decks. I used a red direct damage/flying creature deck the most, mainly because i had three shivan dragons in it. The quirkiest thing I had was a blue deck that had a time elemental and some card I can't remember, that would pull the elemental back into my hand at the end of the turn. When it worked (which was about 20 percent of the time), whoever I was playing had their mana tapped throughout every turn, and I would slowly kill them with a 1/2 creature. Not a very popular deck.

I haven't dug out the cards since I was about 18 or so, though I remember having a lot of fun playing until 6 in the morning smoking entirely too many cigarettes in my friends basement.

Oh god, the days of Middle School are flooding back. Never played that game nor could follow it. I instead played a knockoff card game made by Marvel comics called Overpower. That game went on for one semester and then died.

This is almost word for word my experience with the game. I think I started a little later but otherwise its the same story. Shit got too complicated and expensive to keep up on. Makes me think of MMO's, they're fun until they become a job.

Black Lotus

No.

Definitely no. Black Lotus was the card from Beta (I believe) that often fetched several hundred dollars. What I meant above was that the Lotus Petal was often the most expensive of that particular set, my bad.

That card I was referring to was a Lotus Petal (which has the abilities mentioned above). The card itself was most certainly a reference to the Black Lotus, but it was definitely a different card and came many years after.

Jesus Christ, what am I saying? Fuckin' neeeeeeeeerd!

Black Lotus made it into the initial release of the game and stuck around until Unlimited, I believe. I remember I traded an Enterprise-D from the Star Trek trading card game for a Black Lotus with a friend who was trying to get the whole Trek set (the Enterprise was a super-rare card from that set). I sold it for fifty bucks, thinking there was no way a game card could every be worth more than that. Hoo-boy.

*There, Renn, I out-nerded you, you're safe.

It's lotus petal. I pointed this out in post #7, above.

Anyone here ever get lion's eye diamond to do anything useful?

Lion's Eye Diamond was one of the key components for one of the most powerful decks ever constructed.

From the Wiki article:
"The deck used Burning Wish to fetch Yawgmoth's Will out of the sideboard and set up a kill with Tendrils of Agony. The deck, called Long.dec, resulted in the restriction of both Burning Wish and Lion's Eye Diamond, which was a key mana engine in the deck."



There, I out-nerded you both.

Aah Magic...memories. Started right around...Revised (4th edition), just before Fallen Empires and just after 'The Dark'. We had a store in the next town over that still stocked the older booster packs. I got a job the next summer and spent too much money buying packs of Legends, Antiquities and even once, an Arabian Nights one. Still have an almost complete Legends set, with all of the Elder Dragons, sitting in a protected case back home.

Eventually got back in during sophomore year during...I don't even remember which set. The one with the storyline featuring Kamahl and Ixidor (one of my favorite characters from the many novels; yeah...nerd).

As for the movies: The Brothers War. Do that, you can do ANYTHING else in the Magic universe, as I think everything is connected to it.

Basically, when most of us did, and after the chance to get hordes of supremely valuable cards (later) on the cheap.

That guy I mentioned twenty or so posts ago, I forgot to mention: I had to break his heart by telling him that playing with four libraries of alexandries (he had sets of four for three decks) wasn't going to be cool anymore.

The Brothers War could be a great movie, but it'd take a lot of work.

You guys didn't read the novels, did you? Jaysus.

I remember when Legends came out, me and a couple of friends chipped in and split a box of boosters and took turns picking packs out of the box. Once they'd all been given out, we started tearing them open so we could show off what we got. I think I got a Mirror Universe, which was one of the rarest cards in the set.

By the way, an Unlimited edition of a Black Lotus sells for about $850. A beta version will set you back almost $1300.

I actually read the very first one, which tried to fit the game mechanic into the plot of the book. Wasn't too bad as far as game fiction goes, but that's a hell of a qualifier there.

I should have pawned a few of them [BETA!!]. He never would have missed them.

I read two.*

*three

I remember the first one being actually readable, which ranks as one of the two or three biggest shocks of my reading career (I purchased it only so I could send away for the card ... I don't know if that makes it any better).

my bad! only my friends play that game so i had no idea there was more...so yeah..my bad my bad!

Mox Diamond! That's what my Mother fucking opened, not the Lotus Petal.

mas·och·ism
NOUN:
3. A willingness or tendency to subject oneself to unpleasant or trying experiences.

Holy shit (dude).

The Legions and Scourge cycle wasn't terrible...

What is the draw of this game? If I play a game I want to be able to play it completely out of the box, not continuously have the game grow and evolve.

Blue Moon and Cosmic Encounter are about as close to Magic as I've ever been.

Anybody play those? And if so how do they compare to M:TG?

That's part of the draw (for me anyway). It's never the same game, and continually grows. Once I get tired of running my counter-burn deck, I can play something else until they print cards that make me want to play the counter-burn deck again.

Imagine you're a console gamer playing an incarnation of Street Fighter. There are many others playing this game across the world, and they are ruthlessly looking for the optimal strategy. Eventually they will find it: one character will be proven just a little bit better than the others, so that you'd be a fool to pick anyone else. Because if you did, the other guy would just play the best character and destroy you. The game would have reached an equilibrium and become boring.

You can't design a perfectly balanced game (unless it's really simple, of course), but you can shake it up every few months so that equilibrium is never achieved. That's what Magic does, and they do it well.

Also, by the way, you can play it out of the box, and you keep playing out of that same box for about 2 years before it fully rotates out of the main competitive format. Even then, you can still play with your friends or in more inclusive formats.

Chiming in to say I play Magic. I began during 4th Edition and Ice Age, left during Nemesis, returned during 5th Dawn. I played online after grade school, but recently got back into the cardboard crack.

I've got a whole box full of Shards block cards, but the only deck I really enjoy right now is my Unearth Zombie deck.

I played from Antiquities to Alliances. I lost interest after that, and sold my cards. I've been thinking about getting back into it, but don't really want to amass a large collection of cards again, I'd just like to get enough cards to make a reasonable deck for occasinal play.

When I did i mostly played blues, alot of counters and flying creatures.

You're in luck then. Blue's been broken since they printed basic Islands.

I have a pretty good Elf hybrid deck going right now, faster than any other I've ever tried.

^ I'd love to pit my Grixis deck against it.

That would be an interesting match. I don't think I'm really all that good at Magic but I think I got lucky and built a deck that's almost idiot proof as long as you have a good sideboard. It still gets beat plenty, but it's the most fun deck I've played. Definitely the best I've built.

Do any of you play Magic online?

I thought about it when I first started playing the TCG a few months ago to try and get a hang of the basics, but I couldn't find a good way to play on a Mac.

I used to from 5th Dawn until Future Sight... but once they switched to 3.0, it took apart my decks and I didn't feel like having to rebuild them. Also, its too expensive to play paper and digital Magic.

To me, online Magic sort of takes away one of the better aspects of the game-- human interaction. I liked going to tournaments at Your Move Games in Davis Square and meeting new people. Some of them are still friends of mine to this day. Some of them were just "Magic friends", people I gamed with but didn't interact with outside of the game. Some of them were either jerk-offs or stunted man-children, and we won't speak of them.

But largely the game for me is all about that social aspect, and when you take that away I just lose interest.

I stopped playing a while back (~5 years ago) and have recently gotten back into the game. I am regretting having jettisoned my collection while moving a year ago, if not for the missing staple cards (pain-lands from Ice Age and Apocalypse, Birds of Paradise, etc) then for the no-longer-legal cards that I kept because the artwork rocks. I had two pages full of Phyrexian Negators, too, and some other collectible things, like Avalanche Riders signed by Darwin Kastle, and artists signatures from people like Bob Eggleton. It'll be a while before I stop feeling like a moron for getting rid of those binders.

I'm enjoying the game now, and I'm having fun playing catch-up on recent Magic history, sets, and mechanics. I'm actually down the street from the latest Newbury Comics (New England music/movie/clothing/hobby chain) in Norwood, and the staff there are close to having FNM up and running, so I guess I came back at the right time.

Same for me, the human interaction is missing.
Which is why MMORPGs havent really gotten me to stop Pen+Paper Roleplaying, why Magic Online never really sparked, and why I prefer playing the WH40k Tabletop instead of Dawn of War for Multiplayer

I am old-school, I guess.

Found this deck on a Magic website. As a huge Grixis fan, I think I'll give it a shot at FNM this Friday.

Creatures
3 Viscera Dragger
3 Shambling Remains
3 Hellspark Elemental
3 Singe-Mind Ogre
3 Fire-Field Ogre
3 Grixis Grimblade


Spells
3 Bituminous Blast
3 Blightning
3 Terminate
3 Countersquall
2 Incinerate
3 Brainbite
2 Drastic Revelation

Land
2 Terramorphic Expanse
3 Crumbling Necropolis
3 Grixis Panorama
6 Mountain
6 Swamp
3 Island

If you're ever in need of a deck:

http://www.deckcheck.net/

Has TONS of decks, and updated daily.