Magic: The Gathering - Page 3

EDH has become my only way of playing Magic lately, outside of prerelease events and the odd draft or two. Regular Constructed Magic is just too expensive. I can ill afford to pay over a hundred dollars for a full playset of Jace or BSA or whatever Mythic Bullshit they decide to print. Honestly, Mythic might be the worst thing to happen to this game since, well, ever.

I got the chance to discuss Magic financials with Ben Bleiweiss at PAX East, who expressed regret that I won't be playing competitively anymore because he hates seeing players leave the game. I secretly suspect that he's more upset that Starcity won't get my money anymore, but I appreciated the sentiment.

What tickles me about EDH is that even though I'm building a 100 card deck, it's still less expensive than Standard because of the "1 copy of each card except for basics" rule. That said it's going to take me time to build-- but somehow I'm okay with that, even if I'm really itching to smash faces with Doran as my general.

The game ended at Fourth Edition for me. Every set after that just became too much.

When we break them out for the sake of nostalgia, if someone saw us playing they must feel like they've just stepped out of a hot tub time machine. Old cards and we still go by the rules for card frequency, etc., that were in effect back at that time.

I've long ago given up on Magic, I just simply did not have the time or money to keep up. And it is never fun losing because your opponent can afford better cards than you.

Now I only play it now on Xbox Live. For me the game is much more enjoyable when all the players have only a couple of set decks to choose from. It becomes more about strategy and the luck of the draw than money.

EDH is definitely fun, and cheaper than keeping up with standard.

If you guys are into playing the game, you should check out http://www.mtgsalvation.com
They have all kinds of news, info, and discussion. They have a specific forum for EDH in particular which was invaluable in my deckbuilding.

The best thread is probably this one...
http://forums.mtgsalvation.com/showthread.php?t=161090
It lists the top 35 cards for each colour and type. You'd think this would make a lot of decks feel the same, but considering you can only use so many of these the deck variety is pretty crazy.

This thread is good too...
http://forums.mtgsalvation.com/showthread.php?t=194327
It's a deck database, so the guy looking for help with Doran should check here.

I use Rafiq for one deck, and Thraximundar for the other. Rafiq is positively amazing. I don't even have to do general damage with him to win, and even with having to pay 10+ mana for him to come out some games due to constant removal he is very effective.

Standard is too fun for me to want to give up, despite Jund being so prevalent. There's a number of cheap decks you can build that are really strong, including a basic Jund itself so keeping up isn't too bad. I've been playing Standard since Zendikar came in after playing Shards block exclusively and I've been able to keep costs down by buying singles or sticking to one or two decks. I barely bought any Worldwake and have several Tier 1 decks.

The white/blue allies deck is a solid investment if you want to keep up with Standard, and it'll maintain most of it's best cards for quite some time. I think it'll get even better once Shards block rotates, and as of now it is ridiculously cheap to build. People still haven't realized the power of some of the cards in it, so they're $5 at most.

I looked at the MTGSalvation EDH forum, and while the Doran decks there were great, I recently read an article from Star City Games' Benny Smith, who wrote about using Omnath as a General. I'm a big fan of Green, so naturally, this appealed to me, and I'm working on making that deck.

Basic idea: Make a big fat guy and smash people. Should be fun.

What's great about Omnath is that even as mono-Green, you have some good ways of protecting him-- Avoid Fate, Vines of Vastwood, City of Solitude, etc. And in a deck that's all about generating lots of Green mana, if Omnath goes down, you can still muster big fat fatties (Molimo, Multani, and Emrakul/Ulamog soon to come), or abuse the hell out of a card like Chameleon Colossus. I'm really looking forward to seeing how this works.

Ah, Magic: The Gathering. I started collecting M:TG with my brother back when Revised came out, but we quitted for good around Mirage expansion, and we sold pretty much all of our cards although I still keep a deck around. Now I play a bit of this card game via Xbox 360 Arcade game. My favorite color is still White, and I still the love White powerhouses like Swords to Plowshare, Armaggddeon, Wrath of God, Serra Angel, and hordes of White weenies.

I'll be attending Pro Tour San Juan.

Cool! Good luck over there, Travis. Can't wait to hear about it.

Awesome! Looking forward to hearing about your experience there.

Resurrecting this. Wizards is in the middle of the latest block Innistrad and my buddies have dragged me back into it and you know what, like a relapsed drug addict, I'm loving it to death. Apparently, original creator Richard Garfield helped design this set and I think most of us here can appreciate it: horror theme. The main tribal components this time are Vampires, Zombies, Werewolves, Spirits and of course, lowly Humans. The newest game mechanic is the transform ability, in which a two-sided card has certain conditions to be met, at which point it can flip over into something more cool (the werewolves all use this mechanic, human on one side, ravenous beast on the other). It's a lot of fun but having not played in years since the Onslaught block I'm amazed at how fast the games can go nowadays, it seems like everything's done on turn 6 or 7, or maybe I'm just terrible.

 

Anyone else still in this? What's the tournament play like for this set? I'm losing money left and right because damn, it's fun and I want to know someone else is in the same boat.

Yep, still an addict. Loving this set too. They hit so many horror tropes and they've done a great job with flavor.

I'm forever constantly amazed that a damn near 20 year old game can still introduce new mechanics into its gameplay. Undying and the dual sided cards are ridiculously fun mechanics that I thoroughly enjoy playing on my opponents. I'm tempted to jump into a FNM game to see how I'd fare, or at least a booster league. Have never desired that with any other expansion (though admittedly, I was usually flat broke when other expansions dropped and what money I did have went to booster packs because deep down, I'm a completionist and must. have. them. all!)

Recently got my fiancee hooked on Magic, and she regularly dwindles my deck with her Millstone.