Magic the Gathering and other CCGs

[Unsight]

For those who don't know...

Magic: The Gathering (colloquially "Magic", "MTG", or "Magic Cards") is a collectible card game created by mathematics professor Richard Garfield and introduced in 1993 by Wizards of the Coast. Magic is the first example of the modern collectible card game genre and still thrives today, with an estimated six million players in over seventy countries.[3] Magic can be played by two or more players each using a deck of printed cards or a deck of virtual cards through the Internet-based Magic: The Gathering Online or third-party programs.

Each game represents a battle between powerful wizards who use the magical spells, items, and fantastic creatures depicted on individual Magic cards to defeat their opponents. Although the original concept of the game drew heavily from the motifs of traditional fantasy role-playing games such as Dungeons & Dragons, the gameplay of Magic bears little resemblance to pencil-and-paper adventure games, while having substantially more cards and more complex rules than many other card games.

A while back, a friend of mine gave me a deck of magic cards and taught me how to play. I'm not really that good but it's fun for me. In playing it I've met a lot of people--some nice, some jerks, and some who kinda smell funny but not in the good way. I enjoy it though I don't really buy cards. In fact, my luck caused me to win a random drawing of about 20-30 packs of cards at the only pre-release I've ever been to so most all my cards come from that.

The neat part is that you don't need to own cards to play online though.

There is a really neat freeware program called Scrollrack which you can download for Windows here. You can also lookup pretty much any card in existence here.

If anyone is interested in playing online with me sometime, I think it'd be a lot of fun.
Or if you don't know how to play, I'd be willing to help you learn.

Does anyone else play MtG or maybe another card game?

[MesoZombie]

i used to play alot, my favorite deck was a suiced deck for team games

[Don Ramón]

I Interested... But I smell funny too

[Unsight]

i used to play alot, my favorite deck was a suiced deck for team games

Neat, my favorite deck that I've made online is an Angel-themed deck.

My deck ideas probably aren't that good... but I really like themes and stuff so it's fun anyway. ^_^

I Interested... But I smell funny too

I'm happy they haven't invented smell-o-vision yet for the internet.

[MesoZombie]

yeah the balck deck was built around plague and destruction--i had almost no creatures just spells designed to hurt ad kill, so while there was no chance i could win aganist a head to head fight my partner would just roll into them and rip them to shreds while i kept them from throwing up a decent defense

[Unsight]

yeah the balck deck was built around plague and destruction--i had almost no creatures just spells designed to hurt ad kill, so while there was no chance i could win aganist a head to head fight my partner would just roll into them and rip them to shreds while i kept them from throwing up a decent defense

My Angel deck is mostly Angels but sadly they cost a lot to put in play...


For people having trouble with Scrollrack, your folders should look like this:



It has to be in C:\Program Files\

[El Duderino]

I used to be quite the Magic Guru at school... but I lost touch after that and all the card just got insanely better forcing you to buy more... still my killer elf deck will crush you all to dust... 300 damage fireballs anyone ???

I´m interested

[Unsight]

I used to be quite the Magic Guru at school... but I lost touch after that and all the card just got insanely better forcing you to buy more... still my killer elf deck will crush you all to dust... 300 damage fireballs anyone ???

I´m interested

300 damage fireballs..

Eh... go easy on me.

[El Duderino]

^^ lol... thats just if the game takes for ever... and only if I max it out which has only happened once or twice don´t worry I´m not one of them first turn killers... that was one reason I stopped playing, last edition I really remember was Urzas Saga... after that if you didn´t buy good combo cards that would kill your opponent within the first three turns you where toast... I always loved longer matches... they should take at least 7-15 turns per game... problem is if you don´t play to win its no fun and if you are forced to play first turn victory decks its just luck and no skill...

Would you guys like to play all editions or limit it... I can tell you right now I still know almost all cards from Beta to Mirage by heart...maybe a little more... I still played after that but not with as much devotion... so if you guys only want to play older or newer editions I´d have to look into the newer ones... I once played with someone who had the newest cards and they where so good and had so many new abilities they weren't even compatible to older cards... thank good that guy had no skills at all... I moped the floor with my old cheap cards... anyway I like the older editions best by far... about up to Urzas Saga... it had some imbalanced cards but after they where banned or restricted it was ok... after that it just got out of hand though...

[Unsight]

I like casual friendly games so nothing tournament caliber with me (dunno how other people feel).

Any edition and cards are fine too but... no infinite combos and no power nine please. Those things can suck the fun out of it really fast for me anyway.

[El Duderino]

^^ Thats about how I feel... I just don´t know the new cards and abilities... only saw a few of them last year when I played that no skill guy... some abilities where ok.. others... lets just say its kinda stupid to have cards that are indestructible... where is the fun in that ??? Those cards make the power nine seem fair again... I used to play a infinity combo but it was one of the first (maybe the first) and you needed three cards and it wasn´t that hard to counter so it was still kinda ok...

but yeah casual friendly is exactly what I like...

[Unsight]

Just start with the cards you like and go from there. ^_^

Please try out that scrollrack thing too. That could be really fun if a few more people try it out.

[El Duderino]

^^ I´ll try to get the scrollrack thing going on the weekend... tonight I won´t be able to resist Fable 2 and Gears 2... tomorrow I have to work... but on the weekend I should have enough time... sounds like a great idea... I have been wanting to play again for ages but most people now play them killer decks... somewhere I read there even is a combo that somehow can kill you opponent before he can play a card even if he is first to play... how lame is that ???

[Unsight]

That sounds pretty crazy...

So we've got me, Dude, maybe Meso... anyone else?

[El Duderino]

If anybody wants to learn I still have the old PC game which is pretty ok to learn the basics...

Since I got caught up watching Rambo 3 on TV I had time to mess around with this Scrollrack prog. which seems to be pretty cool... very easy to use... but you need to know all the rules yourself... thats why I would suggest talking over Skype or a prog. like that to make it easier... building a Deck I noticed how rusty I am at this... and you can´t really tell if a Deck is any good until you have tried it a few times... and some Decks are only good against certain other ones... building a all rounder Deck with good mana mathematics is quite hard... specially if you have no clue what your opponent might have...

[Don Ramón]

I want to learn!

[fkusumot]

[quote="Unsight"]For those who don't know...

Magic: The Gathering (colloquially "Magic", "MTG", or "Magic Cards") is a collectible card game created by mathematics professor Richard Garfield and introduced in 1993 by Wizards of the Coast. Magic is the first example of the modern collectible card game genre and still thrives today, with an estimated six million players in over seventy countries.[3] Magic can be played by two or more players each using a deck of printed cards or a deck of virtual cards through the Internet-based Magic: The Gathering Online or third-party programs.

I'll just brag, but this is all completely true.

Yeah, I used to play it on the first MTG Tour. Then I started a website called the Magic Dojo in 1996 and ran it for three years until it got bought from me (or to put it another way, I sold it). The three years that I ran it (and it was just me, I did the entire website) is archived at http://www.classicdojo.org/. It was the largest MTG website on the 'net by far. It was like a message forum but people had to send me emails, then I would accept or reject them, do a little formatting or editing for most of them and then posted them where I thought it was appropriate. Most of the writing was crap, you can see it on the archived site. There were 20+ people that were mediocre to good writers that I relied on a lot and they were spread all over the country. And then there was five guys who started out with me as their editor and now all of them have worked for WoTC. Three of them are still there and one is part of the team that makes new cards. When all these people were writing articles for me and travelling to tournaments to do reporting, or more like reporting from a tournament they just played ('specially if they won), they did it all for free. The only thing they ever got was a T-Shirt.

WoTC would fly me in to cover the PT's and World Championships. I hung out with Garfield, Skaff and Rosewater. Mostly Rosewater. Garfield is a complete introvert and Skaff is a bit of an asshole. Rosewater is a flaming queen so we got along just fine, just standing around, watching people play and discussing the underlying dynamics, strategy and meta-game. I have been recognized (a few years ago) by WoTC as one the three most important theorists/writers of the early MTG scene and deckbuilding. I got the award for this article where (I guess) I laid down the first solid explanation of the mana-curve and how a good deckbuilder would utilize it.

I used to hang out with all the players too. Amazingly they were all pretty much such fantastic nerds that a party to them meant playing Classic-Black-Border-Draft with two teams of six each. It was funny once, twelve guys sitting on the floor of the deck of the Queen Mary (they had a couple PT's there) and the first guy on his first turn kills everyone and they all yell in one voice "Fuck you Finkel!".

So anyways, I lost interest in playing after I sold the website even though I was on the board of directors and owned stock in the newly formed company (which eventually got sold to USA Networks just before the bubble popped).

As of now my main association with MTG is that I'm one of the guys on the selection committee for the "MTG Hall of Fame". Since I haven't been keeping up with the PT a lot lately I may resign that position after the last person that I think deserves it wins.

I could still play but they actually changed the rules that I know (with interrupts and the rest of the broken abuseable stuff) and I only know the cards up to Tempest. I have an all Alpha card deck that I use for fun if someone wants to play and a Beta recursion kill deck just for the lulz.


My Award Winning Article
MTG Hall of Fame Selection (I'm about halfway down the list)
Great Interview of Me

[El Duderino]

^^ Sweet... tell me more

[iclim4]

That was a pretty interesting and entertaining read Fkusumot. ^_^

[fkusumot]

Uh... what else do you dudes want to know? The MTG tournament scene is probably very similar to the competitive FPS or RTS games on computers. Mostly bad hygiene, below average social skills and fairly intelligent. And maybe one girl for every 100 guys. Although at that time there were 3 fairly good female players. And they were very intelligent, had sunny personalities and looked okay to the average 16-year old.

Those girls were always getting hit on, I was like the doddering Uncle Frank, and the players knew who I was and definitely stayed away from me except to introduce themselves (unless they already knew me socially). So the girls would hang around me so they wouldn't get hit on all the time by these guys with greasy hair and chicken-breath (or worse).

Just rambling on here but now that I think about I was a minor celebrity in that little world. People notice you when you come in a room. You get people gathered around you in rings or horseshoe shape, because (I guess) they don't want to get to close and be intruding but they like gawking. And then you get sought out by the other minor type celebrities, and it's a clique, and you travel around together.

But I hate crowds, I don't like social situations where I have to mingle with people I don't know and you have to do a lot of that when you go to a Pro-Tour to cover it. Every hour or so I would have to go outside and walk to some place where there weren't any people and have a smoke. This was 10-12 years ago and a lot of the events were at places that I could smoke inside if I wanted to.

Yeah, that reminds me, I would always have WoTC run my phone line (so I could do my web-updates and occasional live-blogging, but we didn't call it that then) to some out of the way place. There were these two women that worked at WoTC that were always hitting on me and it always seemed like they came over to bug me when I was trying to do an update. Although I had no interest in either of them for obvious reasons I did find out I kinda screwed up, in a purely hypothetical way. One of the WoTC women was actually really retired and she was just working at Wizards for fun... cuz yeah, she was pretty damn rich. She was in at Microsoft as programmer early on when they were doing all 401k matches with company stock, incentive and bonus' were in stock and sometimes even regular pay was in, you guessed it, stock. Oh, and how could I forget, a lot of them got stock options, and she got a metric-fuckton of stock because she started at MSFT in '87. So I didn't know any of this until '98. I guess she had sold a little of her stock in '94 to buy a small condo but in '98 she cashed it all and had $5 million, which was a lot back then.

All the original MTG guys did well also. In fact I think Garfield got screwed just a little, but he still ended up with enough money so that he could quite his day job. Their big payday was when they got bought out by Hasbro.

I was also surprised to hear that some of those kids I use to hang out with or chat with on IRC became successful and famous Poker players. I guess it makes sense, the best ones from MTG were the ones that successfully crossed over into poker. And all of them already know the basics of poker because they were all playing poker right after that movie Rounders came out and that lasted for at least a year. Everyone wanted to be Matt Damon.

[Unsight]

So... wanna play with us?

[El Duderino]

^^ lol... I bet we´d all have to gang up on Frank The Tank and would still lose... maybe if we use some imbalanced cards from new editions... or make some up and pretend they are from new editions...

[Unsight]

Hmmm I know one imbalanced card...



I don't actually use it, but it's funny.

[El Duderino]

^^ lol... that card is freaky... wanna try to play a round ????

[Unsight]

I'd love to play a game tonight on Scrollrack (or at least try to).

I can't right now though.

As long as you don't use a mean card like that... ><

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