"The brainiest it's ever been" makes it sound like it's ramping up the intellect. I guess they're saying that because of the end of the "dumbed-down" core sets, but I doubt it's the case for the game as a whole.
I tried getting back into Magic after an 8-year hiatus, and so many of the rules had been changed and simplified that many of the subtleties I enjoyed from before were no longer options. Felt like I was paying hundreds of dollars to turn a dial on a deterministic mechanism...
I kept thinking "well, this is just because I've been out of the loop; with time, I'm sure I'll discover new nuances". But after chatting with power players and reading through forums for a few months, I never saw any evidence of that.
Still a great game. But a very different game from the one I fell in love with in 1997, and also a different game from when I last was really into it in 2007.
I disagree. I've played MtG three times in my life: back in 1997, in 2004, and in 2016. I'm currently in a sealed league at work, and we're finding that Kaladesh is pretty rich with organic complexity. In my experience, it requires a lot more mental effort than I remember using a decade ago, and the people I'm playing with have expressed similar sentiments.
The set seems to be particularly sensitive to issues like timing, the order you play cards in, and the little choices you make. The cards don't have obvious drawbacks like Juzam Djinn or Jackal Pups, but they have lots of tradeoffs with the other cards in your deck. Choices like "what do I spend my energy on?" or "how should I fabricate?" or "do I hold on to the Cataclysmic Gearhulk to try and get more card advantage?" So many cards in the set force you to make little choices that add up to quite a bit of mental work.
That said, I'm only playing a sealed league so I know nothing about the state of the game in other formats.
My biggest problem from a couple years back was just one kid who's parents dropped like $600 on his deck and just played to be smug about his 30 damage turn 3 on friday nights. I've always loved trying to make competitive decks with as little money as possible though, maybe it's just me being silly.
Competitive Magic has a financial barrier to entry, yes, and always has. In that sense it's no different from any other hobby (and is cheaper than quite a few).
Also it's generally a very bad idea to try to build your own decks from scratch if you want to be competitive. Although things shift far more often (due to new sets and rotating formats), competitive Magic is similar to chess in that you're better off studying and mastering known-good decks, since very few people can reliably outperform the ruthlessly honed decks produced by the worldwide competitive community.
Competitive only in the sense of having interesting, non-standard games (that weren't a face roll) at nothing really higher than Friday meetups at the games shop, sorry if that wasn't clear. Anyone can fork out for the latest comp winning deck, read the overview to see how you play the cards and roll the local meetup, I was simply saying that isn't where the fun is for me.
And yes, we spent our fair share reading up and talking to other players about their meta decks, that in itself is great fun also, just of a different kind.
From what I heard, it costs a lot of money to purchase a competitive Magic deck, but the cards tend to hold their value so you can just sell them once you're done playing it.
Compare to, say, Hearthstone, where the digital cards have zero resale value, but the up front cost is substantially lower.
Standard is the most popular format, and has the lowest power level of the major constructed formats. Cards are only legal in standard for about 1 year. Most cards that are played in standard aren't powerful enough for Modern, Legacy, or Vintage, so once they rotate out of standard, their value drops.
Siege Rhino, for instance, lost 80% of its peak value by the time it rotated out in April.
Modern is funny. It's non-rotating, but has a fairly aggressive ban list. No big deal if you play casually, but it's possible to drop $1-2k on a T1 deck, only to have a key card banned a year or two later, or for the meta to shift and your deck to be hated out of the format.
Legacy, Vintage, and EDH are generally more stable.
What I typically do when a new set comes out is to buy 3 to 4 "boxes" of the set (around 100 booster packs). Over the next couple of months I'll draft the set with friends or we will do casual sealed tournaments etc. (You need 24 boosters for an 8 man draft or 6 booster per person to run a sealed tournament.). There is a group of us who get together every fortnight or so to play limited like this - usually over a few beers.
By the time I've opened all the product I generally have copies of most of the set's staple rares and I can trade or sell anything I do not need.
It is a sizeable chunk of cash upfront if you specifically want to play constructed you can acquire 'singles' in pieces and build towards a deck over the season that way. I do not play standard at all. I'm a big eternal format fan (especially Legacy). Once you acquire those cards you can play with them forever.
One thing I have noticed is a lot of eternal format cards are getting thrown into supplemental sets (i.e True Name Nemesis, Shardless Agent, Council's Judgement, Containment Priest, Dack Fayden) stuff like that. Which tends to spike the price.
I've always wanted to get in to some regular in person gaming like this with friends, my circles are just a little too small and disconnected to sustain it though.
I think I might start trying to be the organizer more, it might just be that everyone is waiting to be asked :)
I remember playing the game in the late 90s, and trying again in the early 2000's.
The strategy and game-play dynamics were awesome. Not so awesome: the fact that the amount of money a player spends acquiring rarer cards and assembling a deck dictates their success. It's a pay-to-win game and I fucking hate games like that. Not unlike paintball, he who spends the most on gear wins.
If you and I played a round of golf, where I used a standard set of golf clubs (not cheap) and you used a hand-whittled tree branch, it's highly likely that I would beat you regardless of our relative skill level. This does not mean golf is "pay-to-win", though; if you and I both played with the standard clubs, skill would determine the outcome. And even if you played with an average but acceptable set of clubs while I splurged on super-fancy clubs, you'd still beat me reliably if you were the more skilled player.
Magic is much the same way. There is certainly a financial barrier to entry, which must be cleared if you want to succeed in competitive play. And if you pit someone who has cleared that barrier against someone who has not, skill is much reduced as a factor in determining the outcome. But competitive Magic is like everyone having at least a basic decent set of golf clubs: everyone playing competitively has made the up-front investment in the game, and now they are distinguished by skill rather than further spending.
After selling my collection of cards, I find that I can still enjoy playing the game using the "draft" format: invest $9 or so for three packs, then have a pleasant evening of play. No more expensive than seeing a movie, and the playing field is more or less level.
I play EDH/commander. There a $50 budget deck can readily beat a $2000 deck. I have won and lost on both sides of that equation.
EDH started as a community driven format with no official support. The community decided that your deck must be exactly 100 cards with no duplicates except basic land. This slows the came down and forces more board interaction.
On top of that 1 of your hundred cards must be a Legendary creature. Everything in your deck can be of a color from that creature and you will always have access to that creature throughout the game. This constrains deck construction and makes it really hard to splash a color for one $50 that would be perfect. Always having access to commander is a comfort to new players and opens new strategies to veterans.
To further combat this I have a pool of 30 or decks that I build with my friends and we play mostly from this pool. No paying to win if we are paying together.
In so far as there's a "right answer" for the pay-to-win parts of the game, this is it. EDH, in general, is much gentler on using cards that aren't the best and most expensive thing around.
I have a tourney-competitive EDH deck that, according to current prices, costs about $400. That's a good bit... but replacing 4 cards with cheaper counterparts brings it down to $63. And I have recently seen at 2 other good EDH decks under $40 from someone who decided he wasn't going to spend more than $50 on any deck.
Played paintball for fifteen years, competitively, traveling all over the country, also ran a large online forum. That is not true at all. Especially today, the differences between the high end, and low end guns are at this point, just looks, and luxuries.
It's a pay-to-be-competitive game. Nobody is spending absurd amounts of cash for a deck and expecting to win a competitive event strictly because of it.
$400 is about $350 more than I would have thought reasonable to spend on a card game when I was a teenager (15-16), and my parents would have thought $50 too much.
I spent about £25 on cards, and was probably given another £25 or so by a wealthy friend. The game was fine when played against others who had a similar investment, but the group stopped playing because of eBay: our friends with real money could buy what they wanted, and the rest of us could never beat them.
I think it was the first thing we did which showed who had money and who hadn't. We could take cheap plastic Warhammer figures, paint stars on them, and declare them to be powerful wizard-mages. Computer games were easily copied, it didn't matter who owned a board game. M:tG ruined the equality...
I looked into the game again about a year ago, but there were so many new rules (new abilities, new card types) -- I decided I didn't want to spend that much time on one game.
The last time I played Standard seriously was RTR/Theros and all the top decks were 1K+. I looked to buy in a few months ago, but 4 Jace's alone were over $400 (a new person would also be looking at several hundred for fetch lands). The only reason current standard is "cheap" is because everyone knows that most of the cards won't hold their value post rotation.
I think I'll be sticking with the eternal formats where cards don't lose 90% of their value in 2 years.
If you're looking for another way to scratch that itch, look into Netrunner. The game and the culture are both fun and creative, and it's possible to build competitive decks for about a hundred bucks (as an LCG, all cards come as full playsets, so you know exactly what you're getting).
It's more fun in person, but there's also a free community-made site where you can play online, and most players are happy to teach: http://jinteki.net
I like Netrunner because I feel you're less constrained by your draws. You can run aggressively with an empty board, forcing the corp to spend money on their defenses. You can spend actions digging for cards you need.
Draws still matter, of course, but it's less common for me to feel like I'm trying to top-deck answers in Netrunner.
Generally speaking, the cheap decks people start the game with aren't very interesting to pilot. They don't have enough removal, which is one of the primary ways players interact with their opponent's board. They definitely don't have boardwipes, which means just playing the best creature in hand each turn is usually the right play. They typically don't have much card selection. And most complexity is concentrated at higher rarities, so these decks tend to have simple cards.
That's not to say that all cheap decks are boring, or all tournament decks are interesting, but cards like, say, Duskwatch Recruiter, Dromoka's Command, or Despise, for example, just offer more choices than Craw Wurms or Grizzly Bears.
Regarding what others have said:
Damage not going on the stack was a good change IMO. Sacrificing Mogg Fanatic was always the right play; now it's less obvious. I agree with akud on detention sphere vs. O-ring.
Hexproof over Shroud was a mistake; with that said, they seem to have figured that out, and we're getting cards like Pristine Skywise or Dragonlord Ojutai instead.
I'm sad to see Protection be replaced by Indestructible. Morph/Manifest and DFCs show that they're not entirely shying away from complex mechanics.
What about the spell stack ? I seem to remember a LIFO spell stack for all instants and abilities, but now it doesn't seem to work that way ... I can't really tell how instants vs. interrupts work anymore and if the spell stack actually works the way it did in the old (late 90s) way ?
The Stack was introduced in the 6th edition rules change (1999) and still works the same way today. The 6th edition rules also unified the instant and interrupt types, because the separate interrupt type was only necessary in the old "batch-based" system.
The modern stack is so much more sane than the old batch based system. You can still do plenty of interesting things with it, like casting Blessed Alliance during the end of combat step to get rid of Giest of Saint Traft, or casting Infernal Tutor, then holding priority and cracking a Lion's Eye Diamond, or responding to an O-ring trigger with another O-ring for a permanent exile, or burning somebody out in responding to a lethal mana-barbs trigger.
MaRo started a "New World Order" (http://magic.wizards.com/en/articles/archive/making-magic/ne...) design approach in 2011, where they try to manage some of the complexity by making commons and uncommons have less and/or easier abilities. It sound reasonable, as casual players have a lot more commons and uncommons than rares and mythical rares, and it makes learning/enjoyment curve much less steep. Some experienced players associate NWO with "dumbing down the game".
I mean, that sounds infuriating to me, because it means to get complex effects you have to go and buy rares and shinies on the secondary market. I guess that was always the downside to playing a CCG rather than a straightforward tabletop RPG, though.
For me, damage not going on the stack was a big change. That's probably better for the game, but eliminates a lot of tricks.
Also, the cards printed these days tend to not allow you to hose yourself. Take things like detention sphere, that say "exile a non land permanent you don't control." It used to be that those types of cards would exile any non land permanent, do a skilled opponent could, in certain situations, exile something you controlled by bouncing their only non land permanent in response.
Removing damage from the stack actually makes the game more complex. Previously, it was always correct to stack damage first. There was zero penalty. If you knew the rules then you got to make the optimal choice.
Now you actually have to choose. Do I want this creature to deal damage or do I want to get the benefit of some effect due to sacrificing it or whatever. Sakura-Tribe Elder got worse but it got much more strategically interesting.
I stoped playing right around the time this change was implemented. What I felt back then was that while you are right in principle, in theory what happened was that the power level of a lot of interesting cards dropped so much they weren't playable anymore. So while my Mogg Fanatics got more complex, it didn't really matter because at that point I had to drop them from my deck, usually replacing them with something more dumb and mana efficient.
See also the replacement of Shroud (can't be targeted) with Hexproof (can't be targeted by opponents). There's no longer an interesting trade-off where you're sacrificing flexibility by being unable to target your own creatures.
I've been playing magic competitively for a while now, and I have to say I agree that the recent sets after the so-called "new world order" are much more dumbed down. But you should play legacy or vintage (with proxies) just to see how crazy complex the game remains. Legacy remains extremely healthy and robust in my opinion, and has continued to tease my brain more than any other game.
WoW as a whole may feel dumbed down, but the skill cap at the highest levels of play has certainly increased with the last expansion. Easy to learn, hard to master seems to be the paradigm with them.
Magic is probably my fav board game, too bad that you have to put in so much time and money to have fun and the value of cards deprecates so quickly. I tried Hearthstone to scratch that itch but that game is just gutted MtG.
I pretty much refuse to play any format other than booster draft. Flat price, loads of fun, and easy to get into for a brief period of time since you only need to know about the set you are drafting.
I just find it hard to think about playing with every set of magic cards. With booster draft, there are only a few hundred cards that you even have to worry about.
Another unlisted benefit of draft vs. pauper is that almost any store selling Magic cards will have a weekly draft.
To some of you who are a bit disenchanted with MtG's cost (and the 90s style online client), as well as Hearthstone's simplicity - I might recommend Hex:Shards of Fate. It's more or less what MtG would be if WoTC were on top of their game. It's far cheaper and you can play in your underwear.
" too bad that you have to put in so much time and money to have fun and the value of cards deprecates so quickly."
That's exactly why I stopped playing it. It seemed almost rigged against poor people when I was in school. The guys with more money always had better stuff where we had to use cheap tactics to win. :)
My recommendation was doing it on computer with people choosing whatever cards they wanted. Eliminates that problem. Not as fun as holding the cards or being in person, though. Smartphones today give us another option where we could play it in person using our smartphones with two views: our cards and the board. Maybe even an extension where someone's tablet or monitor subscribes to the board people are playing on to have a constant, large display. What you think?
What's a reasonable price to spend? You would probably spend you $15 to go see a two hour movie... I bet you can get away with spending under $7.50 per hour on M:tG. But it is a very expensive game if you buy all the cards and only play it once.
I still have cards from the 90s, I don't think I've bought anything in 20 years. Still fun game to play on board game night with friends.
Sealed league. Get a group of people, everyone buys 10 packs for $26, you get to open six of them and you play. Every two weeks you open another pack. Ends up taking 10 weeks and nobody spends more than $26, maybe a little more if you buy card sleeves, iPhone apps to track life, or whatever.
What makes it fun is that you're playing against people with the same size card pool as you. Draft is cheaper ($7.80) but it's over and done in a few hours.
This is how I got in to MtG, and can confirm that its super fun. If you're lucky enough to find a group of friends that will participate, don't let the opportunity pass you by.
MtG is my favorite game too, but honestly to be competitive with your decks, on a yearly basis you need to spend a lot more money than watching all the blockbusters for that year twice :)
Flying a plane isn't $500/hr unless you're flying first class, and it's not exactly what I would call entertainment or recreation. I wouldn't do the rest of it, anyways.
Ha, I don't play with the Alpha stuff as much anymore, most of the cards I play with ate Unlimited and the expansions around that time.
I have a Shivan Dragon signed by Richard Garfield that he told me not to take out of my deck so I still play with that. He told me the value of these cards were in how much I enjoy them...
I do have a deck made entirely out of black border Nether Shadows that someone gave me as a joke during a tour of the WotC office years and years ago... most of them are Alphas.
I have a bunch of cards from the 90s but haven't played in decades. What's a good way to figure out which ones are valuable? I had a few beta cards, but mostly the series after that (name escapes me).
Also, where's a good place to sell? Online or in-person?
You'll make more money if you take the time to sell them one by one (or 4x sets if you have them). Selling your collection in bulk will make you lose 30-40% but it's less time consuming. Ebay is the place since trading sites will pay you wholesale prices (they have to make a profit retailing your cards).
Thanks for making me think about this. Every time I play my favorite deck I spend $5-10 for entry for a local tournament, which lasts about 4 hours. Adding in the cost of the deck, I'd need to play it for over 200 hours before it becomes cheaper than $7.50 an hour.
You occasionally get Standard decks in your price range making top 8, but almost never in Modern. It's really stretching it to call the budget Modern decks "competitive".
You can print any card and paste on top of cheap cards, just to play with friends. Its nice to do this with the duel decks for casual fun. If you do this just to play with friends, DMCA never would discover. But of course you can't play tournaments doing this.
For testing I use an open-source program called Cockatrice (search google/github for it). It comes with a utility that can scrape the official wizards card db and then can connect to a multiplayer server. It doesn't support rules enforcement (it's a virtual tabletop), but it does work on Windows/Mac/Linux and gets out of your way enough to be excellent at testing with friends (particularly friends who may not live near you). Add in a voice chat client, and it's actually faster than playing with physical cards (shuffling is faster due to the computer doing it).
Eh, that's only true if you are cash rich and time poor. A booster box with 36 booster packs costs ~$100. At 15 cards per pack, that's 540 cards per box. The latest set has 249 cards, so a box will probably get you close to 2 of each card. But to be guaranteed to have all the cards you want, you may need to buy a second booster box and do some trading/purchasing of individual cards. Total cost is at minimum ~5¢ per card.
But I can also just print 6 cards per page from my black and white laser printer at a cost of up to 8¢ per page, or about 1.3¢ per resulting card (plus cutting them out with scissors). And, this doesn't require an upfront payment of $150+.
So no, I would not say the cost of just buying the product is lower.
It's even worse if you consider rarity. A pack has one slot for rare cards, three slots for uncommon, etc. 1/8 of the time the rare card will be a "mythic rare". The latest set has 53 rares and 15 mythic rares, so the chance of having even one copy of a particular rare card in your box is 1-(1-1/53×7/8)^36 or 45%. For mythic rares the probability is only 1-(1-1/15×1/8)^36 or 26% that you'll even have one copy. Then consider the number of times you'll want a "playset" of a card, which means four copies.
You could get started with the Pauper format, where you can only use commons. That's actually the only format I play in tournaments. With friends, it's Commander + Modern, since none of us have crazy expensive decks.
As an eight year old getting into magic around the tempest days, part of the braininess was in the extensive vocabulary in the card names! My MtG circle was a seriously literate group of elementary school kids.
I was just about to post about Shahrazad! Totally agree! Shahrazad: Players play a MAGIC subgame, using their libraries as their decks. Each player who doesn't win the subgame loses half his or her life, rounded up.
As another comment mentioned, you can't play more than 4 of a card in a deck.
But Magic didn't start out that way -- you could have any number of cards in a deck. (The creator, Richard Garfield, assumed that most people would only have a few hundred cards, so no one would have that many of any specific card.) I don't know exactly when that rule was introduced (Shahrazad was printed in Arabian Nights, the first Magic expansion), but let's ignore the rule.
So you build a deck with only Shahrazad and Plains (to cast spells, you need to pay the casting cost. And that cost is "white mana", which you get from a card called Plains). If you don't have any other cards in your deck, you can't kill your opponent. So you have to rely on the opponent losing another way.
There's a rule in Magic that if you have to draw a card, and can't, you lose. This is called "decking" your opponent. So if we keep recursing, eventually one player will run out of cards. But note that in most formats of Magic, there's no maximum size of your deck. Most formats have a 60-card minimum. So if you build a deck with 50 Plains and 50 Shahrazad, you'll have more cards in your deck at all times.
If you go first, each player draws an initial 7 cards (down to 53 in their deck; 93 in yours), and then on turn 1 draws another card (down to 52 in theirs, 92 in yours). On turn 2, you draw a card (91) and play Shahrazad, so each subgame consists of your opponent's library going down 8 cards, and your library going down 9. So start again. After the next recursion, they have 44, and you have 82. Then 36/73, 28/64, 20/55, 12/46, 4/35, and you win. You pop up a level (to the 4/35 game), and your opponent loses half their life (down from 20 to 10). You play another Sharazad game, and again you win, and in the 4/35 game, they go to 5 life, then you Shahrazad and they go to 2, then to 1, and you win. So at each level, you need to win five times (the branching factor is five). And there are seven levels, so there are 5^7 (78,125) games that you need to win through decking your opponent.
You can't pull this off in a tournament; you only have an hour to play each match (that is, 3600 seconds), and you have to win two games to win the match.
So if someone tries to Sharazad you in a tournament, they'd definitely be able to beat you, given enough time. But all you have to do is not resign, and they won't win; you'll tie the match. That's better than conceding.
This is nowhere near the brainiest Magic has ever been. I've been playing almost since the beginning and it's been disappointing to see how the game has been simplified. It seems like all competitive standard decks now are creature decks, which is a shame because control and combo decks used to be a huge part of the meta game and required a lot of skill to pilot. I think Wizards deliberately eliminated combo and control decks because they often left the opponent (especially new players) with little to do if they were losing. Whereas when two players are playing creature decks, both players (even new, losing players) will get to play some cards, do some attacking/blocking, etc. This makes the game much more exciting for new players, which ensures that they will keep playing. If you want to see some really brainy decks have a look at Cadaverous Bloom (called Pro's Bloom below)
https://www.mtggoldfish.com/articles/evolution-of-magic-bann...
Also have a look at the Bargin deck below:
http://www.starcitygames.com/php/news/print.php?Article=967
Also Mythic Rares are super lame. It's a return to the days when you needed the "Power 9" (actually Power 10 when you include Library pf Alexandria") to be competitive.
Ex-Power Artifact, Ex-Academy, Ex-Oath-Combo, Ex-Enchantress and Active Legacy Splinter Twin combo player here.
I really don't see how actually interacting with your opponent is less "brainy" than comboing out. Building a combo deck to win turn 1 reliably is not as difficult as actually interacting with your opponent and forcing them into submission. To win with a good combo, just assemble the deck with dollars and learn to pilot it on its own in a vacuum and tada you can win all kinds of tournaments at the local game store. Its not hard, its just a formula.
If a format is balanced enough that there are no instant win combos available then players, regardless of wealth, actually need to deal with interaction. I think this is a good thing. I shouldn't just win by showing up because I can put any card I want in any deck. Currently this is the state of EDH for me.
I do somewhat agree with you from a playing standpoint. I often gravitated to combo or control because I didn't want to deal with doing the math on attacking / blocking as it could lead to some awfully complicated interactions. But there were definitely difficult decisions to be made when playing combo or control, since you'd often be facing aggressive decks that put you on a clock. But mainly, I found the deck building and meta game more interesting when combo, control, and creature based decks were all available to players. Personally, I just always thought it was really interesting when a deck would try to do something like generate infinite (or near-infinite) mana in order to "go off". That is an aspect of Magic that I found unique, since most games are so tightly controlled that there isn't possibility of finding an interaction that is "broken", as we used to call it, and can be exploited to create scenarios that are outside of what the game designers possibly intended.
From a metagame and game balance perspective Control and combo are totally different, unless they are mingled in the same deck.
In a typical Academy deck (pure combo) you just built a 56 card combo deck and slammed in 4 force of wills for protection. A game will another is only slightly harder to win than a game against a goldfish. If the metagame decisions around your control go beyond "How do I defeat the one thing that stops me" you probably weren't playing an optimal version of that deck. Academy decks should be winning before turn 3 100% of the time.
Someone mentioned Prosbloom, I was under the impression it won 3 or 4 with a city of solitude in play. Pretty much the only question you need to ask about that metagame is "How do deal with someone stopping my turn 2 squandered resources?". Versions dealt with that with copious use of 4x enlightened tutor and 4x vampiric tutor, not a real metagame choice.
In Illusions/Donate (combo/control) you build and play a blue/white control deck with a win condition that sometimes saves you the hassle of having to interact. You are still playing a two player game with removal and sometimes even creatures, but your wins come in fast from nowhere. There were several ways to interfere because the win could come well after control was seized or sometimes just before the aggro player attempts to win.
Try pulling off anything of that consistency when you cannot run duplicates of your combos and need to run 100 cards. This is what EDH looks like. Actual thought on deck design because you can't easily build a well oiled machine from cookie cutter parts. When running it feels like trying to win a race while building the racecar from secondhand parts. There is immense challenge and complex decisions.
The combo decks look totally different and barring an extreme outliers (Arcum Dagson and Narset) it is nearly impossible to build a deck that wins consistently without actual board interaction.
I've been playing since Ice Age, and my first competitive deck was Enchantress combo, so I totally feel you regarding mourning the relative power decrease of combo (and hard control) as archetypes. But you do spell out the exact reasoning for this, and I'm inclined to agree with Wizard's decision making here. I play mostly Modern and Legacy nowadays, in part because I prefer the older, more complex interaction heavy style of Magic, but even as an old hand I can appreciate how frustrating it is to lose to a hard control lock or a combo with which you have no way to interact. By allowing players to choose that play style, the game designers are basically saying, it's okay if there are (possibly a lot of) games of Magic in which one party has zero fun. Which is fine for some players, and you can still get that experience by playing older formats, but you have to agree that this is an unsaleable philosophy for a modern, mass-market game produced by a public company.
Agreed. I think Wizards made the right call for Standard in terms of attracting and retaining new players. It's good to hear from another person who got in around Ice Age (same here) and enjoyed the complexities of that era of Magic deck building. I think Magic appealed to the "mad inventor" side of my personality, which is why I miss the more diverse possibilities (hard control & combo) that used to exist in Standard. And I remember the Enchantress combo deck! Good stuff!
I got hooked on Magic early and didn't feel much need to branch out to other games. I did play a bit of Texas Hold'em later and thought that was okay. A lot of people in comic shops (where Magic is played) play WarHammer 40K and Settlers of Catan, so you could have a look at those games.
It was pawned off on the community extremely well, most people were actually "glad" about it being introduced, and its purpose was hidden at the start.
Originally, they were meant for cards that were too strange to come up often in limited play, so this slot was just to get the weird effects to show up less in drafts. However, over time, it turned into every single card that would be a great high priced single turns into a mythic rare. I stand by my statement that this rarity was the biggest scam in the history of MTG, and most players ate MaRo's blog post introducing them right up.
> However, over time, it turned into every single card that would be a great high priced single turns into a mythic rare.
That's just a blatant exaggeration. They do a pretty good job of ensuring that not all the mythics are chase/staple cards in most sets. And there are still plenty of weird/garbage cards in the mythic slot that you definitely don't want in limited.
That said I agree that it was mostly a financial decision, but I can't really fault Wizards for making it. Other successful card games have had more than three rarity tiers for years - Magic just gets additional pushback because it's so old that a segment of the player population has unrealistic/unfair expectations of stability, as if their sentimental attachment to the way things are should outweigh Wizards/Hasbro's financial imperatives.
Mythics didn't get sold as a way of rarefying complexity (you're thinking of the New Order revisions). Mythics were just a blatant ripoff of the Pokemon TCG (or a precursor), like foils were 9 years earlier. Here's what MaRo wrote in that article[1] you mentioned:
> Magic is the only major trading card game currently printed with only three rarities. If we want to stay competitive in attracting new players we have to keep up with the industry standards.
> We want the flavor of mythic rare to be something that feels very special and unique. Generally speaking we expect that to mean cards like Planeswalkers, most legends, and epic-feeling creatures and spells.
There's a legitimate non-money-grabbing reason for having rarer cards: limited formats. MtG is divided into "constructed" formats where you build your deck in advance from any legal cards you can obtain, and "limited" formats where you open sealed packs of cards and build your deck on the fly. It doesn't matter if mythic rare cards are unsuitable for limited because they're unlikely to show up there, so it gives the designers more freedom. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magic:_The_Gathering_formats
But I think in practice it's mostly about the money.
I'm not sold that they've avoided this for the most part. Many of the most important tournament cards are mythic rares. BG delirium is one of the top two competitive standard decks currently and 25% of the deck is mythic rares. https://www.mtggoldfish.com/archetype/standard-b-g-delirium-...
The "you put money in, entertainment comes out" model is pretty broadly applicable, so I'm not sure what the hangup over video poker should be. More to the point, there is far more value for players in things other than getting mythic rares, so I'm not even sure the comparison is appropriate. It is far from the main focus of the game.
I think its a shame you were downvoted. I completely agree, many other TCGs were not so careful with promotional cards for example. All promos in magic are functional reprints of some other card.
Things like the DCI Balance and Force of will might be worth a thousand dollars but there are cheaper versions of those cards out there. They even reprinted force of will this year.
As a complete aside to this conversation, is there an easy way to unload Magic: The Gathering collections without dumping them on EBay as a single lot (or trying to individually price/sell cards)?
They've been sitting on a shelf for a few too many years.
Planechase is getting an Anthology release and the Commander decks are having their yearly release, both this month.
The latest block set introduced a new mechanic that substantially expands the design space and the set just before that, Conspiracy: Take the Crown is a mix of drafting complexity and a substantial amount of multiplayer complexity.
All I hear is that Magic introduced a stack system in 1999 and apparently that dumbed it down to unplayability.
The past two releases and the next two this month are huge recent evidence to the contrary. It's the same with getting rid of Mana Burn, removing it reduce complexity and made some archetypes useless. But the mental space it previously occupied was filled with the opportunity to expand there design space and make it a more varied game.
A new Archenemy set is due next year too. So with just the releases over a year you'd be able to play Archenemy Planechase Conspiracy (or at least the draft cards, god knows how to combine those with EDH though, probably just cube?) EDH. Anyone who'd think that shirks complexity is wrong.
If you like the concept of Magic but not the pay to win element, check out Codex. http://www.sirlin.net/codex It's an RTS-inspired reaction to deep experience with Magic, by a sophisticated and competitive game designer. I think it's pretty rad.
If you want to get into MTG cheaply, I suggest looking at the Penny Dreadful format. All cards used must have cost 1cent when a new set came in.
https://www.reddit.com/r/PennyDreadfulMTG/
Depending which cards and their condition, anywhere from "good luck selling that junk," to "go buy a modest new car" levels of money. Had I not sold everything I had in 2000 or so, I'd be on the latter end of that.
Even if the glue failed, the cards inside may still be worth something, especially from that early. But highly dependent on the set. Check here for the expected value in cost to buy of the cards inside each pack, opened, but in very good condition (i.e. effectively TCGPlayer mid pricing): http://mtg.dawnglare.com/?p=sets&pack=1
Wow, it really has been over 20 years! I caught the bug at the tail end of the beta run. I am not a fan of board games...but damn do I love me some MtG!
I played MtG seriously in the late 90s and early 2000s and the idea that it's more sophisticated than it's ever been just isn't true. I have gone back and checked it out every few years since I stopped playing seriously and the game is a lot more focused on the board than it was back then. The right play is usually a lot more obvious and deck construction is also a lot simpler because the sets are designed with synergies and deliberate "hot" cards in mind.
I'm glad people still enjoy it, but for me at least it was deliberately dumbed down after the Urza's block and has stayed at that level since then.
I tried getting back into Magic after an 8-year hiatus, and so many of the rules had been changed and simplified that many of the subtleties I enjoyed from before were no longer options. Felt like I was paying hundreds of dollars to turn a dial on a deterministic mechanism...
I kept thinking "well, this is just because I've been out of the loop; with time, I'm sure I'll discover new nuances". But after chatting with power players and reading through forums for a few months, I never saw any evidence of that.
Still a great game. But a very different game from the one I fell in love with in 1997, and also a different game from when I last was really into it in 2007.