Magic Gets a Facelift

[Ben Kenobi]

Lots has to do with skill. Generally the more skillful players will get more from poorer cards, or a worse position.

Luck plays a huge factor too as you can have the greatest cards, and still draw one off-colour land to start your hand.

No two games are ever the same, though. That's why we keep playing.

Sealed deck is cool, though.
Get to see who the *real* players are.

[DrSpike]

I didn't realise this was so popular.

So ecplain to me.......you buy the cards, but then you might lose them when you play? Is that right?

[Chowlett]

No, unless you and a friend agree to play for ante. Ante is now strictly outlawed in tournaments.

As it happens, I'm heading down to London on Saturday for the Legions pre-release - basically a huge sealed-deck tournament (about 200 players) on a set which isn't available in the highstreet for another fortnight. Should be cool.

Regarding the new faces, my only real gripe is that Artifact looks reasonably similar to White...

[Grumbold]

Even the best player can deal themselves a 7 card hand with no land in it and go on to draw 2 more non-land cards in their first draws (you can't do anything without land.) Those with the best deck design and playing skills should win on average, but nobody wins all the time unless all their opponents have very badly designed decks.

White weenie was one of my favourite powerful deck styles. More fun for both players than a card-reduction deck or a land destruction deck. My fun deck was based on many of the unique named Legend cards. It was awesome if only you could stay alive long enough to start summoning them, but that was quite unlikely against a decent opponent.

[FrustratedPoet]

Originally posted by Chowlett

As it happens, I'm heading down to London on Saturday for the Legions pre-release - basically a huge sealed-deck tournament (about 200 players) on a set which isn't available in the highstreet for another fortnight. Should be cool.

Sounds groovy.

Good luck.

[FrustratedPoet]

Originally posted by Grumbold
White weenie was one of my favourite powerful deck styles. More fun for both players than a card-reduction deck or a land destruction deck.

I'm one of those evil players who enjoys building Blue Control decks with lots of dispells and board-controlling Enchantments to ruin my opponents carefully laid plans.

[DrSpike]

OK so I'm struggling here. You build your own deck, so that's why people with more money have a better chance, because the best cards are expensive and rare.

Hence some people prefer to play in tourneys where the deck is a standard one and hence noone has an advantage. Am I closer now?

[FrustratedPoet]

Originally posted by DrSpike
OK so I'm struggling here. You build your own deck, so that's why people with more money have a better chance, because the best cards are expensive and rare.

Hence some people prefer to play in tourneys where the deck is a standard one and hence noone has an advantage. Am I closer now?

Yeah that's about it.

As somebody mentioned above it is against the rules to have more than 4 copies of any card (except the basic land cards) in your deck. This means that the richer-is-better model doesn't get too far out of control, although it is certainly still an issue.

Draft tournaments are the best test of skill I think - they require not only good playing skills, but a thorough knowledge of the advantages and disadvantages of every card in the set - not to mention some of the obscure ways they can interact with each other. In these tournaments geekier-is-better.

[FrustratedPoet]

Spike: A trial version of the Magic Online game is available on the 'net for free (it's even legal ) - it restricts you to some simple decks and basically acts as a referee so you don't accidently cheat. You should download it and try the game - I think you'll like it.

Link: http://www.wizards.com/default.asp?x.../downloadlinks

[DrSpike]

I'll check it out. I remember the pc game getting a lot of good reviews.......how is it regarded amongst the players?

[Chowlett]

Originally posted by DrSpike
OK so I'm struggling here. You build your own deck, so that's why people with more money have a better chance, because the best cards are expensive and rare.

Hence some people prefer to play in tourneys where the deck is a standard one and hence noone has an advantage. Am I closer now?

Pretty close. About the only thing you're missing is that, unless you go out and buy or trade for specific cards, the card you get in a pack are random.

Well, mostly random - if you buy a Booster pack of 15 cards, for instance, you'll get (IIRC) 1 rare card, 3 uncommon cards and 11 commons. It might be 10 commons and a basic land. A Tournament pack contains (again, IIRC) 75 cards, including a selection of basic lands, 3 rares, a handful of uncommons and the rest commons.

Thus, at a sealed deck tournament, each player gets a Tournament pack and 3 boosters - thus having similar, but by no means uniform, resources. A draft tournament involves each player having 3 boosters, opening 1, picking a card and passing the rest to the next player. This means that players have a better chance of knowing what their opponents are playing, and evens the playing field a bit more, since if you find a booster stuffed with really cool cards, you can't keep them all.

FP - thanks for the luck, I'll likely need it. I'll be helped by the fact that Legions is 100% creatures, since I'm much better at creatures than other styles. Chances of winning anything are, however, remote. On the plus side, if I find myself doing really badly, I can drop out and pay another £7.50 for a single draft mini-tourney - which is equal to if not below high-street price of the 3 boosters, and there's about a 50-50 chance in an 8-way draft of coming out with a prize...

[Grumbold]

The original tournaments helped the Mr Suitcase syndrome. The rules were just 60+ cards in a deck with 4 of anything. Since most rare cards appeared only in one set, you needed to buy or trade for up to 4 of every rare card you wanted to use from each set (as well as getting one of everything in a set even if it was pretty useless, the other side of it being a "collectable" card game.)

Some cards were found to be too powerful so they were later limited to 1 per deck or banned completely. So you had to get different cards instead, while holding on to those rares because they were valuable and still very playable in other forums with less restrictive rules.

A bit later on when the "basic" set of cards was in its 3rd or 4th edition (including various card changes and refinements) and about 5 expansion sets were in existence a new tournament style came along. There you were allowed to only use cards from the current version of the basic set plus the last two expansion sets. Great for culling out old players of the game with extensive collections of early rare cards but also inviting everyone to want to get 4 of each new and useful rare card every time a new expansion came out. Stop collecting and you pretty soon couldn't play.

Thank goodness at about the same time the sealed deck and draft tournaments sprang up. There your skill and knowledge of all the potential cards is still highly useful but the cards you actually get to play with are very limited and roughly fair for everyone.

[Chowlett]

And in a pre-release, your knowledge of the cards helps very little - since Wizards keep all but a few of the more interesting cards under wraps until the prereleases happen.

[Richard Bruns]

This isn´t the first time the design has been altered. The cards have been changed quite a lot through the years, although the changes happen a little at a time. Look at some of the really old cards; the difference between those and modern cards is greater than the difference between modern cards and this new upgrade.

With each change, the cards look less archaic and more modern. This is good for improving readability, but I think that the game loses a little its flavor with each change. For example, the text boxes on old green cards looked like an old parchment scroll, which gave the feel of casting a spell out of an old tome but made it harder to read the text.

A lot of old players will say that the game is getting "dummied down" to appeal to a wider audience, and this change may be criticised as being part of that trend. For some reason, these layered boxes also reminds me of the screen menus in the Final Fantasy games.

I have played Magic for quite a while and never spent any money on it. It started with my friends at school, who had big collections and liked to play multiplayer games with lots of people, so I was invited to play with their leftover cards. I got flattened at first, but learned the game fairly quickly. I developed a preference for green and white, because it was possible to win with the cheap and abundant cards that they let me use.

Then I got in on the Magic Online Beta Test fairly early, and built up a very nice collection of online cards. I made several variations of blue control decks, and one of them, based on Patron Wizard, was almost tournament-quality. Of course it all got wiped out when the beta test ended, and I quit playing.

[Ben Kenobi]

My favourite deck?

A white/ blue/ green deck.

Probably the most pacifist deck I have ever seen, yet it's quite hard to stop.

I usually win with 50 life.

I like the new slivers though.
especially the new spirit link sliver.