Magic has been such a huge part of my life. At my lowest point after moving to a new town, we were gifted a pile of cards from one of my dad’s coworkers. It was the only thing keeping me going and more or less saved my relationship with my dad. It’s still, for me, the best game ever designed and in my 40s with 3 kids I still play and watch hours of content every week. Heck, we even have some hall of famers on our cap sheet at my current startup which somehow fills me with pride.
My son has introduced me to Yu Gi Oh and Pokémon but they both lack the fundamental elegance of MtG. It’s probably not fair to call Magic simple given the size and complexity of the rules at this point, but at the lowest level it really is just about combining simple things to achieve infinite variety. The best cards have short text and chime nicely with the theme of the card and wider story. The worst are like Yu Gi Oh, a page of complex tiny text that tries to do too much.
One of the saddest things is that, as you become better at the game with a deeper grasp of the rules and the cards, you never really recapture that feeling of the early days, when every card was exciting. Draft comes close (picking cards from random booster packs to try and piece together a deck) and Cube certainly captures the nostalgia (drafting with packs made of your favourite or most powerful cards). But still the smell of an opened booster takes you back.
Wizards has made many mistakes over the years and but Magic is extremely healthy and several recent sets have been all-time greats. Both Magic Online (the ugly but fairly complete online client that has _every_ card) and Arena (the more modern client that’s a bit simpler and easier to play but only has recent stuff) are actively maintained so you can play anything, anytime.
My only sadness now is that I never really made it to the pro tour, but there’s always time.
Magic was probably the first instance of where I learned that sometimes it's ok to not try to "solve" games or put too much thought into being competitive.
I'm not sure how my friend group found Magic originally, but it was around like 3rd edition or so? We all really liked it and spend way too much money on cards. We would play around the kitchen table in a single game, 5, 6, 7 people all with decks a mile high building huge armies before someone finally gave in to break the peace and attack, usually resulting in everyone else attacking them. Great fun.
I had some access to the internet at work and during a break I started looking up stuff about Magic and found a deck that won a tournament recently. It was a red burn deck, and the tournament was a draft, which I had no idea what that meant, but I had a "winning" decklist and I had most of the cards in there. I traded with my friends for the other stuff I was missing and we set about to play. I think I killed everyone one after another with that "stupid deck" with cards the others just flat out gave to me because they were "bad". I took that deck to a tournament a couple of weeks later and found out what the difference between drafts and constructed decks were, mainly that my deck needed 20 more cards. I still get fourth place and a box of booster packs.
My friends one by one stopped playing not too long after that. I went on to win most local tournaments and play in a handful of pro tour events, but none were ever as much fun as sitting around the kitchen table.
Learn to manaweave, cheat, call “judge”, fix matches and artistically stack the deck when cracking fetches and you’ll be there in no time. Too much variance to go regularly 9-0 and stuff like that
Yeah a bit, been a victim of cheating and rule lawyering. My paper magic experience evolved to “pay attention to what the other guy is doing” rather than thinking about my game plan. As a draw go player, it becomes unsustainable for my mental energy.
How recent are these experiences? Sad to note that Sheldon Menery died recently, but he had as much influence as anybody on cracking down on cheating in organised play.
> “as you become better […] you never really recapture that feeling of the early days”
It’s the same with everything, isn’t it.
There’s a stage in life when you’re relatively young and it makes sense to go deeper into whatever inspires you. But as you grow older it’s probably good to make an effort to try more new things, to get back some of that feeling of discovery. It may not work out quite like that but it’s worth to keep trying.
Yeah, same with programming certainly - the feeling as a kid of just pushing through to get something done no matter what the code looks like. Now you’re second guessing everything and trying to do a professional job. But it’s rare as an adult to be able to throw yourself into a new pursuit without judgment. With the internet everyone knows what ‘good’ looks like, everybody’s hustling, everything’s professionalised.
The ability to experience raw, messy joy is something you’re not taught to cherish.
Huh, you're not wrong. The other time I quite shamelessly hacked something together with my son in Roblox Studio just to show what was possible. I did have to resist scorning all the snippets of code I came across (and I do think there are valuable design lessons to learn on that platform) and just did the simplest possible thing.
Absolutely - I think teaching programming in a language, framework or paradigm you (the teacher) does not know has huge advantages for a specific level of newcomer
In my experience it is a good lesson for about 50% of absolute beginners, but a great lesson for 99% of folks who have just started grokking their "first" language etc.
I am now in the process of teaching an absolute beginner in my family and in this case I'll stick to my specialties because I can tell they'll become frustrated if they can't get _something_ working on their own. Thus, I bet they want clear "unstucking" help rather than a "let me google that with you". They are more concerned with the 1st thing, and not the broader "how does someone who know this stuff goes about learning?"
Anyway, I digress - in any case these initial lessons are great for me as a teacher to experience that discovery through them
Online, the answer is Arena. You can get started for free and if you never want to spend anything it’s possible to grind the resources you need to acquire new cards and compete in tournaments. You can get all the way to money prizes this way. Constructed formats are probably more economical than draft because you don’t have to constantly pay for packs.
In real life, every player has thousands of cards they’d happily dump on you if you just want to learn and have fun. You won’t be able to build a very competitive deck (or one up to date with current formats) but it’s fun to play over the table with friends.
The best investment for physical cards is probably the Commander format. This is a particularly social, multiplayer format, where all cards are legal (except for powerful stuff that’s been banned). You can build a deck over years and it’ll always be valid (if not good). This is also available on Arena, but most of the fun is getting round a table.
If you want to get competitive, there’s lots of content out there and many popular streamers to learn from. Magic Online is probably where the highest skilled players still play and test for tournaments but you’re unlikely to go infinite there.
If folks want to get into paper magic, the commander pre-constructed decks are a solid place to start. Some are almost competitive and require just a few tweaks to get into much better shape. They do a good job of packaging the thematic elements as well.
In ‘94 I was 11 and Magic was blowing up in my hometown - the 3rd (or Revised) edition had just come out. The local comic book stores would have Magic tournaments on Friday nights. Turnout would usually be 30-50 people and it was mostly grown ups. You would play a number of 1:1 matches and whoever had the best records at the end got to a final four. The winner of the tournament would get a high value card.
I played with an all red deck with quick spells to inflict major damage (Fireballs, Lightning bolts, etc…) and Forks to double the power of those spells. The grown ups didn’t like it because “it was a cheap strategy”.
I sold all my Magic cards in college - I really wish I would have kept those.
> I sold all my Magic cards in college - I really wish I would have kept those.
It could be worse! I started playing in Dec 1993 when 2nd (Unlimited) and Arabian Nights came out, but sold all my best cards by the late 90s.
As a teenager I was pretty happy with the profit. It was probably a grand or two if I recall correctly, from selling my mint unlimited Lotus, multiple moxes, 40 dual lands, 4 Juzam Djinn, Time Walk, Chaos Orb, etc...
I'm glad to find my sentiment reflected in the article:
I was interested in RPGs and wargames in the early 90s. Even in my relatively backwater hometown there were events, stores or clubs were I could socialize over them.
It was all swept away by MtG within a few months, and I had the misfortune of not "getting it" myself and suddenly being left without anyone to play anywhere.
Have you tried rejoining the scene? These days I see my local game store having wargame nights, Magic nights, tabletop nights, etc. I think the market for all of those has exploded over the last decade and there's sooooo much gaming of all sorts now. Truly a nerd's paradise :D
In a way yes, an important part of the appeal of the games were the miniatures, and during the pandemic I got back into collecting and painting them and it's become my main hobby since then.
I really enjoy MtG, even though I only got into it very late. The commercial aspect really irks me however. I don't think a game should be both competitive and collectible.
After playing with printed cards for a while, I went shopping for games with a similar vibe but a smaller pool of cards. Epic Card Game has been a lot of fun, especially in a draft format. I am not sure why it was never popular, though I assume the ridiculously un-googleable name has something to do with it.
120 unique cards for $15 was hard to beat, and I was since able to acquire the entire collection of cards for less than $100 (whether that's a good thing or a bad thing is up to you).
Other more eclectic mentions are Mindbug, Riftforce, Superjack (regular cards), Arcmage (opensource).
In my entire life (I'm 41) I only ever shoplifted once, and was caught - and it was for Magic: The Gathering cards from the Virgin Megastore in Edinburgh in 1998.
Just want to say, I don’t follow or play this game at all (tried it once or twice years ago but that’s it), but that was a fascinating read! Very interesting from both the ludology and business perspectives.
apparently there is an open source version of mtg based on a standard deck of cards which has been around since the 70s and possibly was the inspiration for mtg.
Fascinating. While my elderly dad is amazing at competitive card games he doesn’t like any game that doesn’t use the standard 52 card deck. I’ll give this a shot!
It’s really possible that Cuttle was the predecessor to Magic.
It's amazing how many different games you can play with one or two standard decks. It's also an amazing conversation catalyst as it takes off the pressure to constantly talk and introduces opportunities for unusual spontaneously arising subjects. Current favorites are Spite and Malice and Gin Rummy - pretty much everybody seems to enjoy those games. Cuttle I haven't tried, yet, and it's obviously not a game you can learn within ten minutes and just play. But I keep it on the radar.
I spent a lot of years after, trying to recapture the wonder 11 year old me felt those first months of Magic, where every card seemed a literal portal to another realm. I’ll probably never find that feeling again.
Will always be one of my favorite games. Perfectly combined my love of computer strategy games with CCGs and was just weird enough to keep me coming back.
Lol thank you for the clarification! And here I thought, "Man, that's not how I remember those cards. I didn't realize 90s printed cards were so pixelated, with Arial and bad border control everywhere. I must really be getting old."
Makes me feel better that it was just a video game :)
My son has introduced me to Yu Gi Oh and Pokémon but they both lack the fundamental elegance of MtG. It’s probably not fair to call Magic simple given the size and complexity of the rules at this point, but at the lowest level it really is just about combining simple things to achieve infinite variety. The best cards have short text and chime nicely with the theme of the card and wider story. The worst are like Yu Gi Oh, a page of complex tiny text that tries to do too much.
One of the saddest things is that, as you become better at the game with a deeper grasp of the rules and the cards, you never really recapture that feeling of the early days, when every card was exciting. Draft comes close (picking cards from random booster packs to try and piece together a deck) and Cube certainly captures the nostalgia (drafting with packs made of your favourite or most powerful cards). But still the smell of an opened booster takes you back.
Wizards has made many mistakes over the years and but Magic is extremely healthy and several recent sets have been all-time greats. Both Magic Online (the ugly but fairly complete online client that has _every_ card) and Arena (the more modern client that’s a bit simpler and easier to play but only has recent stuff) are actively maintained so you can play anything, anytime.
My only sadness now is that I never really made it to the pro tour, but there’s always time.