The Twenty-Five Year Journey of Magic the Gathering | Hacker News Reader

The Twenty-Five Year Journey of Magic the Gathering

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61 pointswskinner48 comments

I recently dug up my old cards from the storage. My 11 year old nephew learned to play Magic while on vacation, bought two cheap decks, and taught it (badly) to my 9 year old son.

At some point in all that, of course I need to show this old shoebox chock full of old Magic cards. Instead of letting him play with my old cards, I decided that my son needs to have his own cards, so we went to my local game store and bought him a "deck builder's toolkit" that's a much better deal than the old starterdecks in my time, but somehow lacks a copy of the rules.

The shopkeeper, who knows me from way back, warned me not to let him play with my old cards, because some of those are now worth quite a bit. He urged me to look up the value of my old multilands in particular. I think I bought them from a friend for about $4 a piece. Turns out they're now $800 a piece. Insane.

Also insane: all my old big monsters are obsolete, as new big monsters are way more powerful than the old ones. But new spells are weaker than the old ones. That's 25 years of balance tweaking, I guess.

The official rules are 250+ pages of legalese.

For reference since you've been gone a while, the best casual format (by far) is Commander (EDH). Buy him a couple cheap duel decks to learn the basics (phases, stack, etc). Then buy one of the prebuilt Commander decks (the 4 color ones would be best) to get started All that together is around $60 ($100 if you want a second Commander deck to play with him). Not a bad deal for the tabletop experience.

Commander is a Singleton format (only one of any card that isn't a basic land), so buying the occasional pack can mix things up a little. Cards that are unplayable in constructed are often great in Commander (and only having one isn't a disadvantage). A 4 color deck (if you have just one) or having all five colors across both decks increases the chances of being able to use whatever you open.

Note: if you're going for raw power, buy singles from a dealer instead of packs, but packs are great for casual (or drafting of course).

Edit: I didn't think about 9 year old hands, but you can play 60-70 card Commander so he can shuffle easier.

An official format that allows only one of every card is a great idea. Back in university, some people also got tired of all the highly tuned decks with dozens of very similar cards, and decided to play with that rule, calling it "Highlander decks" (there can be only one!).

I believe my son or nephew also insisted I shouldn't have more than one of each card in my deck, so maybe the guy who taught my nephew only played Commander.

Although googling for it, it seems Commander comes with a lot of extra rules. I'm not sure that's what I'm looking for.

Highlander became Commander. There are only a couple extra rules. In human speak:

1. cards in your deck (100 total including the commander) have to be the same colors as your commander.

2. you start at 40 life and a commander in your command zone.

3. if your commander goes to the graveyard or exile, put him back in the command zone, but he costs 2 more colorless to cast each time this happens.

4. if a commander personally deals 21 damage to someone, they lose.

If they insisted on one card, they were playing commander or brawl (MTG's new "commander lite" using 60 cards, standard only with slightly different life rules).

the monsters > spells was the thing I noticed too. After college in 2010-2012 I went to play some drafts for a laff like I used to when I was a kid. I'd flip through the card catalog for 20 minutes before it started and figured I'd just jump right back in.

I lost pretty handily, and the big takeaway was what you found.

I hate to say it because its the hokey hipster thing to note, but back when I was a kid and it was all Urza's Saga, Mercadian Masques, etc, the cards felt much more... gritty and real. Everything felt more bloody and less cartoonish and lightweight. Maybe that was part of being a kid.

Play is actually much better/more balanced than I remember though, by far.

NWO changed everything. Lowest common denominator plus the belief that magic players are idiots.

They decided nobody likes stax decks. Then nobody likes land destruction. Then nobody likes combo. Then nobody likes counterspells. Then nobody likes any other kind of control either. Finally, nobody really likes spells. So everything became mid-range and aggro except that aggro generally loses to mid-range.

So just mid-range turn creates sideways and nothing that adds real complexity to the game.

Stopped with standard after RTR and every time I've looked, it's been too unfun for me to drop hundreds of dollars playing standard again.

https://mtg.gamepedia.com/New_World_Order

Modern currently is dominated by fast aggro and combo, with a resurgence of control to pray on combo. Midrange is basically dead.

The cards that power modern were mostly made before NWO started directly affecting the pipeline.

Control can beat basically any deck that isn't completely broken (eg, eldrazi winter), but does so at the expense of losing to everything else. In addition, burn is cheap and played a lot day 1. It lowers most control deck numbers enough to make a top 8 contention impossible.

Teferi has helped a lot as one of very few consistent win conditions across the field. I think modern really needs UU counterspell for control to be less than niche. Once the field diversifies a bit again, control will once again fade to T2.

The article seems to gloss that this is one of the most potent pay to win loot-box hustles of all time, primarily targeting minors. The game is amazing but has this sleazy side. For this reason most grown-ups I know jumped to one of the living card games, Netrunner or Game of thrones.

My usual analogy is golf.

If you show up to play a round of golf, and your opponent has a nice set of professionally-made clubs while you're using some sticks you carved by hand, you're probably going to lose, badly. But that doesn't make golf "pay to win" -- at the competitive level of golf, everybody has made the investment in that baseline of good equipment, and you're back to practice and skill as the differentiator.

Magic is similar. If you show up to a constructed tournament with whatever you could cobble together from a few booster packs, yeah, you're going to get crushed by people with competitive decks. But at the competitive level, everybody has made the baseline investment to have access to the full card pool, at which point you're back to skill (of designing/choosing/playing decks) as the differentiator.

Anyway. Top-tier Standard decks are in the couple-hundreds-of-dollars range, and even if you just go out and get the cards for one of those decks and nothing else, there's enough value in the cards that you can trade/sell and get back not 100% of what you paid in, but enough to make switching to a different deck not all that bad.

That’s a bad analogy. If golf had specific rules about length and material of each golf club that also changed every year, requiring you to buy new clubs to match the rules, you might have a point.

Golf companies also don't sell you unknown bags of gear that may either contain something useful or a complete pile of crap.

Interesting idea for a new type of golf tournament: at the start, everybody gets a closed bag of random golf clubs, they pick one to keep, and pass the rest of the bag to the golfer to the left while they get to choose their next club from the bag they get from the right.

And competitive Magic players don't buy booster packs unless they're planning to play draft. They go to a store and buy the individual cards they want.

Non rotating formats, although more expensive, are very popular, especially Modern and Commander. Outside of bans, the playable card pool is very stable and changes relatively little even with new expansions. I don't play golf, but I assume that equipment wears out and need to replaced (balls, bags if not bats).

More relevant than the equipment cost is the fees. For the price of golf club memberships you could make a lot of magic decks and enter a lot of tournaments.

Non-rotating formats are more expensive up-front than Standard, but tend to be cheaper long-term because the cards stay legal and usually things don't shift enough to make them completely unplayable.

I wish I could find my old netrunner deck.

Nothing (except maybe hearthstone or force of will) compares. I'd say it only partially targets minors though. The cost is too high in constructed. Most players at a given FNM are 25+.

Standard: $500 per year (more if you have to buy into a completely different archetype)

Modern: $1200 per deck (with a revolving door on the ban list)

Legacy: $2-4000

Vintage: $15,000+ (mint power mox and lotus would cost $35k+).

> In the game, players were fashioned as “planeswalkers,” who cast spells and travel between planes of existence. The spells themselves were the cards, ...

I played 1999-2004 and now 2016+, mostly non-tournament casual for this exact idea that most players seem to have forgotten. Decks with an emphasis on flavor feel more in line with the core theme of the game, and it's a very rewarding experience to roleplay a Planeswalker using their library of spells.

Many new players (especially tournament-minded) seem to treat the art and flavor as tertiary to the mechanics. One person told me they'd still play the game even if it was black text on plain white cards. Apparently the point was to win, not enjoy the aestetic.

Win or lose, I enjoy the fact that my decks have a rock solid roleplay theme and are usually under $40 each.

I certainly do like the art. Although over the years, a lot of art has become more generic. The first sets of cards had in my opinion much more iconic art. Look at Llanowar Elves, for example.

And some cards are really pure works of art.

I feel like there used to be more variety and weirdness in the art style. Something like Plague Spitter https://bit.ly/2PWwvyf or Stasis https://bit.ly/2ovqWdu wouldn't happen anymore. Most of the art these days feels like generic fantasy art that could be painted on the side of a van.

I will acknowledge this may be totally unfair, old-timer nostalgia.

The Fascist Art Director [1] is a thing.

[1] http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?multiver...

This is how I approach the game and my friends and I have an absolute blast. Card Kingdom makes some EXCELLENT duel decks with great themes (zombie, pirate, eldrazi drone, all legendaries, etc) for 10 bucks a piece and we have fun on lunch breaks playing for bragging rights. Nothing beats winning over your friend’s graveyard recursion deck that he’s won with for two weeks straight after tuning the crap out of a straight dinosaurs deck!

I credit Magic: The Gathering for quite a few points on my SAT Verbal for all the arcane vocabulary the cards taught me! The art was/is fantastic too.

Necromancer, tabernacle, exsanguinate, odious... the list goes on.

"Student's spelling leaves a lot to be desired, but is worryingly good on occult subjects."

I played the heck out of Magic in middle school and ended up with a perfect SAT Verbal.

My sister lost a spelling bee because she misspelled "manna".

While the game is great, I find the random card dynamic of the card packs pretty troubling. There is no legitimate gameplay reason why you can't just buy the cards you want for a flat rate.

This is just one of the reasons why Limited (building a 40 card deck from only packs that you and your group open) is clearly the best way to play Magic. Another: even though it seems more variance-prone, it's arguable the most skill-testing format in the game.

Though one of the cool elements of the game is that you can also play a game with a random stranger you just met. That happened a lot back when I was playing a lot in the 1990s. But that game is less likely to be balanced, and it got increasingly less balanced as more cards came out and balance and ideas started shifting around.

How do you play MtG online ?

Surely there are (illegal? grey?) clones where the big ticket items are free ? How do these clones maintain a game play balance ?

Non player. Curious.

Cockatrice is what I've used in the past.

https://medium.com/@mrdeprey/how-to-connect-to-cockatrice-an...

There's an official software to play online, where you also need to buy packs with random virtual cards to play. But there's also non-official softwares where you can use any card. How to maintain the balance? This is the core game's responsibility. To create cards and mechanics which aren't just pay to win.

In line with the spirit of the article, WotC needs acknowledge and amend this horrible mistake:

http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?multiver...

"Invoke Prejudice" Whenever an opponent casts a creature spell that doesn't share a color with a creature you control, counter that spell unless that player pays X, where X is its converted mana cost.

Also note that the multiverse ID is 1488!!!

This is no coincidence, not a dumb joke. These are hate symbols that can and should be removed from the game.

This game's thematics are about war, demons, magic, killing, slaughtering, enslaving, pestilence etc and a silly card from a decade+ ago is a problem? Don't manufacture outrage please.

While I agree that the card is largely unimportant and mostly seen as weird trivia, the art was created by a white nationalist and contains klan hoods. It is more tied to our real world than just the vague notion of racism.

Is there a name for the logical fallacy of saying in-game murder is no worse than making references to real-world hate groups?

All the other references to seriously heinous and potentially more destructive things don't seem to bother not much anyone or at least can not be used to rile up controversy to the same degree as racist imagery or references. It seems to be ok to glorify killing or at least portray it in totally acceptable or neutral light but any reference to possible prejudice or separation or claims of inferiority of certain groups or species compared to others is a no go?

In the light of america's past treatment of minorities starting from natives and then blacks and even discrimination of specific groups of whites it is perhaps understandable people are wary of it but try to see the situation objectively without any historical bias or taking sides and simply the first principles of what is portrayed or stated.

I am not trying to manufacture anything. There is an obvious difference between: fantasy war game and reference to reality's past events. That is why you do not see a card called Gas Chamber: Choose a creature type, destroy all creatures of the chosen type, nor one named Crucifixion: destroy target god.

As I said, in line with an article that highlights MTG's efforts to incorporate diversity into game design, Invoke Prejudice is a card that needs to be removed from the game.

What exactly do you expect them to do? The card was, in fact, printed; do you expect them to just remove an existing card from their database or something? They can't, like, recall it or something. What, are they going to ban it from tournament play?

If you just want an instance of a person from Wizards acknowledging that that art was not something they should have printed, here's an example: http://markrosewater.tumblr.com/post/145475725553/would-u-gu...

(Also, although troubling, the multiverse ID clearly is a coincidence, as cards seem to just be numbered first by set and then by card number.)

  > What, are they going to ban it from tournament play?

Plenty of cards have been banned from tournament play. There's no reason why this one can't. Maybe it already has?

So, first off, this is something you can easily look up. No, it's not banned.

Second off, I think banning a card for non-gameplay reasons sets a pretty bad precedent.

Third off -- banning it wouldn't accomplish anything except bringing more attention to the card. This isn't a card that sees tournament play. This is an old card so it's only legal in Legacy and Vintage, the formats that allow basically every card ever printed -- that's what it's competing against. It does not remotely meet the bar to show up in Legacy or Vintage tournaments. Banning it would not reduce its tournament appearances because it doesn't have any. It'd just draw attention to it because it'd have to, y'know, show up on banned lists. Better to just apologize and otherwise let it die in obscurity.

Ban the card from legal play, remove it from their DB. Acknowledge the mistake.

I am aware such actions could fire in the wrong direction.

What, exactly, would any of this accomplish?

Again: Removing the card from the DB wouldn't be changing anything, it'd just be lying about how things are. The card does, in fact, exist. Collectors trying to get a complete set of Legends will try to get their hands on it whether or not Wizards lists it; lying about the card's existence doesn't change that. And banning it is incompatible with that! You can't list as banned a card you don't list at all.

But fundamentally, even if we ignore all that, de-listing or banning the card wouldn't accomplish anything. (This is not a card that actually sees tournament play; a ban would be purely symbolic, in addition to setting the bad precedent that cards can be banned for non-gameplay reasons.) Apologizing and acknowledging the mistake is good, obviously, but they clearly have done that when asked about it. I think Mark Rosewater took the right approach above: They can avoid repeating the mistakes of the past, but they can't undo them.

Wow, you're right about the multiverse ID. That's a fucking bummer of a coincidence

For anyone else curious about what this whole subthread is about, I found this Reddit thread particularly enlightening:

https://www.reddit.com/r/magicTCG/comments/1b3fie/so_this_ex...

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