Magic the Gathering players lament the loss of 30-year history

In Belgium it was the other way around. PHP and MySQL was cheap, anything Microsoft related was more expensive.

https://web.archive.org/web/20020930072241/http://www.thebib...

As far as I'm concerned I'm done being charitable to them. They've never been fantastic, and Hasbro has clearly been demanding their dues forcing this.

My biggest hope is the Magic community has a great open alternative similar to what the d&d community is likely to do in response to this.

Overall the community seems to be somewhat forgiving of what Wizards R&D does, but definitely not anything that's a result of Hasbro exercising pressure to milk the franchise, and usually it's quite easy to tell which is which as soon as you hear quiet "sorry I didn't decide this" remarks from R&D people. People don't hate the game or the company as much as the obvious ways to segment the audience and generally increase the price of new cardboard rectangles (as for reprints, they're actually doing those, but investor-collectors aren't so happy).

Magic Online Trading League, or MOTL, is incredibly special to me. It was the premier place to discuss and trade MTG cards on the web in the year 2000. This is the first website I created an account on using the Internet. I was 11. I chose the name "Meowmix2.0" which slowly evolved into my permanent, online username of Meo / MeoMix. Heck, my profile still exists - unmodified since it was written 22 years ago, http://forums.magictraders.com/ubbmisc.cgi?action=getbio&Use... I remember getting banned from the forum when people realized I was under 13 and then begging my mother to fax in permission for me to hang out with the cool adults.

Such good times. Bought my first MTG singles through their trading forums. Stuffed cash money in an envelope, mailed it to a random stranger, and rushed after the postal worker every day until I found my precious cardboard in the mail. :)

So many memories. Thank you MTG for continuing to exist over so many years. I stopped playing for ~8 years and it's difficult to put into words how much of a warm hug it was to come back and find my beloved game still chugging along - seemingly uncorrupted by the slow pull of capitalism.

All that seems to slowly be changing with Hasbro's acquisition, but I'm holding out hope. Magic has evolved a lot over the years. It'll continue to do so and I believe in it's ability to stay... magical. :)

Yup, that was my friends. I was smart enough to preserve my cards. Sadly I don't know where I put the box with the preserved cards...

It’s funny because when eBay was released I thought “why needs that? Anyone can just do their own with excel and Usenet.”

All they care about is how much more money they can wrong out of their cash cow.

What does the set release cycle have to do with the health of competitive Magic? I mean, sure, there's no yearly core set anymore, but so what?

- Reprints (actual or functional) of staple cards still get made in every set.

- There is still a diverse metagame in standard.

- I don't draft much, but I've heard positive things about several of the last sets' limited environments.

- New formats like commander have created new competitive environments.

- Arena and digital formats like alchemy bring new players to the game and competitive scene

Feels to me like, despite Wizards doing everything possible to screw things up, competitive Magic is in a pretty good spot at the moment.

The DND community recently won a large battle against WOTC over the proposed open gaming license changes. Fans saw wizards taking away some of the freedom that made DND great and decided they wouldn't put up with it.

Huge numbers of people cancelled their subscriptions and paizo, DND's biggest competitor announced that they sold 6 months volume in 2 weeks after they announced their own open license as a replacement to the OGL.

All of this culminated in wizards backing off the updated license, and actually publishing the DND 5.1 SRD under creative commons 4.0.

I reckon wizards will try again with the next edition and their virtual table top, but for now the DND fans have proven they can get wizards to bend under enough pressure.

Fans need to start refusing to be juiced. Stop paying them money.

Back in the 90’s, we didn’t have streaming services and smart phones with dozens of apps. Hell social media barely existed (maybe MySpace was out then). Most households in America did not have internet. Video game consoles were just starting to gain traction, but were not nearly as ubiquitous as you see today.

So trading cards were a solution to that. It’s an offline, cheap hobby that kids and teenagers could pick up relatively quickly.

I’m wondering what their influx numbers are now - are new players still joining the game at the same rate as in the 90’s? Do people still play Magic considering all the other entertainment sources we have today?

It may also be worth reflecting on the hubris, evident in retrospect, which underlay the idea that in the age of the Internet this would magically cease to be the case.

Someone cannot--as in their request will be rejected--do that unless it's for pages that host personal information.

Archives still there if you have the original URL*. The problem is, like in many other sites, every few years they move everything around. So you cannot just copy-paste the new URL and expect to find the copies available in the older one.

*E.g. the one article that they're unable to find in the submitted one: https://web.archive.org/web/*/https://magic.wizards.com/en/a.... Had to use Google myself to find this older archived URL.

You are almost certainly correct and, further, it is likely the text represents almost 100% of the value.

There is no excuse for this buffoonish behavior. Just absurd.

A lot of modern websites don't even download the actual page/article content until some JavaScript runs. I noticed this in particular when I was collecting daily Monkeypox stats from the CDC website.[1] The Internet Archive had indexed the public URL every day, but that page used JavaScript to download the actual daily stats from a separate JSON or XML file and used that data to render the page. The Internet Archive bot was only downloading that data file maybe every 2-3 weeks, so even though they had archives of the page for almost every day, nearly all of the per-day data was missing.

I don't write bots often anymore, but for the last ten years or so I've defaulted to using an automated instance of an actual browser, because it's the only way you'll get all of the page content to load accurately, especially on sites that use the "lazy loading" anti-pattern.[2]

Even if you do that, it's still another step (probably several steps) to archive the content, because the browser just loads the page and resources, it doesn't save them, and in a lot of cases images in articles are downscaled and you want to archive the full-res version as well.

TLDR: make sure you're really backing up what you think you're backing up.

[1] At the time, the CDC was only showing the current figures, not the historical data, so if you wanted a graph based for sure on their real data, not some third party, you needed to collect it yourself.

[2] I know a lot of devs think lazy loading is great, because it reduces load on their servers, but it's an anti-pattern for UX IMO because it causes the page to take longer to load than if the browser were allowed to continue loading resources before the user even started scrolling.

Craig is “chump blocking”—he’s getting attacked by strong creatures, and uses weak creatures to block them. The weak creatures (the “chumps”) die, and the strong creatures remain. This leaves him extremely vulnerable, but alive. The strong creatures can attack again next turn, and he will be even less able to block them because the creatures he used to block are now dead.

He has a spell called “Char” which deals 4 damage to a target creature or player and 2 damage to himself. This could be used to destroy the attacking creature, but destroying the creature won’t win him the game. At that moment, he is at 3 life, his opponent is at 7. After chump blocking, the opponent will be able to attack and win the game next turn.

Craig decides to Char the player, rather than targeting any creature. This brings his life total to 1 and the opponent to 3. It's then Craig’s turn (because he played Char at the end of his opponent’s turn). At the beginning of his turn he gets to draw a card. He draws a card that can deal 3 points of damage. (That card is Lightning Helix.)

It was exciting because it was a gamble. He could only win if the right card was on top of his deck, and therefore, it was the right move to play assuming that he had the right card. There’s a maximum of 4 copies of any card (except basic lands) in your deck, which must be at least 60 cards. By that math, you get 1:15 odds of drawing the right card here (undoubtedly the odds were not exactly 1:15 but some other number, based on however many cards were left in the deck and however many Lightning Helix were left). The commentary on the game was that this was the “only correct play”.

Edit: And he won $31,000. Second place was $16,000.

>FOR YOU GUYS WHO COULD NOT UNDERSTAND WHAT HAPPENED: CRAIG JONES HAD 1 TURN TO DEAL AT LEAST 7 DAMAGE TO OLIVIER, SO: AT THE END PHASE, CRAIG USED A CARD CALLED "CHAR", DEALING 4 DAMAGE TO OLIVER AND 2 TO HIMSELF, BRINGING HIM DOWN TO 1 LIFE POINT. AT THE DRAW PHASE, HE DRAWS LIGHTNING HELIX, DEALING 3 MORE DAMAGE, DEALING A TOTAL OF 7 DAMAGE TO OLIVER AND WINNING THE GAME WITH 1 LIFE POINT.

This business model is really good from the company's perspective because it increases revenue and involves less effort and less risk than releasing complete games at a single price. But it means that the way to win is to be willing to spend more money than everybody else. It doesn't surprise me in the slightest that companies that base their business model on pay to win would have about as much respect for their customers as a typical OnlyFans personality has for her customers.

I think people who enjoy card games would be better off making alternatives where the focus is on skill rather than how much you're willing to pay. Even if you aren't a competitive Magic or Pokemon card player, playing those games casually supports a company that exists to extract money from "whales" just like EA Sports or the companies making those awful freemium phone games. And it is at least an order of magnitude easier to make a good card game without pay to win than it is to make a good football simulation game without pay to win.