I started playing when there was just the one set, and quit playing right as Base Set 2 was coming out. I had been going to tournaments and such, both with a fun Psychic control kind of deck, and a Blastoise-based comboey deck, and then even went 3-2 with a 59 psychic energy, 1 Mewtwo deck. One of those was actually my fault.
ANYWAY, my roommate and I picked up a starter deck a piece a couple days ago (what set, I couldn’t tell you), and played a few games. You know what? It was fun! And as a longtime (ago) M:tG player myself, it was kind of rewarding for him to be able to win occasionally, since we were both playing janky decks and the rules are simpler. (Which doesn’t often happen in Magic, because he plays with my decks, and even Sligh has SOME decisions to make, and the rules are more complicated).
ANYWAY, with the cost of cards much lower than they used to be for singles, someone should convince me to not go out and drop a couple hundred bucks on Pokemon cards. The most relevant argument being that we probably will get bored of it in a month or two.
I guess about ten years ago I was able to pick up a ton of Wyvern cards for cheap, about six boxes for ~7 bucks each. We ended up with multiple full sets, including the “ultra rare Wyvern’s Shadow” card. My wife and I played it a bit, but it got old and now the cards just sit around doing nothing and have no resale value and we’ve forgotten the rules. We’re in pretty much the same place with my Legend of the Five Rings collection(Imperial - Hidden Emperor 4). Not sure we’ll ever do anything with them again. I know L5R has continued and people still play, but unless I teach the kids, they’ll probably never see the light of day. A shame because I still have sealed starter decks from Imperial and a couple full boxes of expansions I never opened.
Well, I’m actually not terribly worried about the rules, unless they don’t put the complicated cards in starter sets, but I also bought a booster just for funsies and they didn’t seem terribly hard to understand.
My main dilemma is that I play with my roommate, and he isn’t terribly good at Magic, which doesn’t make it very much fun for him. I try to lead and allow takebacks, etc, and even stack matchups in his favor (Stasis vs Sligh, or Green Stompy vs some other slow deck), but he just doesn’t have a whole lot of experience with it, and it isn’t satisfying. Neither of us are looking to get into the tournament scene (I don’t have the patience for Type II anymore, and don’t want to spend the bucks necessary for Type I or Extended. I’d actually be all about some Limited, but I don’t think he’d enjoy that either.
What sets are you playing with? Are you playing with Expansions, or base sets?
Portal is what I got in on, and it only had Land, Sorcery, and Creatures. -It had a counterspell effect at a sorcery speed. [It was in the rules text, that it could be played immediately, but it was classified as a Sorcery.] -Personally, I would throw Artifacts in as well, just because I love how artifacts go with everything.
Has your roommate played with JUST 10th edition cards?
I don’t know if you can still find Portal or even Starter cards any more, but a into level game only might be better than throwing him into the deep end of 10,000 plus cards, over 15 years.
I’m playing with cards ranging from Alpha (well, basic lands from Alpha ;)) through… Invasion-ish, although not too many Invasion cards. Mostly Tempest block through Masques. I have a repository of 10-ish decks that are built and good to go so I don’t have to worry about having a deck ready (What happened is that I just built a bunch of decks with the understanding that I wasn’t going to get back into it and buy more cards, but all I’ve done for the last week straight is read Magic articles on starcitygames.com ::sigh:: )
Anyway, the basics of the game are easy enough, it’s the more subtle interactions, remembering in-response-to effects, and to remove creatures to attack instead of Lightning Bolting me when I’m at 17 life, and that sort of thing. The strategy as opposed to the rules, but I’ve just been playing so much longer than he has, it’s frustrating for him, obviously. I suppose a possible game plan would be to build a more ‘fun’ deck rather than a (previously) competitive (previously) Type II kind of deck to play against him wiht.
Nine times out of ten, if a person isn’t having fun playing Magic, it’s because they’re playing a deck which doesn’t suit them. Figure out what Magic has to offer for your roommate(if he liked Pokemon there’s a good chance he’s a Timmy) and build a deck for HIM, not a tournament clone. Maybe get him involved in deckbuilding.
Check out some of the more fun draft formats. Google “Winston Draft”, “Solomon Draft”, and “Magic Mini Master”. A couple packs can provide an evening’s entertainment and provoke a lot of strategic challenge. Also consider Reject Rare draft(a favorite of Timmies), and Big Box draft. A friend of mine who was a competitive player(still in the top 20 in my metro area) for years has burned out on competitive M:tG but still loves the box drafts, and it only requires some time to re-pack your existing cards, no additional cash.
My son is a big Pokemon fan, but his fandom is thus far limited to the handheld GBA/DS games and the anime cartoon series. He has some cards, but he definitely doesn’t play the trading card game.
He’s seven.
Can you explain the basics of TCG to me, an audience that has no experience with ANY trading card games at all? I do understand, by osmosis, the world of Pokemon pretty well. Should I urge him in this direction? It seems to me that battling his friends via WiFi using the DS games is getting pretty complicated, especially when he’s already mastered EV training and breeding for moves and natures… will TCG be a different challenge? Easier? Harder?
You would probably get a better response with a new thread, one which doesn’t seem defined, via the OP, as anti-Pokemon TCG. I played for a while back in ~99 but never really got into it. I know a fair number of players and I know a lot about TCGs in general, but I don’t know much about your son, and what he gets out of a game, and how he should approach it to get the most out of it can vary widely. If you start a new OP please let us know what type of things he enjoys beyond Pokemon. Is he athletic? Does he show the ability to focus for relatively long periods of time? Is he self-driven with things he’s interested in? Is he organized and neat with toys with lots of small, sometimes fragile, parts(this is important for TCGs). How does he get along in competitive situations, and does he enjoy them? Is he a good sport(winning and losing)? What kind of commitment are you willing to make to his hobby. Pretty much any TCG with a reasonably large playerbase can be expensive and require travel to events, something you’d have to handle for him. Are you willing to be a playtest partner for him to learn the game with? TCGs can be great parent-child bonding experiences, in addition to my own, I know at least three other families which use them for family game night and go to events together. Two of them use them as ways to keep in touch with their adult children who normally wouldn’t ever call or write, but will show up for a weekly game night. Clever, that.
There’s also formats like DC10, where you just take a stack of random cards, shared between the players, and play as though you have infinite mana available to you at all times. It’s just big goofy fun, with far less strategy. We like to do this with leftover draft commons and uncommons after a long day.
Thanks for all the suggestions guys… I guess for some reason, I’ve never played any of those variants before in my life (the only two two-player variants I’ve ever played is mana drop (drop as many lands as you want, draw a card for each one), and just a regular game where we only have 1 deck.)
I’ll give it a shot this afternoon and see if he’s willing to get into one of those.
The idea with mana drop isn’t to build a deck around it, at least when I played. It was something to get a game of Magic over with faster at lunch time or what have you. I’ve built him a deck based on his play style, which equals big creatures and cute pictures. It’s B/G, some fast elf mana (they’re cute, of course), some land fetchers/cantrip spells, a couple cards like Hermit Druid to get creatures into the graveyard, and some cheap recursion spells (Diabolic Servitude and the other uncommon one from Urza’s Saga where you sac a creature and put two in play from the graveyard). As far as big creatures go, I limited it to Dark Hatchling for removal, and the fun big Saproling stuff from Invasion block and before, Nemata, Verdeloth, etc. If I can find my Verdant Force, I’ll throw it in there too.
I built it from cards that were laying around, he had fun the one game we played with it where I threw together a jankety WW deck to play against. More results later, and maybe even a decklist.
