Are you suggesting there is something to CCGs other than munckinism? :dubious:
All this time I thought people played them for the art.
For the record, Magic: The Gathering is a truly brilliant and fun game. I’ve been playing it nonstop for nearly 10 years now, and boy are my arms tired.
Minor nitpick, but you’re conflating the two different types of Magic limited play. The first is “sealed deck” in which you get 1 Tourney pack and 2 boosters for a total of 105 cards (rarely 1 Tp and 3 boosters for 120). The other is “draft”, where you do the picking a card and passing. You end up with only 45 cards, but since you generally only need 22-24 for the average deck and you get to select cards that work well together during the draft, you can get by with that few. In fact, the average draft deck (made from the 45 cards gotten after drafting) is stronger than the average sealed deck (made from 105 cards randomly included).
Like MaxTheVool, I have a very high opinion of Magic. I’ve been playing for about 10 years as well. Munchkin is a great game too, but not even remotely the same. It is much simpler, for one. Munchkin : Magic as Go Fish : Duplicate Bridge.
I wouldn’t have quite put it that way. Munchkin is is a boxed game and not a Collectible Card Game. Easy to learn (play it once and you’ll know all the rules), strategy is simple (depending on how treacherous your friends are), able to have two players up to however many friends you can put up with (I’ve had up to 10 people playing at once), and cheap (because only one person buys the set and everybody plays with it - Although there are several ‘expansion’ sets that add cards to the beginning deck)
Magic is also easy to learn the basic idea of the rules, but because every card or combo of cards can change the impact of the others, the strategy is NOT simple. Like iamthewalrus comparison of Bridge, people study the game to learn various strategies. Eveyone has to buy/supply their own deck and because some cards are rare or more powerfull that means having a good deck isn’t (usually) cheap.
I got into Magic when it first appeared, spent about $100 on my decks and played for a year. Then I realised just how intense (read crazy IMHO) people were getting into it and put my decks away. Three years later I sold them for almost $1000. (All alpha and beta cards including two black lotus)
I’m a MIB for SJGames and teach people to play Munchkin at conventions and it only costs them $30 to buy the set for themself which they can play with their friends.
I used to play quite a lot of MtG a goodly many years ago and then put it away while I finished Grad school and law school, only to pick it back up again recently (now that I have free time) with my fiance.
You can put together an effective and fairly powerful Magic deck for under 30 bucks. It might not be a complex or evidence any stragety other than KILL IT! KILL IT QUICK!, but it’ll probably work well enough. Or you can spend literally thousands of dollars putting together a deck (depending on what you want/can afford/are interested in). The first time I put it away, I ultimately made somewhere in the region of $2,500 for my card collection (used to pay post-law-school bills 
).
That being said, the game the OP probably saw was likely some people playing either Magic or Legend of the Five Rings, with Magic being the more likely of the two. Of course, asking the players will net the OP not only the name of the game, but quite probably More Than They Really Wanted To Know. In my experience, CCG players will be absolutely thrilled to explain at great length to any new person evidencing actual interest 
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There’s absolutely no reason why you can’t combine a tournament deck and a draft. We do it all the time. There are many ways to play the game, and that’s one of the enjoyable things about it.
One of the advantages of doing the combination is that you are much more likely to end up with enough cards to build a reasonable deck when you have the tournament deck and a draft. My store is in a small rural area, and most of the players don’t even have a DCI card. We just look for ways for everyone to have fun with the game.
If this slight variant bothers you, you really wouldn’t like some of the other twists we’ve played, like drawing random pre-built starter decks and then doing a draft to tweak them; or the multi-player variations; or swapping decks between games to better test playing skill vs. deck-building skill.
Is there any Magic sites where you can see what your cards are worth? I bought a few packs along the the starter set and we really didn’t get off the ground with it and I just might sell them.
I know for a fact that it isn’t all about who spent more money on their cards. I won a tournament with a deck that was worth about $50 (Library of Alexandria, Underworld Dreams, and Vexing Arcanix were my three big money cards) and my opponent in the final round had a $500+ deck (lotus, all the moxen, library, mirror universe, etc, etc) but he just wasn’t a good player.
Also, it should be kept in mind that there are different tournament formats. Some tournaments allow only recently printed cards and disallow the old, expensive, overly powerful cards. This makes a more level playing field, and is also an insidious marketing strategy to keep people buying new cards as the ones from older expansion sets are no longer tournament legal.
The one I’ve seen around for the longest period of time, and been reliable and all that garbage, is http://www.brainburst.com/.
I miss playing Magic. There aren’t too many people around here that play, and I haven’t bought any new cards in probably two years, anyway.
I used to play MtG a lot about 10 years ago, when I and all my friends were in the army and we were having a hard time getting enough people together to play D&D. Because we all saw it as sort of a low-rent alternative to roleplaying, none of us took it all that seriously. We didn’t care for tournament rules or even personal decks - my friend AG kept all the cards any of us bought in a big shoebox (he also kept all our D&D material - we’d always meet at his place), and before each game we’d deal them out randomly and built a spur-of-the-moment deck. Needless to say, we didn’t spend hundreds of dollars on cards.
It was great, lighthearted fun. I actually miss it a bit. I wonder what happened to that shoebox? None of the cards in there is newer than 1997, and they may be worth something these days.
I don’t know of any Web sites with price guides I’d really trust. The best price guide is probably Scrye magazine, published monthly and available at any card or game shop. There’s a new Magic: The Gathering magazine starting up next month that will have a price guide in it, too.
Or just throw 'em up on eBay and let the market decide.
I’ve been in a 50+ person game, but that is an anomaly of course (A Neutral Ground “Grand Melee” where you could only affect the players within 2 seats to your left and right, and several players spaced 5 or more apart take their turns at the same time. Fun, but silly).
If you saw a lot of cards in binders, they also were probably trading cards as well as playing.
Magic is an incredibly well designed game/phenomenon. As Chronos mentioned, one of the beautiful concepts in it is that you can’t just draw your cards, hope for the powerful ones, and play them. Every card has some cost associated with it, (yes, yes, including 0-cost, nitpickers) and if you can’t play the cost (usually by having certain other cards in play already that generate a resource called “mana”) you can’t play it. The bigger the effect of the card, the bigger the cost, so the game tends to scale up gradually and you want to draw different cards at different points in the game. (Part of the game is determining which cards are overpowered with respect to their cost. The designers do a prettty good job of balancing them these days, but mistakes do happen).
On top of that, you can’t just make a deck of 60 of the same card (60 is the minimum deck size for most types of play) because with the exception of 5 cards (ok, 11 cards, nitpickers) you are not allowed more than 4 of the same card in a deck. (some older, powerful cards are restricted to 1 per deck, or outright banned)
There’s also a bit of rock-paper-scissors aspect in that Card A may be very good, but some rarely used Card B totally ruins it, so if Card A is getting used a lot, other players will start packing Card B. Then the Card A players switch to Card C, which may not be outright as good as Card A, but punishes anyone playing Card B, etc…
There are dozens of CCG’s on the market that followed in the footsteps of magic. Very few succeeded and are still popular. Some came and went without much notice. Some were popular for a time, then faded. Magic remains, not only because it was the first, but because it’s a very, very good game.
Sorry, I’m so used to DCI-sanctioned formats that I assume everyone plays them. To clarify, the two formats I mentioned are officially sanctioned for rated tournament play, but many players play lots of other formats as well. The format you described sounds pretty fun, too. It would give you some nice direction for your first draft pick, rather than flailing around for the first few picks.
I wish there were a store nearby that would so some more quirky variants more often. My favorite limited variants are minimaster, in which you get only one pack, have to play all 15 cards with any number of basic land (and don’t lose when you run out of cards), but each round’s winners gets all their opponent’s cards to add to their deck, leading to the final match being between two ultra powerful decks, and backdraft, where you try to draft the worst possible card pool, and every match you switched cards with your opponent and tried to make the best deck out of the crap they’d drafted.
I’m a bit embarrassed about how long it took me to figure out what card #11 was. Stupid rats.
Yeticus, you can try www.blackborder.com. They have a price “search engine” that checks three or four magic sites and gives you all their prices. Note that you won’t be able to sell your cards for as much as the retail stores are asking.
We don’t have a certified judge in town (I told you it’s a small community). My son-in-law wanted to become a DCI judge, but he would have to do several tournaments under a level 3 judge. He checked the registry, and it appears there isn’t a single level 3 judge in the whole state of Montana. sigh
That sounds really entertaining. We’ll have to give that one a shot.
These last few sets have really changed rat decks, haven’t they? When I saw the Relentless Rats preview, I thought they’d be fun, but after looking at the price they were going for, I gave up on that idea! My kids, between them, bought two boxes of boosters and only got two Relentless Rats cards. Uncommon? Hmmph.
What you might consider is taking a trip to Washington or Oregon when there’s a fairly high-level event going on, like a Pro Tour Qualifier or Grand Prix Trial (or even Pro Tour-Seattle!). Make arrangements with the Head judge ahead of time, and explain the situation. It’s likely that he can help out with the main tournament, plus a couple of side drafts, and gain all the experience he needs to take the judges test and get certified in a single weekend. There would probably even be time to play in a couple of side-events. You also usually get free packs for helping out.
Cascade Games runs the tournaments in the Pacific Northwest. Tim Shields (tshields123@yahoo.com
) is the tournament organizer, and Tony Mayer (seattlel3@hotmail.com) is the head level 3 judge. John Carter, the M:tG Rules Manager, also makes appearances.
Learning how to judge is extremely rewarding. It also improves your game tremendously. Being able to have sanctioned events at your store means increased Friday Night Magic prize support from Wizards, and that will in turn improve the turnout at the events.
Um, end soapbox.
Is anyone here actively looking for cards? I might just give them away to my fellow dopers. I think most of my packs are 5th edition cards…I’ll have to look and maybe make a list, but I won’t do it unless you guys are actually interested.
Are there Magic players that aren’t actively looking for cards
Yeah, I’m looking!
And, JSexton, thank you very much for all the great information! I really appreciate it.
Um… I’m always looking for cards… keep me in mind.
He he. Agreed. I’m happy to take any unneeded cards off your hands. Off the top of my head, the only thing that I can think of out of 5th that I need is Necropotence and the painlands. But there could be others.
Actually, you don’t need a DCI judge to run a DCI tournament up to 16K. See the tournament application [warning: pdf]. My local store doesn’t have a DCI judge, and we run weekly 16K drafts that draw 12-20 people. You stilll need someone to be the judge and have the last word, but anyone who knows the basic rules and has access to oracle wordings and offical DCI rules in the case of having to look something up is qualified.