It’s cathartic, actually. After fifteen years, I am finally going to be completely done with Magic : The Gathering.
When I started collecting, it was in the heyday of Fallen Empires (well, insofar as FE ever HAD a heyday), Fourth Edition, and Ice Age. My collecting tapered off sharply with Weatherlight, and though I did buy one booster box of Urza’s Saga, after that I was out for years.
Then the MTG storyline came back to Dominaria. There was Coldsnap, and Time Spiral! And a local Magic gaming group to play with. I got sucked back in. I bought large quantities of the Mirrodin and Ravnica blocks to catch up. A friend found some cards his ex-girlfriend had left with him, and I got a Timetwister, Mox Pearl and Black Lotus (all Unlimited) for $400. (The Mox Pearl was in mint condition, too - it still hurts me to think about trading it away)
Then Lorwyn hit, and the spell was broken again. Plus, the local magic group was about 75% composed of uber-competitive dicks. So I got out, and just kind of boxed up the cards, and let them sit.
So now, a couple years later, I am getting rid of the cards. I was inspired while preparing for the Origins gaming convention. I knew of Troll and Toad, of course - but I also knew shipping tended to eat up any profits from selling bulk cards to them. But! They’re at the con! So I can sell my cards in person. The Black Lotus is going to go into auction, but Troll and Toad can have the rest. I won’t make back a fraction of what I spent, but it’ll be good to have the free space, and nice to have the cash on hand.
It amazes me that people ever played this game. I just never could get excited about wizards and all that fantasy shit. But to each their own. There are plenty of folks who don’t get into some of the things I love.
The game is not about wizards and fantasy shit. It’s a strategy game with a fantasy setting. That’s a lot different than, say, LARPing.
I played from winter of 1995 until about 2002 or so. I gave it up when I graduated from college, and got both a job and a steady girlfriend. There just wasn’t time to blow an entire saturday on a Pro Tour Qualifier, and you can forget about Friday Night Magic at the game store, too. I don’t want to make it sound like my gf forbade me from playing, but my priorities shifted as I grew up and Magic was left in the rearview mirror.
I will add that I do think about the “glory days” quite a bit, and would gladly spend an evening slinging cards around with the old gang if they were around (most have dispersed to different parts of the country). Who knows, I may even take up tournament Magic again.
It amazes me that people will open a thread about a topic that they have no interest in just to post and make everyone aware that they don’t give a shit about said topic of the thread. There are plenty of people who have no problem not threadshitting. But to each their own.
I never got into Magic and but I did get into the Yu-Gi-Oh! card game with my stepbrothers and it was a load of fun for the years it lasted lasted. Then they got older and thought the game was lame and for little kids so they got rid of their cards years ago. I still have mine but I am moving at the end of the month and I will be getting rid of my cards and I will be sad when I do.
As has been pointed out, it’s a strategy card game. If you’re amazed that people ever played it, then you should be similarly amazed that people ever played bridge, poker, or euchre. The fantasy stuff is just an overlay on top of the basic strategy. It just as easily could have had a steampunk theme or a My Pretty Pony theme or whatever.
FWIW, I’m not a Magic player myself but I’ve hung around quite a bit with people who are.
Yep. I have no interest anymore. I am in a continuing process of Ebaying off all my good stuff from Alpha, Beta, Arabian Nights, etc. Make a few bucks, and then clear them out.
If you have anything left and you’d prefer to help a current player get their hands on some juicy older cards for his Vintage interests than make a killer profit, then I encourage you to get in touch with me.
Heh. Killer profit? Troll and Toad pays 55 cents per hundred on most cards, unless it’s something on their buy list. Of course, most of the juicy stuff is on the buy list. Still, I don’t think anything I have is worth more than $30 to them, since the Lotus is going in the auction.
I stopped playing after high school but I make it a point to still collect a couple packs of ever new set that comes out. Which reminds me, I have to get the new Eldrazi set.
I have cards dating back to Ice Age when I bought them new, then a friend of mine left the game and gave me all his cards. Nothing too spectacular, no Moxes or anything like that. I think the oldest cards I have are probably from The Dark or Legends, sometime around there.
I don’t play, but I like creating decks for fun. Mine suck though, I was never that good, but I like making little weird motifs in mine. A red land destruction deck was fun, so was a Black weenie creatures deck with a bunch of Bad Moons. Or a Blue counterspell/Control Magic deck. Fun times
If you like creating decks you might want to try playing Dominion. It is essentially deck building made into the game. The major advantage it has over traditional ccgs is that all cards of communal so everyone is always on the same playing field. It also doesn’t require a 2nd mortgage to play as each set cost no more than $45 and you only really need one of them to play.
And neither is LARPing necessarily about wizards and fantasy shit.
From Lovecraft to Westerns to Sci-fi (e.g. Warhammer 40,000) to Steampunk to Cyberpunk to Modern times, if you can write a tabletop RPG system about it, you can just as easily write a LARP system for it.
I love the deckbuilding aspect. The part of this preparation to sell that h urt the most was decomposing some of the decks I still had sitting in sleeves. I had a tremendously fun, speedy little mono-green deck built around Wild Pair, Groundbreaker, Primal Forcemage, Unyaro Bees, Llanowar Elves, Dryad Arbor, Mwonvuli Acid-Moss and a couple of other land accelerators (as well as Scragnoth and Quagnoth for beefier filler creatures) I built it mainly as a way to play games with the ‘stack’ - ordering the effects of Wild Pair and Primal Forcemage correctly to fetch the creatures I wanted. It can be fun to drop four Groundbreakers (each with bonuses from Primal Forcemage) on your opponent in a single turn.
And then there was the Stormfront Riders / Cloudstone Curio deck that could produce infinite soldier tokens - or with Soul Warden in the mix, infinite life.
What’s Dominion? I remember years ago they came out with a sort of D&D version of magic where you battle the computer and build decks out of sets available up to that point. Then you could also connect with other people to battle them. Is that it?
I’m sorry Bees. I have a newborn, and we need to scrape up every last bit of spare money we can. If I have any Alpha, Beta, or Arabian uncommons (or less desirable rares) left after the purge, I’ll let you know, however.
No, Dominion is a table-top game. It’s basically a non-collectible version of Magic. Each player starts with a deck of ten cards, consisting mostly of “money” cards they can play to add new cards to their deck, which they can use to buy better money cards, or victory cards which score them points at the end of the game. You keep cycling through your deck, adding new cards to it (and sometimes taking cards out) constantly trying to fine tune it so that you can consistently buy the high-value victory cards. You also randomize the spread of cards available to buy, so each new game can be radically different from the previous game. It’s a great game, and they’ve released three (or is it four?) expansions to it so far. Highly recommended.
You’ve picked a bad time to quit, I think, as Rise of Eldrazi is the most fun expansion in quite some time. Of course, I say that as someone who plays only limited (which is really the best way to play if you have enough time commitments that you can’t spend hours on end building and testing and trading, etc.).
Tonight is my weekly draft group draft. Anyone who lives near San Jose, CA, and wants to draft more often, send me a message.