By the way, I tried out Apprentice. One of the weird offbeat decks I put together seems to generally win the goldfish match around turn 6 (as early as 4, with a great draw, or as late as 11, when it was starved for land). Is it possible to try two decks against each other in solitaire mode (as in, me playing both sides)? Some of my fantasy decks have too much interaction with the other side for a goldfish match to really be meaningful.
We should have an Apprentice MTG competition for fun. 
Not really, but if you have two computers, you can install apprentice on both and can connect “via the internet” even on the same LAN.
I’m not 100% on this since it’s a long time since I used Apprentice, but I think I was able to just run Apprentice twice on the same machine and have them connect to each other. You should just be able to type 127.0.0.1 as the IP.
And some people do get out of Magic, even after they reach the top. Of course, I am not one of them. I’ve never sold all my cards (only the ones that were worth any significant amount), but I have stopped playing for months at a time. While I played very enthusiastically for awhile, and could probably tell you what most cards in existence do, there are some sets that I every once in a while come across cards I never knew existed, having been printed in that time frame where I stopped playing.
I also play Limited rather exclusively, and am good enough at it that what I win at local tournaments feeds itself so that I never have to pay for anything. I also help run some of the larger tournaments in the area.
Neat trick! I just confirmed it works.
I used to just open two apprentice windows. You just have to alt+tab after every turn.
I’m always mildly startled to find out this game is still chugging along. I played in the first “Golden Age” from Legends to Ice Age but sold out after that. Are the rules insanely complicated now or something? It seems as though they’d have exhausted all the permutations of the basic rules by now and I know they were adding new rules in Fallen Empires & Ice Age. But even that was forever ago.
Yes in that they keep adding mechanics and whatnot, so there are ever more combinations and rules to remember, but the basic rules were actually simplified with the release of 6th edition.
Yeah, they eliminated the difference between “instants” and “interrupts”, and instead implemented a “stack” model (which should be familiar if you follow computer science). Basically, the last thing that’s put onto the stack is the first thing that comes off of it.
By way of example, let’s say that one player, whom we’ll call Chandra, tries to cast a big fireball, but the other player, whom we’ll call Jace, counters it. Under the old rules, Chandra declares she’s casting the fireball, and then after Chandra says so, Jace says he’s casting a counterspell at the same time, which he’s allowed to do because it’s an interrupt and so can be cast at the same time as another spell. Under the new rules, the Fireball goes on the stack when Chandra declares that she’s casting it, and sits on the stack waiting to see if anyone wants to respond to it. Jace says that he does want to respond to it, and declares that he’s casting Counterspell, so that goes on the stack on top of the Fireball, and waits to see if anyone responds to it. Chandra doesn’t have any response to that, and says so, so now things start resolving. The Counterspell is on top of the stack, so it resolves first, and the effect it has is to counter the Fireball, which is then removed from the stack since it’s countered. Once the Counterspell is resolved, it’s taken off the stack, and now the Fireball would have a chance to resolve, except it can’t, because it was countered.
My one regret is that this new method robs me of a bit of “get off my lawn” nostalgia, of a memorable play I made way back when that wouldn’t work any more. I was getting crushed by a Black Vice/Howling Mine combo, and unluckily wasn’t drawing enough land, either, so I was desperate to get cards, any cards, out of my hand. The only two cards I had enough mana for were a Power Sink and a Red Elemental Blast, but my opponent didn’t have anything blue, and wasn’t casting any spells. So I cast the two of them on each other. It wasn’t enough, and I still ended up losing the next turn anyway, but it let me hold on just a little bit longer, and it was certainly fun.
When would that have ever been legal? If you don’t have a target for either spell, how could you play either of them in the first place?
That didn’t work under the old rules, either. Interrupts were cast during an “interrupt window”, which happened after each spell, but they weren’t cast simutaneously, and you still need a target for the first one you cast.
One of the reasons for the rules revision is that very few people actually understood the intricacies of the old rules.
I thought the rule was just that they each had to have a target, but since they could be cast at the same time…
Eh, in any event, my opponent didn’t object, and it’s not like that’s something you’d often want to do, anyway.
There was never such a thing as “at the same time.”
Even when interrupts were separate from instants, you would use LIFO (Last in, first out) to determine in what order the spells resolved. You still had a stack, only when you interrupted an instant you started a new stack at that instant, and in order to respond with instants you would have to let the interrupt stack resolve, then proceed as normal.
However, I do not begrudge you the point that against an indifferent opponent, it is a neat trick.
By Ice Age, they’d barely scratched the surface. 
Let me introduce you to:
Split Cards
Flashback
Convoke
Equipment
Hybrid Mana
Suspend
“Pitch” spells
& Cycling
Just a few of the more interesting mechanics to be introduced since then.
I’d link to a Planeswalker, too, but they aren’t so self-explanatory.
Don’t forget flip cards, morph, persist, and a few cards that just completely change the fundamental rules
Plus, there’s now colored artifacts and colorless non-artifacts.
Not to mention Levelers.
Wow, that’s new.
And kind of cool too!
Like I said, just a few. 
Not to be confused with Leveler, of course.
I’m also fond of Splice onto Arcane and Madness, but I may be in the minority there.
You can play two decks against each other on Redshark, which is an alternative to Apprentice.
(I use a version of Redshark with a “patch” that converts it to play Pokemon.)
It’s interesting to here people talk about the game like that because Magic isn’t just chugging along. It’s grown considerable and is an extremely strong and long running game. Since Hasbro bought Wizards of the Coast it went from a minor vague concept to them that they barely acknowledged they owned to one of their most profitable year round income.
I haven’t played the game for years, I played competitively up till Mirage. Yet because of my friendships it continues to be part of my life. My Best friend is one of the worlds top dealers, present at nearly every Pro-Tour world wide. For me it works out as a great perk occasionally attending an event with her. I’ve been to a number of countries I wouldn’t have otherwise made the time to see.