I had it once. In bed for three days. And yes, I did hate it.
Anybody who is interested in the basic game experience should check ou tthe current version of Duels of the Planeswalkers which is available on Steam, XBox, PS3, and the iPad (it’s in the App Store as Magic 2013). The iPad version, at least, lets you play a couple rounds for free before you have to pony up $10 for the full game.
Duels isn’t all of Magic – its card pool seems to be only several hundred cards, some of the decks wouldn’t be tournament legal in the current format (don’t worry if you don’t understand what that means), the deckbuilding isn’t as robust as in real life, etc. It’s a pared down version to be sure. But it’s a hell of a lot of fun and it will give you an understanding of the basic resources, card types, and typical effects available in the game.
–Cliffy
There are a number of different formats, and they have different cost requirements.
To be reasonably competitive in formats that include almost all cards printed, the annual cost could be zero… assuming you’ve already got the old expensive cards. Having enough old cards to make a few tournament-viable decks probably puts your collection in the $3000+ range, but you don’t have to add much to it. The format changes slowly. This is how I play Magic. I spent a lot of money on it for many years and built up a collection. These days I spend almost nothing, net.
To be competitive in a more restrictive format that allows only newer cards (called Standard), a budget (but competitive) deck is probably going to have a cost around $200 total (there are sometimes competitive decks for less, but you can’t really rely on it). Cards stay legal in the format for 1-2 years, but decks don’t necessarily stay competitive that long. Careful choice of deck and selling off cards before they crater, and I think you could play competitively for $200/year.
There are also formats where you just go open up cards and play with them on the spot. Those tournaments are $12-30 each (you keep the cards you open).
Those are the minimums. If you wanted to be able to build every top-level deck in every major constructed format (basically, be able to play the deck of your choice in every tournament that came along), you’re probably looking at a collection in excess of $20k, and an annual outlay of $1k+/year.
There are many Magic players who are both compulsive collectors and quite generous. It’s not difficult to befriend some Magic players who will loan you a whole deck to play with. I know several people who don’t own any cards and don’t spend any money on Magic aside from tournament entry fees. They just borrow a deck from someone and play it. If you want to try your hand sometime, I’ve got deck you can borrow.
In practice, no. It’s actually pretty hard to print believable-looking cards unless you have access to expensive printing technology. Not worth it unless you were actually trying to counterfeit en masse to sell. Even if they look believable, they probably feel wrong. The company that makes the game has a strong financial interest in keeping this from happening, so the penalties for knowingly using counterfeit cards are steep. I’ve never heard of someone making it through even a mid-level tournament with something like that.
There is also the Pauper format, which only uses common cards (there used to be three rarity levels for cards - common, uncommon, and rare; there’s now a rarer level, called mythic rare or just mythic); I don’t know how much it’s played on paper, but it’s reasonably popular in Magic Online. The cheapest deck for Pauper that has been successful in (recent) online tournaments costs about five dollars; the more popular decks run between twenty and fifty or sixty dollars, and you can probably own every legal card in the format for about three hundred.
Like gonzoron says, it’s a resource management game. Land cards produce mana, magical energy, which comes in five colors. With very few exceptions, all the other cards cost mana, often of a specified color or colors, roughly proportionate to the power of the effect. Those include creatures, which hang around until killed and can bash your opponent every turn, and various types of other spells that have immediate or continuous effects (making your creatures more powerful, killing an opposing creature, dealing damage directly to your opponent, etc., but wackier stuff too).
One of the most basic rules is that you can only play one land card per turn. That means that early in the game, all players are limited to relatively mana-inexpensive, and therefore relatively less powerful, cards, while late in the game, when you’ve got eight or twelve lands out there, you can cast your most powerful effects – but so can the other player(s). Or maybe the other player kills you by a thousand cuts before you get there.
Another important facet of the cost is color. Most spells require particular colored mana, and different colors can do different things. Green, for instance, has the best big creatures, blue has counterspells, red can damage creatures or players directly, etc. But each color has things it can’t do (or can’t do well). One solution is to play multiple colors in your deck, but that means you’ll have situations when you desparately need to cast a red Lightning Bolt but so far you’ve only drawn lands producing green mana. The more colors you play, the more effects you have access to, and the more problems you’ll have drawing the right colors of mana at the right times.
To answer these, I first have to say a word about sanctioned formats.
Magic has been around nearly 20 years, and has been printing new cards every few months throughout that time. But most tournaments don’t use that entire card pool. The most popular tournament format is “Standard.” Standard uses only the cards printed in the last year or two (including older cards reprinted in current sets), with about half the card pool rotating out in the fall, then steadily increasing in size every three monts as new sets come out until the next rotation. Depending on the time of year, there’s usually, IIRC, between 1000-2000 Standard-legal cards at any one time.
Another, new, format is Modern, where every card printed since summer of 2003 is legal. That is, the Modern cardpool gets bigger every few months, but cards don’t rotate out.
Then there are the eternal formats (Vintage and Legacy), where you can play with any card ever printed, although as in every format, a small number of cards that were unexpectedly crazy powerful are banned from competition.
No idea on that one – I play very casually and don’t touch the tourney scene, even the local tourneys. That’s one of the things about the game – while there’s a very active tournament scene at all skill levels, you can also just play with your pals and not worry about when the old cards rotate out of the current sanctioned formats. If some card is too good, you just house rule it out.
Poking around on the net, there appears to be some, not a ton, most of it by scammers trying to sell them to marks for cash, rather than to use them for play. There are few cards in Standard (not just now, at any time) that are worth more than $20, although there are always a few that are expensive, and usually one or two that hit $100 at their peak. Most are way less, even among tournament viable cards. So there’s relatively little payoff given the costs and risks.
Very powerful cards in other formats, typically the really old ones printed when runs were much smaller, can command prices of several hundred dollars, and a very few reach four figures, but those are met by collectors. You wouldn’t actually play with that sort of thing. What if you spilled your Dr. Pepper on it?
So the rub is that there’s little to worry about on that score unless you become a pretty serious player. You’re much more likely to have you backpack stolen at a Grad Prix than to be sold a fake Black Lotus.
–Cliffy
Yeah, you wouldn’t play with the mint condition versions of the cards that cost the most. But even a beat-up Black Lotus (the most expensive card) is probably $800+. I don’t play Type 1, which has the most expensive cards, but I play Legacy, which includes several individual cards that approach the $300 mark even for the cheaper versions (many cards have several printings, so the rarer printings are more expensive), and I own and play with several of them. It’s not that uncommon to see people playing $10,000 decks in Legacy full of Beta dual lands and such.
Beverages are not allowed anywhere near the tables. If a spill did occur, most people play with cards in plastic sleeves that will prevent most damage if you act quickly. If you’re really paranoid, you can buy tiny plastic sleeves that fit inside larger plastic sleeves, and alternate directions, which means you’d have to actually immerse the card in liquid for a while for any to get in.
I don’t see how that would be a problem - for you, anyway. If you’re just playing on your kitchen table, it doesn’t make any difference to you whether your opponent bought that playset of Caverns of Souls for $70 or just printed out some proxies - as long as they aren’t marked (i.e. they’re using all proxies so they can’t tell the difference just by looking at the backs).
I used to love MtG, but I grew dissatisfied with the rules changes, card selection in the newer sets (at the time, this was quite a while ago), lame new card types, and new abilities that were more annoying than anything else.
I know some D&D groups like to play with old rules sets, I wonder if anyone does that for Magic.
Obviously this is all very subjective, but the general consensus is that the rules changes that have been made over time are nearly 100% for the better. I’m curious if you recall specific changes that irritated you?
A good example of a rules change that I think is clearly correct, but which I can easily see pissing people off because it initially seems like “dumbing down the game” is the removal of mana burn. It used to be the case that unused mana in your mana pool caused you to lose 1 point of life per mana, it no longer does.
I think there are two basic reasons why this is a good idea:
(1) The rule added very little to the game. That is, of all the games of Magic ever played, very very few were actively made more interesting due to mana burn. The vast majority of time it never came up at all, and if it did, it was almost always a kind of irritating but not very important way. So there’s an entire rule in the rulebook, and stuff to confuse and bewilder new players, for very little benefit.
(2) The rule reduced design space. For instance, there was a card called “near death experience” printed recently which is an enchantment that says that at the beginning of your turn, if you have precisely 1 life, you win the game. That’s an interesting card… maybe not very powerful, but something that you can certainly imagine people trying to build a neat deck around. But with mana burn around, all you’d ever do was cast that, then mana burn down to 1 and hope you don’t get lightning bolted. Fun. Mana burn not existing means that a variety of cards can exist that couldn’t before.
(Two other similar-in-scope rules changes over the years are the removal of “tapped blockers don’t deal damage” and the removal of “tapped non-creature artifacts are turned off”. Again, in both cases the additional complexity and the non-intuitive nature of the rule wasn’t worth the marginal gameplay benefits.)
Probably the most controversial rules change has involved the timing of how combat damage resolved… basically imagine a situation in which a blocking or blocked creature has the ability “sacrifice this creature: you gain 3 life”. Initially, you could not both have that creature deal combat damage and gain the 3 life. Then for a long time you could. Now you once again can’t. It’s certainly not ideal that things have changed back and forth, but we’re talking about rules changing every decade here, not every month. And in both cases I think they made a very reasonable decision based on the state of the magic rules at the time.
Your other comment was about printing of new abilities. I think there have been times in magic history when new abilities would come out just kind of for the sake of new abilities coming out. For instance, Urza’s Saga featured cycling and echo. Why? What did cycling and echo have to do with anything thematic in Urza’s Saga? Were either of them super-exciting-and-new? Did cycling and echo rlate to each other in any way?
Back then, each set would have some new abilities, with no real rhyme or reason, and some of them were pretty forgettable. In more recent years, I think WOTC has done a pretty darn good job of coming up with abilities that (a) genuinely seem new, and (b) have a logical and/or thematic reason to exist. Perhaps the best example is double-faced cards. That’s right, cards with pictures and text on both sides, and no card back. They came out in an expansion called Innistrad which was gothic-horror-themed, and many of them are things like werewolves and vampires, where it makes sense for them to transform from one state to another, and thus flip over.
There are people who play Alpha Only - that is, the they play by the rules found in the first starter rulebook, and only use Alpha cards (so no CoP: Black.) That’s not for me; I only have five Alpha cards, and prefer the 6E rules anyway.
These two changes are far more beneficial to the game than the removal of mana burn. They make the game playable. Deciding which abilities of a tapped artifact work and which don’t (and what might cause the disabled abilities to be turned on again) was a nightmare.
Mana burn is controversial because it wasn’t a problem.
And then completely borked the PR job.
I didn’t have a problem with the old rule, and the new one has a nasty bodge-job to give the defending player some chance to use damage prevention effects that would otherwise become completely useless. This fix was explained so badly that I’m surprised there weren’t more players walking off.
On the subject of abilities, one of the worst received sets in Magic history was Mercadian Masques. One of the reasons it was so unpopular was that people didn’t think anything new was introduced. The reason for that perception? No keyword abilities.
New abilities sell sets. That’s why the ability word concept was introduced - to tie cards together that work in similar ways.
(The set was also a sucky, badly underpowered set, a case of falling off your horse to the left because you’ve just remounted after falling off to the right.)
This wasn’t addressed to me…but I hate when I memorize rules, and then they change. Quite often, I’ll forget that the rules have changed, and try to play by the old rules.
I think that this is just a function of me getting older, like getting cataracts and gray hair.
Haven’t played Magic in at least a decade. Just picked up the iPad game. Not sure if I should thank you or curse you. 
I’m declaring that this thread is not for our, er, Ascetic friend greenslime anymore. It’s now for posting cool Magic stories. I’ll start!
I love Cube*. By far, my favorite way to play Magic. One reason is that even with a fixed card pool, you keep finding new stuff. I had a Lotus Cobra in play, which allowed me to accelerate out a Deadeye Navigator followed by a Primeval Titan. At that point, it clicked that each time I flicker the Titan for 1U, I get two lands, which gives me 1U from the Cobra. So I can now just take every land in my deck and put it into play. Whee!
*Cube is a Limited format where you have a box of cards, generally amazing all-stars from the history of Magic, and you make 15-card booster packs from these to draft with. Mine is 375 cards, enough to support an 8-man draft table plus 15 cards left over to use Booster Tutor with.
I’m a Melvin. Big-time. WHat appeals to me ar ethe quirky interactions of the cards.
I remember one four-playe rgame I was in not long after the release of Stronghold (so, spring 1998). In my previous turn I had completed the assembly of my gamewinning combo,. I had on what would now be called the battlefield a Triskelion, a Hell’s Caretaker and an Intruder Alarm. I hadn’t yet drawn my second Triskelion, but I had an Onulet in my graveyard.
My rh opponent announced we were all dead in his next turn, and passed to me.
I untapped.
In my upkeep, use Triskelion three times to “ping” my rh opponent.
Use the Caretaker to resurrect the Onulet, sacrificing the Triskelion to do so. I get some life and everything untaps, including the Caretaker.
Use the Caretaker to resurrect Triskelion, sacrificing the Onulet. This untaps the Caretaker (again). The new Triskelion has three counters on it. Thus it can be used to ping someone.
I kept going like this until all my opponents had been shot dead by the Triskelion, without leaving my upkeep.
There are better ways of doing that now, but it still works if you can assemble the pieces.
Thanks for the kind offer, homeboy, but this sounds like something that would take me way too long to get to the proficiency that I would like. I am way to obsessive for that game.
I may have seen you playing out of the corner of my eye when walking by Metro Comics. I assume that that’s what they’re playing with weird looking cards over there.
Curse all of you, this thread is making me consider playing again.
:D:mad::D:mad:
Possibly. I haven’t played at Metro in a while, though. A friend of mine opened +EV Games on upper State a few months ago, so I (and pretty much every other local Magic player I know), plays there now. It’s a store dedicated to Magic run by people who love the game. They do a way better job at everything Magic related than Metro ever did.
I just looked that up. I don’t go in there very often since Bitterman’s went out of business. It’s nice that you found a good home.
My favorite magic stories always seem to involve cards being used in ways they don’t seem to be intended to be used.
Examples*:
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I had a deck that used Dismantle and Darksteel Reactor. (Aside: there’s something called a “counter” in magic, which just means take a penny or glass bead or M&M or whatever and put it on a card to track something.) Now Dismantle is “supposed to” be a card that destroys a type of card called artifacts, and if the artifact destroyed this way happened to have counters on it, you can put those counters onto one of your own arifacts. Darksteel Reactor is “supposed to” be a slow ticking clock that wins you the game in 20 turns, by getting a counter each turn. Of course there are tons of ways to speed up that clock with other cards that add counters. But one of my favorites was trying to Dismantle my own Darksteel Reactor. Since the Reactor is indestructible, the Dismantle would fail to destroy it, but the counter-adding clause still worked, and I could put those counters it made on anything, including the same Reactor I just failed to destroy. So in my deck, Dismantle effectively read “Double the number of charge counters on your Darksteel reactor.” So I often won with the reactor in far less than 20 turns.
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Usually you get your mana from a type of card called “Land.” And usually a land only gives you one mana each turn. (When you use a card, you often have to “tap” it. i.e. turn it sideways to show you can’t use it again until next turn.) But there was a series of Lands they made that looked like this one: Dimir Aquaduct. They actually give you 2 mana with each tap, of two different colors. The drawback is that it comes into play tapped (not untapped, like most cards), and that you have to put a land already in play back in your hand. Or so it would seem. The Aquaduct doesn’t say you can’t put the Aquaduct itself back in your hand. OK, so what would be the point of playing it if it bounces right back to your hand before you even get to untap and use it? Meet Stone-Seeder Hierophant. She can tap herself to untap a land, usually just giving you an extra use out one of your lands. What’s better, she untaps herself every time you put a land into play. So if you play things in the right order, you can untap the Aquaduct with the Hierophant, and tap the Aquaduct for 2 mana right before it goes back to your hand. Too bad you typically can only play one land per turn, but… meet Patron of the Moon He’s got a bunch of text on him, but the last 2 lines at the end are the interesting ones. For 1 mana, he lets you put up to 2 lands from your hand into play, tapped. Usually not that exciting, but if the land you put into play for 1 mana is an Aquaduct, which untaps the Heirophant, allowing you to untap the Aquaduct, which you tap for 2 mana before it returns to your hand… now you’re back where you started, but with 1 more mana. Repeat as often as you like for arbitrary amounts of mana.
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I also like when things don’t go “infinite” like that, but just “exponential.” I won’t explain the details, but I’ll just say that Opalescence lets you put Followed Footsteps on some places where it clearly doesn’t “belong.” Like Doubling Season, for example. One Doubling Season, then 3 Doubling Seasons, then 11 Doubling Seasons. Then 2059 Doubling Seasons… then 2059+2^2059 Doubling Seasons…
*(I’m trying to make these examples makes sense to Magic players as well as those people curious about it. Sorry if I overexplain.)
For those who are both magic geeks AND math geeks, back when there was mana burn, it was possible to get uncountably infinite creatures in play, as long as you were willing to use a card from unhinged, and it similarly involved doubling season being turned into a creature, along with two copies of Nacatl War Pride. Good times…