Khadaji, why not buy your nephew the World’s Most Annoying Deck?
It’s guaranteed fun, at least for the one playing it. 
This is, somewhat, true if you play competitive M:tG. As Evil Death pointed out, this isn’t necessarially the case and I have friends who do very well for themselves in tournaments based upon trading or winning cards to increase their cardpool.
I’ve never seen a playgroup who plays casually put any sort of pressure on their members to get new cards or spend tons of money/time on getting the perfect deck. This is a huge fallacy of a great many M:tG players I’ve run across on the net. You don’t HAVE to play competitively. Play for fun. Get some friends together and have FUN. Screw the current hot cards for tournament decks. Don’t play “net decks”(kind of ironic coming from a guy who helped design such decks once upon a time I know). Screw spending money to do well in tournaments. Screw tournaments alltogether if you like. Ingenuity and creative playstyles are much appreciated at the casual table where FUN not VICTORY is the goal. Play with whatever cards you have and if someone mocks you for playing “crappy” or “janky” cards, thank them for their time and find some other players to play with. I’ve yet to see a card which was completely and utterly useless. Some of my favorite cards are widely considered “crap” by those focused on tournament play and I simply don’t give a damn.
Call me naieve if you will, but I’ve had FUN with this game for nearly a decade now(making a charge of naievete pretty difficult to make stick) and my spending is more out of a “ooh! Lookie, new toys!” factor than it is “Gotta have these or I’ll never win another game!” that you make M:tG motivations out to be.
Enjoy,
Steven
King of Casual Play
The One and Only Defender of Cards That Blow
cough cough Pale Moon cough cough
Don’t start with me! I could swear I took you apart on this very type of conversation once before on the usefulness of various “crappy” cards. Some are harder than others, but it’s still possible. Heck, I can recall a game where Pale Moon would have won the game for me in a PTQ, so there!
Enjoy,
Steven
First of all, can someone explain to me who Evil Death is and why it’s all so funny?
Second, I think several of you, in an effort to convince people that Magic doesn’t need to cost astronomical sums of money, have bought into the casual/competitive dichotomy a little bit too strongly. I’m a very serious, competitive player. I have, and care about, a very high rating, both in real life and online. I’m qualified for Pro Tour Chicago, and very much looking forward to it. However, I never play with netdecks, I don’t buy singles, I don’t yet own 4 of every good Onslaught rare, and I still have fun almost every time I play. Why? Because I only play limited. That is, drafts and sealed deck.
There are two basic ways to play magic: “constructed” and “limited”. Constructed is what everyone has been talking about up until now, and it means that you own some number of magic cards, then choose from your collection a subset which you build into a deck, which you then bring to your tournament/casual game night/lunchroom and play against someone else’s deck, which they similarly assembled and brought. This is how Magic was originally designed, and for the first 4 or so years of Magic’s existence, it was by far the predominant format. Unfortunately, it’s a broken game in various ways:
(1) People copy decks over the net all the, so originality and deck-buildling are discouarged. Not totally absent, but discouraged
(2) It takes money, or huge amounts of aggressive trading, to win
(3) There’s no guarantee that decks that win will be any fun. Heavy control decks, or heavy land destruction decks, or combo decks that go off on turn 3, are (or have been at some time) all decks that have done very well in constructed magic. But to someone who first learned to play magic with creatures and giant growths and flying and big dragons, they might not seem any fun at all.
(4) People can have very different conceptions of what they’re trying to do with their decks, which can lead to no fun for any player. Building a smurf-themed deck is a perfectly reasonable thing to do. So is building a deck that is purely maximized to win. No one is “wrong” in doing either of those thigns. But those two players aren’t going to have much fun playing against each other.
In Limited Magic, on the other hand, no one brings any cards at all. Rather, you show up at the tournament/whatever, everyone is provided with the same number of sealed booster packs, and you open then right then and there and everyone builds a deck. (In a “draft” tournament, which is the most common kind, there is a “drafting” period in which people take turns choosing cards, giving players control over what they have, but still leaving a basically level playing field.) Limited has several great advantages:
(a) everyone’s on an even footing. It doesn’t matter that I’ve been playing for 7 years and have spent probably tens of thousands of dollars on the game. I still only get 45 cards.
(b) Everyone has to build their own deck. Sure, you can read articles on the 'net giving advice about how to draft, how to build, etc. But once you open up your cards, you’re on your own. Sink or swim based on your own skillz, buddy!
© It’s exciting. Remember when you first started playing, and having a Shivan Dragon was the most exciting thing ever? Well, in constructed deck, dragons usually suck. And if they don’t suck, well, everyone owns 4 of them anyhow. But in limited, that thrill of peeling open the wrapper and hoping for Rorix, Bladewing is still there
(d) It’s fun and balanced. In limited, people play creatures. They attack. They block. Games last. It’s very very hard to build a degenerate deck in limited.
(e) You can be as wacky as you want and still have good competition. Me and my magic playing buddies, who are all quite serious and good players, like to draft non-standard formats such as Onslaught-7th-Destiny, or what have you. We’ve seen combinations of cards in play that might have never been seen by anyone else, ever. But we’re still playing to win without the whole “well, it’s just casual, so you’re not supposed to burn me out because it’s no fun” business.
(f) it’s not all that expensive. If you buy boxes, the 3 packs you need to draft will cost you 6 or 7 dollars, which is a reasonable price for an evening’s entertainment, particularly given that you’ll end up keeping the cards, which you can of course then either sell or build constructed decks with.
Oh, a few other points:
-Back to the OP, if you buy him a box of packs, he can open them and keep the cards. Or, if he’s a smart young fellow, he can draft with them!
-Pale Moon is just plain awful. It may not be absolutely totally 100% useless in some provable sense, but man is it terrible. As is Saprazzan Raider. As is Baki’s Curse.
-mtgman, you were kvetching about them changing the rules for Illusionary Mask? I just don’t see why you’re pissed off. First of all, if you just play casually, then you and whoever you play with are perfectly free to play with whatever rules you want. If you want to play by revised-era rules where bolting a creature in response to giant growth doesn’t kill it, be my guest. Secondly, if you love Illusionary Mask then you should be thrilled beyond belief with Onslaught. Suddenly, a mechanic that was only available to casual players with very expensive cards, and which required you to draw your key card or your whole deck wouldn’t work, is everywhere! Face down creatures for all! Vive la revolucion! Oh, and the old Illusionary Mask rules sucked… “I fireball you” “I don’t die” “Why?” “I’m not telling, but maybe one of my face down creatures is Ali from Cairo”
Oh, and I forgot to mention…
Just two days ago, in the competitive 8-player draft froom on Magic Online, in an all-onslaught draft, I smashed someone with a 13/13 trampling blue Pheldagrif, lest you think that competitive magic is never any fun.
(Thank you, Riptide Replicator and Mythic Proportions.)
It’s not really my place to tell his(snicker) secrets. If you’ve spent a fair bit of time on the M:tG newsgroups you’d probably recognize him, otherwise I’m not sure what he’s done in recent times to get name recognition. I never really saw any of his stuff on the Magic websites like some of my stuff or some of the other M:tG newsgroup regulars writing ended up.**
This is true, limited play offers both the ability to slowly grow your collection and be able to compete without trying to get specific cards(either by buying massive amounts of random boosters/boxes or by buying singles). I should have mentioned that as another way to keep your M:tG costs low. Still it does have some disadvantages for some players. I am a deckbuilder. I love to take cards and build decks to work together. It’s just my personality. I do well in Limited events when I play them, and it’s probably the only form of competitive M:tG I’ll play these days unless someone dusts off the old Vintage format(type 1) for a local tourney. But my love is given to deckbuilding and I just don’t find that kind of satisfaction in being given forty-five random cards and being told “make do!”**
As Evil Death(damn it’s hard typing that screen name when I know who it is and I’ve typed his real name in correspondence for years! It’s like your mom suddenly asking you to call her by her first name instead of “mom”) pointed out, the rules are a LOT better now than they were back then. Back then the Mask worked as the designers intended, but other stuff was FUBAR. Many casual players, in lieu of cooking up an entire rules system for their play, will stick with the current rules. It’s the safest thing to do and it gives everyone a starting place/common ground. You also don’t have to rely on memory to remember how things used to work or used to not work and try to fit new cards into the old rules. Old cards automatically get updates to the new rules and they typically stay close to the intent of the card(the Mask being one of the largest exceptions). It’s not as big a burden to update the old cards into the new rules(which are typically far better than the old rules) as it would be to make the new cards fit into the old(bad) rules. I think you’d find, if you pried the top off all the places M:tG is played casually, that most casual players stick with the current rules because they’re the most clear and easiest to follow. I always looked forward to rules updates because I knew stupid stuff would be fixed in the next rules release(well after a point, when Tom Wylie was in charge of rules a rules release often created as many problems as it solved, but those days are, thankfully, pretty much long gone).**
Yes, face down, but VANILLA face down. THAT’S my whole problem with the new ruling. I like my face down creatures to still be the creature. That was the whole point of the ILLUSIONARY Mask. The ILLUSIONARY Mask created an ILLUSION, it didn’t change what the creature WAS, it just disguised it. Morph is different. Morph allows you turn a vanilla 2/2 into something else if you pay some cost. A face-down creature under the current rules is not really a threat. One can argue that it is a POTENTIAL threat, but it’s not a threat like an old face-down creature was. If you’re playing against old face-down creatures you are desperate and you may throw removal spells at all kinds of critters hoping to get the one whose hidden, but still present, power is aiding your opponent. In the new world they’re just Grey Ogres(or worse with the Mask they’re 1/1), not worthy of attention until your opponent reveals them, then ZAP, you trash them.
Surely you can see that face-down + effects is greater than face-down - effects?**
Sucked for you maybe 
Would have sucked even more to discover one of my face down creatures was Marton Stromgald and I’m coming across with 18 critters including my mana birds and you just KNOW I’ve got ways to protect him during the one fast-effect step between the time you discover he’s on the table and the time he leads my army to victory.
Enjoy,
Steven
Not looking hard enough. I’ve been on the MTG Paradise review team for a few months, I’ve published on Cutting Edge and I may have an article on StarCity soon. Hell, I even got onto the front page of The Dojo once.
Oh, you can probably get away with using my first name, son.
MOM!
[sub]snicker[/sub]
Glad to hear you’re doing well Dave, hope you’re still enjoying the game. I don’t hit the M:tG sites much anymore unless I’m looking for something specific. The online community just has a different focus for the most part than what I’m after in the hobby.
Enjoy,
Steven
The old mechanic of illusions sounds interesting (I’ve only restarted playing recently), but it sounds very easy to manipulate and maybe even cheat (with multiple face down creatures, who will remember what statements you made about each one?). With Morph, it’s streamlined, which is probably why it’s being implemented, as it makes it easier to adjudicate in tournies. But besides that, I find the whole mechanic to be quite fun, esp. with cards that have an effect that you can reveal after combat damage is dealt (like Haunted Cadaver, which can sacrifice itself after dealing damage to player to make player discard 3 cards). With the new set coming out, Legions, there will be cards that produce an effect as you morph them (flip them right side up), which adds even more craziness to the mix.
I like this legacy-child of the illusory days 
- Windwalker
Reading this thread has made me want to play Magic again. 
I started shortly after Antiquities and before Legends, my box of cards is around here somewhere… I stopped playing about 5 years ago because it quite frankly stopped being fun. Games that lasted over 3 rounds were a rarity when I finally gave it up and as it was mentioned I learned to play when you could win the game, down to your last few cards with a pumped up Scryb Sprite. :> My favorite way to kill somebody was poison, because nobody else I knew did it. I remember bitching about how Fallen Empires was such a suck expansion… I think the last cards I bought were for the Visions expansion. I don’t even know if I could still jump into a game and play, the rules have probably changed so much. Oh well.
I’ll be honest, I skipped a lot of these posts, so apologies if this has already been mentioned, but the best place I’ve found for single cards is www.cardshark.com. Cards are sold by individuals, and people are rated like eBay, so you know who to buy from and who to stay away from. Each person lists the price of their card and its condition.
Card Shark is good for letting you get a feel for what a card is really worth.
I’ve always used a Yahoo store whose name is escaping me at the moment for boxes. And there’s nothing more fun than sitting around opening up booster pack after booster pack. It’s like Christmas!
Oh, it’s www.collectandsave.com. That’s the store I’ve used in the past. I can’t remember if they’re fast, but I think it was that orders over $75 were free shipping, and their new release boxes were pretty cheap.
It was a rules nightmare, an absolute nightmare. BUT it was only a problem if you didn’t, or couldn’t, trust your opponent. If you’re friends and you’re playing for fun(and you’re not the Ferrett, but that’s a LONG story) then why would you lie about your face-down cards? You’ve got a big enough advantage as is. It was completely unplayable in tournaments for exactly these reasons, the competitive venue brought tons of opportunities, and more importantly, motives, to use the card to gain unfair advantages. Underpaying costs, ignoring Comes Into Play drawbacks or restrictions, skipping Upkeep costs, etc. Flat out misrepresenting what a card was wasn’t really the biggest problem because if a person said a card was one thing and it was actually another then it could be verified pretty easily on a case-by-case basis. The problem was that four turns after a card hits the table if it finally gets turned face-up and you suspect your opponent didn’t really have enough mana to cast it four turns ago you’ve got to prove that. Without a judge taking transcript-style notes on every action of the game that isn’t really possible.
I never attempted to play Illusionary Mask in tournament, but I DID(and still do) play it. I have NEVER underpaid or paid the wrong type of mana(irrelevant now because the effect of the card under it’s current wording filters colored mana costs to generic) or skipped an inconvenient drawback on a CiP ability or any of the other thousands of subtle ways someone could cheat with the Mask. My friends have no fear that I ever would. If they asked questions like “would it be legal to target creature X with Y spell?” then I answered honestly. If I had a creature on the table with a global effect that would impact a declaration they made then I stepped in to tell them that I had something which would affect them and how it would change thier options. This is how the Mask was intended to be played from its original design.
The changes to the mask in order to make it “playable” make it clear that the definition of “play” the makers of the game currently use doesn’t include trust between the players. Given the last few tournaments I’ve attended and the amount of cutthroat attitudes among the top tables(hey, play the game for nearly a decade and you acquire enough skill to earn a seat at the top tables even if you don’t play tournaments regularly) I can certainly see justification for this fear. I’m not saying they were WRONG to do what they did, but it’s a pretty clear indication that the game rules and cards are being designed for isn’t the “a couple friends sit down and play a few hands over lunch” anymore. The Mask wording was brought about because tournament players can’t trust each other and the officials, instead of trying to put in some way to ensure good faith on the part of players, simply took away the opportunities to abuse trust. No trust, no chance to abuse it. Good decision on their part, makes their lives a lot easier and makes it easier on tournament players to ensure they’re not being cheated.
I, and this is a personal rule, don’t play games with people I can’t trust. Games are supposed to be fun. It’s not fun to sit and worry about if the other guy is going to cheat you or not. If I see an Illusionary Mask(and I’m certainly not the only person in my playgroup who has them) hit the table then I know my job as a tactician just got a lot harder, but my TRUST in my friends keeps me from worrying that I’m going to be cheated. This type of scenario is pretty clearly NOT the norm in tournament play nor do the officials even seem to expect it. **
Even with the changes it’s still a powerful mechanic. Extremely powerful and I appreciate Morph, but it’s just not the same. Both mechanics are different. They may look similar on the surface, but they are still pretty vastly different. There are very different pros/cons for Morph versus Mask encompassing things like how CiP(Comes into Play) effects/costs are handled as well as static effects/activated effects and ongoing/upkeep costs. Plus with Morph(and the current Mask) the face-down card’s controller can look at and flip the card at any time. With the old Mask there were a handful of conditions under which the illusion would be dispelled(and ONLY those conditions would case a card to be turned face-up) and at one time(IIRC, the cobwebs get to me sometimes and I’m not sure if this was ever a real rule or just an arguement I had with someone once) even the creature’s controller wasn’t allowed to look at a card once it had been cast. :eek: Imagine a game with face-down critters and NEITHER player can look at them and BOTH players are going from memory as to what the critter is/can do.
It’s different now, not that that’s bad, but it’s different. The main problem I have is with the rules and card eratta seeming to pander towards tournament play as if it’s the “right” or “correct” way to play. IMHO trust SHOULD be a part of the game but I’m not enough of a fool to expect it. That’s why I’ve never played Mask in tournament and I’m not sure what I would have done if ever I came across it being played by someone I wasn’t sure I could trust. The re-wording of the Mask seems to be a pretty clear message that the inclusion of trust as a factor between players was a mistake and they don’t expect players to trust each other. As I mentioned earlier, I don’t play games with people I can’t trust as a matter of principle. I may compete with such people, but in that case it’s not a game, it’s a sport. A lot of people play M:tG as a sport and that’s great for them, but to me it’s a game and it’s supposed to be fun.
Enjoy,
Steven
Honestly, they haven’t. The big change is that spells now resolve one at a time and then you can respond further, instead of all resolving at once. Any play group can go through the changes with you, but they’re fairly minor.
If you stopped playing 5 years ago, you stopped when Urza’s Saga was out. That is now considered to be a mistake and the power level of the game is much more reasonable.
For one high-dollar card, I would buy your nephew the Library of Alexandria. I don’t know that I would buy a mox unless I could buy at least 2-4 more. If you’re only going to have one super-rare, mana-producing artifact, stick with the Black Lotus.
Of the remaining Power 9 cards, I would consider Wheel of Fortune to be a substitute for Ancestral Recall and Time Warp to be a substitute for Time Walk. Both the subs are much, much cheaper.
If you want to get your nephew a handful of older rares, I would suggest: Autumn Willow (Homelands), Maze of Ith (The Dark), Icy Manipulator (Ice Age), Sedge Troll (Revised), Serendib Efreet (Revised), Ernham Djinn (Arabian Nights or Chronicles), dual lands (Revised), or Mana Drain (don’t know).
If you just want to get him a bunch of cards, then buying a box is probably best.
And they’ll be easy to learn. The new rules are remarkably intuitive and if you fall in with some people who use the marked playmats as a learning aid(marked with areas to indicate spells currently on the stack as well as having a large red swatch to put the creatures in combat in during combat) as well as a good step-by-step turn sequence then a couple of hands should be enough to get you back in the swing of things. I’d recommend getting the newer cards for your first few games because some of the older cards have eratta you’d have to take into account and that would add a little overhead to both play by the new rules and look up the eratta for the old cards under the new rules.
Enjoy,
Steven
Here’s the crux of things. Of course the rules are written for tournaments. Because as long as there are tournaments, the tournaments need to have rules. But if you’re just playing casually, you and the people you play with are free to do whatever you want. If they’re as decent friendly good sports and you’re implying here, I don’t see why they wouldn’t allow you to play with the illusionary mask as it originally worked. And believe me, Richard Garfield and Randy Beuhler aren’t going to break into your house in bullet-proof vests and demand, at gunpoint, that you play the game with the current rules.
Also, I’m sure that the current rules for the mask were motivated 99% by a desire to not confuse people, intenetionally and/or unintentionally, particularly with respect to Morph, and only a fraction, if at all, by concerns about people cheating.
(Oh, and lest you think that Wizards only cares about hardcore tournament play, I have three words for you: Wheel and Deal. And then one more word for you, with punctuation: Kaboom!)
They will, and we do. But why should we HAVE to throw out the rules? Why have the rules, by design, excluded the trust which was originally so intrinsic to the game? Tournaments need rules, sure, but why can’t there be a base set of rules and additional restrictions which apply to tournament play? Unofficially there is, but the reality is that the game is so complex that players are either forced to flounder in uncertainty or adopt tournament rules. There is no casual ruleset which allows for things like trust between players, only a tournament ruleset which is a model for anal retentiveness.**
I’ll admit it was an extremely confusing card to play, for both players. Given the number of times they simply ignored cards which were confusing unless they were being played in tournaments(witness copy cards which didn’t have updated rules until long after 6th ed rules came out) I’m not certain their motivation for the changes to the Mask were simply for clarification.**
It’s far easier to throw a few “fun” cards into the mix instead of structuring the game to appeal to fun(with trust) play. The rules are really the heart of the game, the framework in which the cards behave and players interact. The current framework clearly excludes trust between players whereas the original framework explicitly included such trust. That’s my whole problem with it. It is a different type of play that the rules are written for than it was when I began. One of the primary things I enjoyed about the game was the trust and friendship. The shifting the rules and common play styles, with the red zone, rules about tapped cards having to be turned a full 90°, essentially leaving no room for possible misinterpretation by either side, misinterpretation which would be settled by a simple query if each side trusted the other, seems to be a pretty clear indication that trust isn’t expected to be part of the game anymore. Being so anal about how a person plays the game flies in the face of the idea of the game being intended to be played between friends for fun.
Enjoy,
Steven
I guess I still don’t agree with you about the relevance of trust. Out of zillions of magic cards and rulings, I can only think of two actual card rulings that seem related to issues of trust:
(1) Illusionary Mask, which is just one single card, as discussed already this thread. And honestly, I think their motive was far more to make Morph work, and to clean up the rules in general, than it was to stop casual players from cheating
(2) I believe that it used to be the case that Land Tax and its ilk didn’t require you to reveal what you had searched for. Now all such cards do.
As for whether there should be special tournament-only rules, there already are. In a tournament, if you present a 59-card deck, you get a game loss (or whatever). But honestly, what’s a better solution: to have a set of rules of the game, with an additional set that apply only to tournaments? Or to have a set or rules of the game that always apply, knowing that casual players can choose to do whatever the heck they want?
I guess I’m not so much saying that you’re wrong about anything, but that you seem to be reading an enormous amount of “they used to have all these rules that implied and allowed trust, and now they think we’re all cheating bastards and they need to make rules about everything because they don’t think we can trust each other, and the next thing you know they’ll be requiring that a DCI-sanctioned judge be present when we play for fun at lunch” into the fact that they changed the rules about Illusionary Mask, rules which were a hideous mess to begin with, WHILE ADDING MORPH, the most fun mechanic ever.
Oh, here’s another example: The rules require players to reveal all face-down cards played with morph at the end of the game. This rule, at least largely, is to prevent cheating, and thus could legitimately be argued to imply a lack of trust. So presumably they could have not made that a rule of the game of magic, and instead, the DCI could have made a sanctioned-tournament-only rule that morphs must be revealed. But would that be a better state for the game to be in? Is it that important to you that you be able to pick up your face down blistering firecat after a casual game and maintain the secret of what it was? Rules need to reflect the realities of tournaments, if there are tournaments, because tournaments are the situation in which it’s most important for rules to be clear and unambiguous.
Games have rules. Good games have rules that cover most or all contingencies, so that there are answers. Casual players are free to ignore those rules if they all agree. For instance, there is a rule in Monopoly that says that if Bob lands on Carol’s hotel, Carol has until two turns later to ask for the rent, and if she forgets to, she’s out of luck. I’m glad that that rule exists, because it means that if I’m playing monopoly in a serious fashion with competitive friends, the question of “oh, I forgot to ask you for the $2000 last turn, can I make you pay now?” has an answer. That answer, and that rule, might not be appropriate or relevant in all situations and all games. But it’s there.