Have you considered trying Magic Online? I started paper Magic in 1994, tried MTGO in 2003, sold all my paper in 2007 and never looked back. You could acquire most of those cards for pennies and play any time of day. Of the most recent deck you posted, Scute Mob is around 1.50, and Bloodbraids are 2.50. Everything else can be had for a couple bucks total.
It takes $10 to get started, but that gets you a couple of pre-con decks, and unopened booster pack, and two tickets that are worth a dollar each. Not a bad value at all.
edit: and if you do go this route, hit me up. I’m usually logged in as either JSexton or Guffman, and I’ve got tons of extra commons and uncommons that I’d be happy to get you started with. Offer good to any Doper.
I like this more than the other one, the other one seemed to accelerate into nothing. You might have trouble consistantly activating the Zektar and Scute mob. One fun card you might want to try is Bazaar trader. When you Act of treason one of their creatures, you can activate the Bazaar trader to give the treasonous creature to yourself. Then you don’t need to give it back at the end of turn. Normally I count borderposts as land, but with the Scute mob, you might not want to.
One of my friends in our playgroup is a big fan of playing online. He goes by kronoskeeper and mostly drafts. He’s one of our newest members and one of our bigger Spikes. I can still beat him more than half the time, but it’s getting hard. Given that I have a fourteen year experience advantage, he’s probably going to surpass my skill level pretty soon.
I have a MTGO account that I use every once in a blue moon and I mostly play pauper(or singleton) formats because I’m too cheap to shell out full price for digital cards. I bought a few common sets and invested ~60 in my online collection, including a handful of tix, but have done almost nothing with it. The play experience doesn’t do much for me. I’m more likely to play Apprentice(probably showing my age here) or something I can mock up experimental decks in without shelling out money.
I’m almost never online, but if you find OAODOCTB that’s me. Kris plays almost every night though.
Magic Workstation is where it’s at now. Not only that, with Magic Workstation you can play in online tournaments like e-league, possibly even in e-league, I forget what the online tournament series is called now-a-days.
The real point of me posting here is to ask a question though:
Fundamentally I’m an old-school player with a decent feel for cards printed up to about June 2004. I stopped collecting then for about a year, because I unexpectedly acquired a girlfriend…
I got back in after she asked me to teach her, but haven’t had the money to support a buying habit since, so I’m not up to large swathes of recent cards. The last constructed tournament I played in was the UK National Vintage Championship 2003.
(Yes, Vintage. Broken cards and all.)
I wonder what attendance would be like if they ran a Vintage GP?
A Vintage grand prix would have a very dismal attendance, even if it were held in Europe where there is a higher concentration of power cards.
The grand prix in Columbus is a Legacy tournament, Legacy being the gap between Vintage and Extended. Though you’re still very likely to need cards from after 2004. The fetchland series being tournament stapes in the formats they’re legal in and all.
Part of the reason for my thought was that it would give WotC a sense of how many Vintage players are out there. Also, it would have to be a US GP, not Europe, because the majority of the power cards are in the States, particularly the NE and California regions, and the player base s in those areas are likely to be higher.
Given the number of records set by Legacy GPs - Madrid had 2,200 players earlier this year - I think they’re underserving the Eternal format market.
You know what format I’d really love to see? One limited not by the age of the cards, but by their market value (presumably, the tournament would have to be sponsored by one of the online card retailers). You could have different limits, for different “weight classes”, so you’d have one winner in, say, the “under $25 deck” category, another in the “under $100”, and another for “under $500”, or whatever. The breakdown of cards could be anything you wanted, as long as the total value of the deck was under the limit.
I see this as having several advantages:
1: It would open up tournament play to budget players, since it’d be cheap to assemble a competitive deck for the lower categories.
2: It would force creativity in deck-building, since any deck that got copied too much, the key cards in it would increase in demand and therefore in market value.
3: It would open up all the fun classic cards for play, while still keeping out (or at least keeping in check) the most broken cards.
4: (Almost) all cards would be useful, since using cheap cards would give you more room in your budget for a few really good ones. All of those cards that are “Good… for a common” could be properly appreciated.
Oh ok. The cities I listed in my last post are the only “official” large-scale tournaments that I know of.
Starcitygames.com holds tournaments now and again with large 1st place prizes, but I think they already did one in Los Angeles so Columbus/Portland/Nashville might be your best bets to meet any other Dopers.
Given that I have a fourteen year experience advantage, he’s probably going to surpass my skill level pretty soon.