A comment on Magic Online: While there are occasional buggy cards/game states, they are fairly rare anymore. When they do occur, it’s usually an odd corner-case, ie, not something likely to show up unless you’re really probing for bizarre interactions. And if you lose a tournament match due to a bug like that, they’re pretty good about giving a refund. The actual game play is very nice (if you can get to it).
The problem with MTGO is that the servers really cannot handle the load. They’ve gone through several rewrites of the basic client-server interaction, but they’ve never (apparently) got someone who really knows what he’s doing. Crashing servers, incredibly laggy gameplay when lots of people are on, events that go down and need to be refunded, etc. are all pretty standard. I gave up on Magic Online, even though I’ve got $100s or maybe even $1000 of cards online because, while I have no problem paying good money to play magic, I spend so damned much time not playing magic because the software is implemented so poorly. It’s one of the worst software products I’ve ever used, and it’s been getting progressively worse over the years, not better. I played it back in the original beta, and it used to be much more stable.
From the time I spent playing online, $100 wasn’t nearly enough to build a decent deck. I suppose since you’re a regular non-online player it’ll be easier for you knowing the cards and which ones you want (you can trade tix for them instead of buying boosters). For me, like most online games, it suffers from the “other people have too much time/money” problem. Other players are just too awesome and I can’t have fun getting spanked constantly.
MtG was a lot more fun when I played with friends in high school and college.
None of my friends play it. I would know of nowhere to go for a game.
I don’t really want to plunk money down for cards if I can help it. I assume that I can’t help it and some way, some how, I’ll have to plunk money down for cards, but if there’s a piece of software to be bought and updates done to it for new card releases, that’s pretty much what I’m looking for.
I’ve seriously considered building a windows 98 virtual machine on a partition of my 2k box to play the Microprose game. It had a world you could roam around in and you could play against the computer. Yea, it wasn’t a very strong player, but it was interesting and you could make it play whatever deck you wanted to. If you can still run it, it was a pretty good way to get your fix without dealing with buying individual cards or having to deal with other players too much. And two people with it can still play(albeit under 5th ed rules) via direct TCP connection.
I played from Fallen Empires up to Tempest, briefly resurged around Urza’s Saga, then quit for years, finally getting back into the game with the retro-sets Coldsnap and Time Spiral. (The Dominaria setting was always one of the things I enjoyed, and its return sucked me back in.)
Once the time Spiral block was done, I lost interest again, though. Plus most of the local players are competitive dicks.
So now I’m planning to sell all my cards. There’s supposedly going to be a local game shop opening this year, I’m sure they’ll be able to use some backstock. I have a lovely Black Lotus from Unlimited in near-mint shape.
MTG Battlegrounds wasn’t well received by the public, I’m imagining they’d be a bit scared to make another game for a while. Plus, everyone willing to spend money on playing MTG on the computer has MTG Online. If you get a game that gives you all the cards for $39.99 and gives you an RPG style interface to play with as well, you’d be taking away a lot of MTGO money.
I wouldn’t even want an RPG interface. Just access to the cards (they can charge a set dollar amount for a full set of cards and then have a decreasing price for each copy afterwards, or even set up a market system for the cards), a way to build decks, test decks, and then play against people online.
Best bet is to sell the Lotus it to an individual, most shops don’t do a good trade in the high-end cards. In fact I’ve heard the Star City Power 9 tournaments were started because they weren’t moving their P9 stock and needed a way to increase Vintage sales of the mid-level stuff. I’ve got a couple friends who own a shop and as often as not they end up trading a high-end card for a LOT of smaller stuff they can move easily. It’s about cash flow, not about value of stock on hand. eBay may be your best bet, but if it’s really in great condition, consider having it PSA graded.
I think there is a combination of factors. WotC got pretty badly burned in their foray with Microprose, not only did they go through some trouble during development and nearly derail the project, but the game wasn’t what WotC hoped and it didn’t generate nearly the revenue they wanted. They brought it in-house with MTGO and changed the revenue model.
The broader answer is that there is considerable demand for a game such as you describe and several independent developers have picked up the pieces after Microprose left and have implemented more cards and released a new version in 2005(a user mod) which is now supported by a community of developers at Slightly Magic.net. This is an unauthorized version of the game, and if it ever really takes off will probably get nasty Cease and Desist letters from WotC.
Or maybe they’ll announce a new MtG game today which may fit your desires. Due out in two weeks on Xbox 360 and Xbox live. Looks like the cards available will be pretty limited, but some additional cards will be unlockable and it will have an AI you can play against in single-player mode.