You know how some parents stop their children from playing games like Dungeons and Dragons and Magic: the Gathering because of their moral beliefs?
Well, when I was about nine or ten and just getting into Magic my mom created what was, looking back, probably a rule no other parent had ever set for their game-obsessed child: I was allowed to play Magic, but not allowed to use any black cards.
This did not upset me so much; I was already a tree-hugging do-gooder and wanted my decks to represent the forces of good, or at least not the forces of evil. But it only just hit me what an odd rule that was. The vast majority of parents would either think MTG is youth-corrupting “garbage” and demand that their children not play or just not care at all. But my mom had no problem with me playing, she just didn’t want me to play with the particularly evil black mana.
Blue is more conniving, controlling, and tactical than Black, but their ultimate motives are better. Black simply wants to harm life and is full of cruelty. Blue is more like a tricky businessman: he may not be good, but he’s not out there strictly to cause suffering.
Red is indeed an evil color, but they’re not as sadistic as Black - they like fighting and burning things more than specifically causing pain and agony.
I can’t believe I just typed this out. I haven’t played Magic in years. Do gamers really ever grow beyond it?
I started playing Magic soon after it came out, but I was in my late 20s at the time. I played mostly Blue or Green decks.
I remember going to a tournament at the local high school, and playing against some high-school kids. My first opponent was a very Goth-looking young man, whom you might have expected would be playing a Black deck. Nope, he had a White angel deck. My next opponent was a preppie. He, of course, was playing Black.
Really, I’ve found most people like to play the color that happened to be the color of their first power card. I got a Nightmare in a pack very early on (3rd Edition Revised), soon after I got a Sengir Vampire and a Demonic Tutor.
My mother had no objections because she had faith in my ability to distinguish fantasy from reality.
I hated playing against the blue Stasis and Counterspell decks that I went out and made one myself! My thing was that I wanted to frustrate people, so I countered everything and stole their creatures with Control Magic whenever I could. It was a slow deck so it wasn’t too good, but it let me beat up other average decks.
My favorite was a deck I would have hated playing against: Land Destruction. I think it was mostly red, with a bit of black in there. 4 Strip Mines, Fissure, Pillage, Dingus Egg, that Anhk thing…damn I was a bastard
I also tried to make a weenie creatures deck with Black but I couldn’t afford 4 Bad Moons so that never worked out.
My favorite was my Asshole deck, black and blue. Blue was mostly there for counters. Black had the nettling imp, the vampire, the assassin, terror, and a few other relevant cards. I also had an icy manipulator.
The point of the deck was that every creature my opponent got out would have something awful happen to them. I’d icy manipulate them and sic the assassin or imp on them, I’d sic the imp and then the assassin on them, or I’d just flat-out terrify them. If I got out two of my combo cards, every one of their rounds I’d kill one creature off of theirs with no damage to myself; and once they had no creatures, I’d deal 1 point of damage per one of my creatures to them.
It was a nasty deck, really irritating to play against.
Blue was always my favorite theoretical deck - that is, if I had all the cards I wanted, Blue would have kicked ass. It was still fun to play, but since it lent itself so well to combos, it wasn’t as adaptable to my relatively meager supply of cards. So I ended up playing red/green a lot - weenies and lightning bolts, yes please!
I’ve never been all that fond of black, but that might be partly because I never really had very good black cards. In the first starter packs I got, all the best cards were green, but I only had four Forests (kind of makes it hard to actually get a Force of Nature out), so I unwisely traded away the good green cards, instead of just getting more forests.
That was the sort of deck I played a lot, though I also did a Merfolk version of that, including the cards that made opponents’ lands into islands for the islandwalking. My friends generally considered me to be a PITA to play against.
Never got into Magic. But as a youth I was a big wargamer (still am). I guess the equivalent would have been if my mother had forbidden me to play the German side in any WWII games.
