Yeah, I don’t think that those tournaments were running when I was playing. I know that there were SOME tournaments going, and I attended a few, but we had to bring our own cards. And we had to walk uphill both ways to get there.
I think that I quit playing when the Arabian Nights came out, might have been later. I know I bought a few booster packs after the Arabian Nights, just to see what was out there…but most of the people I’d played with had moved out of town.
But yeah, that makes a lot of sense as a business decision. Get someone into the hobby, and you’ve got a repeat customer, who will buy the things you make money on.
Oh, and the new mechanics don’t have to be an either-or decision on WotC’s part. Even if keeping the game interesting is their primary motive, I can’t imagine that they view the disabling of a competing product as a bad side-effect.
Actually, on that subject, some years back I was in Washington, and noticed that the hotel I was staying at was just down the block from WotC headquarters, and stopped in to take a look. They gave me free cards there, too.
I’ve been watching a lot of cube video/streams and am enjoying it immensely. However, it’s pretty significantly -EV which matters to someone like me. Given more time and financial resources, I would probably be cubing my brains out right now.
No. “Cubing” is assembling and playing with a collection of individual cards (usually by trading or buying single cards) that you think play together well, using them and them only (with basic lands, of course) to play limited games (as defined above by MHaye, except that there’s no entry fee and instead of opening booster packs to get semi-randomized cards, you use the same number of cards from the cube).
I have a Cube of about 600 unique cards shuffled into more or less random order. It lets my friends and I play limited games in an environment whose power level and typical strategies are precisely controlled to be the kind that we like to play (e.g. with vs. without the most powerful of powerful cards; lots of fast, aggressive cards vs. lots of slow, powerful flashy cards; plenty of counterspells vs. very few.)
Magic Online has its own cube players can use, simulating an environment like the one most paper Magic cubes provide with lots of powerful cards from throughout the game’s history.
I wouldn’t recommend trying to build a cube to fairly new players or those without a fairly large group to play with as it can get expensive, (especially if you’re trying to assembly very high power cards) requires a good deal of familiarity with cards from ever era of the game’s history and is most fun if you have a lot of people to play with.
Forgive the double post; I missed the edit window.
Regarding the thread’s original question, I’d recommend against Duel Decks if either player is pretty new to the game. They tend to have lots of cards with individual mechanics to learn as well of lots of different cards to learn. Just looking at the most recent (Venser vs. Koth) you’d have flash, scry, hybrid mana, shroud, landfall, reach, landcycling, equip and flashback (in addition to some of the more common ones like flying, haste and first strike) to learn. Most of them are explained on the cars that use them, but it’s still a lot to read until you start to remember what each keyword means and will slow down early games and add confusion. If you get a couple of Intro Packs from the same set, you’ll probably only have three or four new keywords to get familiar with as you learn. I personally like Core Set intro packs for teaching the game as the cards tend to be a little simpler with primarilly recurring mechanics (like the abovementioned flying) and the core sets tend to have a more classic fantasy feal to them (with more elves, dragons and merfolk and fewer nacatls, malignuses and vedalkens).
All that being said, Intro Packs from any set (or sets) are good for new (or newer) players and even Duel Decks can work with a little extra patience.
