Magic online has a few pros over OPT, MWS, Apprentice, and the other online play games. Built in rules so you can't cheat, official and supported. But... I dislike it, honestly. Not just the WAAAAAAAAAAT!? I HAVE TO REBUY MY COLLECTION?! factor... Just... Disapprove of Wizard for their attitudes considering this and the other shit. I remember when Apprentice was the only one out, some of the guys from Wizard put out some pretty favorable comments about it and the idea.

Fast forward a few years and suddenly Wizard is stomping and huffing that MWS and Apprentice are still around. So while I appreciate their concerns and what not, the 180 on that can kiss my dick and MTGO can die for all I care. That's fucking shit.

Also: I dislike that they removed the manaburn rules. :\ I forgot because I and everyone I know ignore that rule and just play like the old rules. It was a better fuckin system. Ya had to be careful and shit. Should we really suffer because newbies are complaining they cant understand a simple fuckin rule? D:

 

I used to play all through High School (some 6 years ago now) and I hadn't kept up with it at all after graduating. D: I can't even remember the name of the last set I played with (trample had just come out, I believe - Green decks were very common at the time (and slow to get started, but late game owned everything), and I enjoyed their quick deaths), but I remember I had an unbeatable Black deck (at my school, of course...I'm not a competitive player). The highest cost card I had was 6, and I only had one. Most everything else was 1 or 2 land, and I could get out so many zombies so quickly your head would spin.

We had a teacher who played competitively, and he helped me build it. I have the cards around here somewhere still, I'll have to dig them up. From what I can remember, it was a standard 40 card deck with 13 lands, 10 instants (no sorceries I can remember, unless the resurrection cards were - in which case it was probably a 6/4 instant/sorcery split), 2 enchantments, and 15 monsters. (Take this with a grain of salt...I haven't looked that the deck in probably 2 years.)

And now, fuck you all. I want to play again.

Edit:

How does one use this?

Edit2: This folder?

 

Limited does sound pretty cool, actually. I like the idea of having to make the most of an imperfect set of cards, rather than having a huge library to choose from (both because it seems to make it based less on who has the bigger wallet, and because it eliminates the fact that certain constructed decks are much better than others so you see the same stuff being played).

I've been watching a cool set of videos on this, actually. Two long time players get given a Deck Builder's Toolkit each, build a deck, and then battle.

Chris Woltereck builds his deck.

Evan Irwin opens then builds his deck.

The battle.

 

^Pretty much this.

 

Actually that reminds me, if you can find one near where you live Taure you should play in a few drafts, they are a lot of fun and a great way to collect a bunch of useful cards.

Sigh, on a sidenote, I hate you all for making me want to play again so badly.

 

I was hugely into this back as a kid and then as a teen, from Invasion through to the Onslaught cycle. They lost me with Mirrodin, and I wisely swore off incredibly geeky hobbies that do horrible, horrible things to the state of my finances.

At which point, I started playing Warhammer.

I don't think I could go back. I was last up-to-date on the state of the metagame eight fucking cycles ago, and the rules changes that raped the stack, combat damage distribution, and the concept of manaburn still make me shit blood in rage.

 

No. That's the program folder. The card scan collection is in this folder. Download and extract them all into one folder, so that your dir looks like this:



OPT uses different folder names, though. So you'll wanna go through this list and double check you've got them properly named.(I.E.: Renaming Unhinged from UNH to UH, etc.)

 

About five years ago, one of my friends got me and about seven other people into Magic again (I played it previously in Jr. High). All was good - until the guy who got us into it sank an obscene amount of money into a few custom decks.

No one else was willing to spend that much money on Magic, and he promptly kicked our asses nonstop. Thus, roughly about a month after we started playing, we all stopped because that douche ruined it for all of us.

 

Indeed. Had a guy like that with us. I might be one too. >_>

Also, to clarify my above post: You can extract the scans anywhere and point OPT to them. C:\fagshit\stuffhere works if you want, they just have to be in the one set per folder, with card names remaining unchanged. D:

 

MtG, good old times

I used to play A LOT, mostly casual games. I did play in a few official tournaments but that's it. We had a room booked in a local community house (or whatever it's called) and used to gather every friday evening or saturday... for something like 4-5 years. I think there was about 15 regular and 100+ faces who showed from time to time...

I started playing around tempest (I still remember the thrill of seeing Urza's Saga). Hell, I've got Urza's block completed, tagged and bagged. Altogether I have two shoe boxes full of those cards (I had a saying: it's better to drown my cash in MtG for fun than drown it in liquor and have a hungover in the morning). Those were geek times...

I had memorized all the bloody cards up till Mirrodin (as in picture, text, and more often than not, flavor text) and used to discuss new deckbuilds with my friends while commuting (the way people looked at us ). Nowdays I'd need some time to brush up my memory.

I used to play control decks: blue counter, blue/black control, red/black ponza, later it was white/blue Isochron's Scepter to name a few of them...

From time to time I play with my friends a multiplayer-deck-game:
You create a deck (about 300+ cards) without cards that target the deck itself (for example: Sage Owl). Each player has 50 life points. During attack phase you can attack multiple targets (as in 2 creatures attack player A and the rest attack player B).
Team multiplayer game (2v2, 3v3, 2v2v2): rules the same as above except for attack phase: allies can help during block phase with their army.

 

Fucking this, though Mirrodin was a load of fun to play as massively overpowered as it was (I should know, I played Skullclamp-Ravager Affinity before they banned pretty much every mainstay of that deck), Kamigawa was nifty, and Ravnica was just cool to play. And as for Time Spiral - well, fuck, I was an old-time player that loved the fluff and backstory, of course I was going to love that block (except for Future Sight - that set is still terrible, I'm sorry). And then, as I've already said, they pissed it all away.

I need to rant here, because I loved the MtG story and the game because of richly designed characters, a great magic system, and a genuine feeling of epicness that few other 'series' can match. That said, the Lorwyn and Shadowmoor blocks were unmitigated pieces of shit - there's no fucking contest there. It was the developers taking everything they should have learned from their mistakes in Onslaught block and throwing it out the fucking window, and after neutering good control in Constructed, I can't forgive them of those abortions of blocks. And Kithkin and whatever the hell they tried to do with Fairies can suck mknote's penis.

And by the time they finally tried to get their shit together, they released fucking Alera, changed the rarities to be reminiscent of fucking Yu-Gi-Oh and started a power creep. And they didn't stop, like they should have. Power creep worked in sets like the Urza block or Invasion or Onslaught because they were followed by blocks that were still interesting and remotely playable in Extended - I thought Wizards learned this. As it is, we got Zendikar, which didn't even both to tone down the power creep - if anything, they kicked it up a notch. Fan-fucking-tastic.

It doesn't help either (from at least the fluff side of things) that Scott McGough clearly hated writing anything in the Lorwyn block (after Time Spiral, they made him do THIS shit?), and the distaste comes out in his writing. He must have been elated when they took the Shadowmoor block books away from him - and they sucked. MASSIVELY. Doug Beyer tried to salvage things, but it's clear he doesn't know what the fuck he's really working with either, and there's no working knowledge of any of the massive storied history that MtG has. And let me absolutely clear regarding this: despite how relatively likable Jace is in the Planeswalker books, I hated what they did with planeswalkers, and compared to the plethora of great MtG characters over the years (Barrin, Volrath, Chainer, Gerrard, Urza, Laquatus, Karn, Phage, Yawgmoth and motherfucking Gix), he's not that special.

Right now, I'm torn whether or not to get back into the series seriously, at least in regards to the canon. As it is, we're back in Mirrodin in the next expansion, and I liked Mirrodin a fair bit. Herndon actually picked a great jump-off point for the set, and the fact that Phyrexia is back (yeah, Wizards, about time you figured out the best damned antagonists you ever had were those fuckers) is enough to draw my attention. But I really don't want to be disappointed again.

As for the card game... eh, when I have spare time, I'm trying to write, and from the looks of my threads, I haven't done a lot of that. I'd only play online (not through MTGO - I don't have time or money anymore for that experiment (sidenote: WHAT THE FUCK HAPPENED TO MANA BURN?)). Maybe through some of Vash's stuff, but I don't have the time I used to, particularly recently.

As for drafts... hell, I loved drafts, they were a blast, and when I managed to get a streamlined 40-card deck working, they were enormous fun. And as I got more cards, I tried a few other forms of drafting that Mark Gottlieb experimented with on the MtG website. Case in point: the Reject Rare draft, where each player donates fifty shitty rares to the draft and you draft with those.

Or there was another fun, if nail-biting, draft that I can never remember the name of, but when a card went to the graveyard or out of the game, you threw it in a blender and turned it on. God, those were tense games, let me tell you...

EDIT: on a side note, continuing some of the rage, is it just me, or is Wizards seemingly taking an enormous amount of pleasure pissing all over their best franchises? Magic's gone downhill (feel sorry for you, Taure, getting into it now instead of years ago), Dragonlance has been effectively abandoned, and Forgotten Realms? Yeah, we got the motherfucking Spellplague - the worst event to occur in fantasy literature since Terry Goodkind's Naked Empire. Way to fuck up a great universe, you jackasses.

And don't get me fucking started on 4th Edition D&D - it's not a fucking MMO, and stop treating us all like fucking idiots, Wizards! Yeah, you wanted to solve the Linear-Fighters/Quadratic-Wizards problem, but the truth is that this never WAS a problem if you had a competent DM who knew what the fuck he was dealing with when there wizards in the fucking party, and the fact that you dropped Open GL was a kick in the balls to every single fucking campaign setting with a brain in its head! And way to handle everything like adults, by kickbanning every single person who dared say there were problems with 4th Edition on your forums. You slimy dickless cunts.

 

I remember this one version we used to play that I can never remember the name of but the basic idea that instead of everyone using their own decks you would take this massive stack of rares/legendary/banned etc. etc. etc. cards and everyone took a regular hands worth at the start. The fun thing about it was that mana costs and shit were completely thrown out the window, you just played card after card of these utterly ridiculous burn the sky type cards to see who could nuke the other guys to kingdom come first. It was great, you'd get absolutely ridiculous shit on the field at the same time.

 

Very well said, Silens. Could not agree more with the direction of the MtG canon. And yeah, Jace is no where near as awesome as Volrath or Urza... Or even fucking Ixidor and Akroma. But for some reason, I just happened to like him a lot.

This, essentially. Read Below:

 

I think I know why exactly I stopped playing MtG now.

Goddamnit, people, this was a game that was once endorsed by MENSA, for fuck's sake! If you're not intelligent, you lose! I understand you want the game to grow, but do that by making the game INTERESTING, with a varied backstory, awesome characters, and challenging game mechanics, not accommodating the fuckskulls!

/privately wishes for the days of Mana Burn, Madness, Storm, and the days when Blue and Black control were viable play options

 

What are you talking about? I've seen plenty of Blue and Black control decks that just cock slap people. Its perfectly viable still.

 

XX) Perfectly Fine Part Of The Game

The Reality: This is elegant and easy to understand if you are not retarded. Unfortunately, 'retarded' just became our new target audience. Suck it, loyal, long-term customers!

The Fix: Dumb it the fuck down. If we can't explain it to a gorilla via sign language, it's fucking out.

The Details: Seriously, have you seen the amount of bank kiddy shit like Yugio and Pokemon have pulled down? Wizards likes.


Magic, D&D, World of Darkness, Warhammer - all of our tabletop staples are being dumbed down to try to appeal to the mummy-buy-me-this market. The smart geek crowd is being left by the wayside in favour of potentially deeper pockets, even though Gygax, Priestley, Rein-Hagen and Garfield all ascended from our ranks.

Fucking disgusting.

 

You know trying to defend wizards and more recent magic sets feels like defending Microsoft or Walmart. You're going to feel like a schmuck either way. That said, I'm coming from a place where I played back during Revised through Tempest before getting a girlfriend and forgetting about the giant money sucking vortex magic can become. Just got back into it a little over a year ago, so all those sets you know and remember I've had the pleasure of learning for the first time. Some have been great fun. Some not so much. I do know I'm in a minority in that I really liked the tribal stuff in Lorwyn and hybrids in Shadowmoor.

I'm not going to pretend there's not a power creep, but I really think they've gotten a lot better at designing and streamlining new sets and blocks. In the days of Urza and Mirrodin they made some ridiculously broken cards (freaking Memory Jar had to be banned before the set came out). More recently though it seems they know how to avoid making *too* powerful cards. Sometimes that means the base quality or power level is higher than it was ten years ago.

That and looking at it more historically, they really have been evolving and changing the game constantly. One long dead theme that I'm excited to see back is that Poison Counters are coming back with Scars of Mirrodin.

And yah, mana burn is toast. Boo fucking hoo. It very rarely even had an affect on the game. I know a whole lot more people were pissed that they removed damage from the stack. Still, if it matters that much to you then just play by your own house rules.

It'd be a lot more boring if the best cards nine years ago were still the best cards today.

 

"If you don't like the official rules of the hobby, just turn into an insular, elitist shut-in with the rest of your circle of equally experienced and bitter friends, and never have an infusion of fresh blood because every newbie is learning these new, retarded rules."

Fantastic advice, nonjon.

MtG isn't like tabletop RPGs, where if you don't like the new edition the old rulebooks are just as usable and easy to introduce others to. MtG is a constantly-evolving, long-term hobby. Where's an analogy... ah, yes. Imagine you're a football fan, you like playing it with your friends, you like playing in local tournaments sponsored by the National Football Club or whatever, and you like hearing about and discussing the latest news in the metagame. Then they change the rules so that each goal is worth one and field goals have been removed along with a dozen other changes, to 'streamline' the game and to 'avoid confusion'.

And then, when you complain, people tell you WELL IF YOU DON'T LIKE IT PLAY BY THE OLD RULES! Casual games with your likeminded friends is only a single fucking facet of the hobby, and the rest of it has been made stupider to attract a stupider crowd. And there's nothing you can do. You can live with the new, stupid rules, or you can cut yourself off from the wider community.

Not ideal, this.



(Jesus Christ, nonjon, don't you know better than to get in the middle of a group of tabletop neckbeards griping about how the old ways were better and try to introduce logic to the discussion?)

 

Eh, I don't understand all the hate on. I mean, just accept it and move on. The removal of mana burn and damage from the stack made things more intuitive for the average person and opened the game to fresh blood. The new sets are entertaining, and they make the average game more exciting. There is a lot less slow buildup and a lot more frantic spell slinging. Something I'm all for.

 

One of my friends, who is an avid MtG/D&D player, had recently been bitching about these changes every chance he gets.

He's pretty much the only person I ever troll for kicks, so I tend to go on and on about how it's a wise choice because it will open the game to a wider audience and blah blah blah (insert retarded argument here).

His ensuing rage always makes me laugh.

But seriously, I tried out MtG for a while. They're not going to attract any God damn eleven year olds by dumbing down the rules. Kids played Yugioh because it was on TV and they didn't know better. Alienating their entire fan base isn't going to suddenly make this game more popular.

And lets pray to God that they don't try to make an anime of the card game.