Into The Magic Circle
June 23, 2009 by Robert
Filed under Board Game Articles
Magic: The Gathering.
Somehow, the game managed to pass me by. When the game was launched, back in the early nineties, it coincided with the first bloom of my interest in girls. I was a late starter. I was past sixteen before it even registered that I was a pupil of a school (All Saints Secondary School in Glasgow, fact fans/stalkers) where every girl had a thing for tiny skirts and thigh-high black socks. All of a sudden, there was only one thing I wanted to tap, and it wasn’t a Land Card. Tap? Get it? Just getting the obvious jokes out of the way early doors. (Oh, by the way, I don’t want anyone thinking I was some gigolo type in school. I lost my virginity at 19. A late starter, I told you.)
By that age, my board game buying had slowed. I remember buying the Army of Darkness board game. One of my last purchases before video games stole me away. It was an awful thing. Terrible cheap components. A cash-in designed to exploit young guys like me who would buy anything with Bruce Campbell on the front. It was one of the last straws. Girls and music and video games had lit a fire in me. Board games and pen and paper RPGs? They’d just become so unsexy.
Magic never had a chance. I think the first time I saw people play Magic was in a little shop upstairs in DeCourcy’s Arcade in Glasgow’s Cresswell Lane. I was in buying Funkadelic and Parliament CDs. And there, in the corner, were guys my age sitting at tables playing cards. I actually remember asking someone what was going on.
Me: So what’s the script here?
Young guy: They’re playing Magic.
Me: They’re playing what?
Young guy: Magic. It’s a card battle game.
Me: Is it?
And with that “Is it?” I remember that I was chuckling on the inside. Guys my age playing “card battle games”? When there was funk to listen to and girls to pursue? I was a traitor to the cause back then. Going through that “put away childish things” phase. Pretending I wasn’t the total geek you see before you today.
And so it went on. Fleeting glimpses of Magic: The Gathering matches in comic shops. Overheard discussions of the latest cards in video game shops. I rolled my eyes every time. And yet I’d never even held a Magic card in my hand, never mind knew what the game was or how it played.
Until this weekend just past.
I was in a Borders book shop on Saturday. My girlfriend was browsing, looking for a Father’s Day gift. I was drawn to the SALE section, as ever. And there, alongside some terrible celebrity cookery books and overpriced wooden bookmarks, was Magic. Booster packs. Loads of them. Reduced from two quid fifty to a pound a pop.
A pound. Only a pound. And my days of shameful eye-rolling at things that were actually aimed at people like me were long behind me.
I picked up a booster pack. I only knew it was a booster pack because it said BOOSTER PACK on the front. The trouble was… it didn’t say anything else. Sure, it had a name on it – this one was MAGIC: THE GATHERING – LORWYN BOOSTER PACK. Whatever the hell that is. But it didn’t tell me anything. It didn’t tell me what I needed to play. It didn’t tell me whether it was an expansion thing or a main game thing or if you could mix the boosters or how many boosters were needed to play a game or anything or anything or ANYTHING. But a pound a pack is a bargain, right?
I made a phone call. Phoned Kenny, asked him to do some Googling for me. “Find out if you can mix all the boosters, if you can use different types together.” I rang him back five minutes later. It was a tentative yes. Good enough for me. A pound a pack is a bargain, right? Sure. Of course it is.
I bought 26 packs. The guy behind the counter looked at me with an “Is it?” in his eyes.
Home, with almost 300 cards to open and sort through. Excited. Seriously excited. People like us, board gamers, geeks, nerds, we love opening shit, right? I open one pack. It’s all jibber-jabber. I haven’t a clue what I’m looking at. Lovely art, though.
I look at what’s written on the card. Sure. A Simic Guildmage. We all know what that is, right? A little bit of panic creeps in. I have no idea what I’ve just spent almost thirty quid on.
Then I remember that months ago I picked up a Magic starter set thing when I saw that on sale. I dig it out. There’ll be rules inside, right? There is. A big poster-sized sheet. I spread the thing on the table. I scan the rules. Seems simple enough. I check through the cards that come with the starter pack.
“ENOUGH CARDS TO GET YOU STARTED!” it says. And then casually mentions that there’s only really enough for two smaller-sized limited starter decks, fella. And those decks aren’t actually the proper things at all. Oh, and you’ll have to get out and buy more to make proper decks and stuff, fella. But, yeah, in the meantime “ENOUGH CARDS TO GET YOU STARTED!” Kind of.
I read about Land Cards. You need to tap land cards to cast spells and summon creatures. You need to play and tap Land Cards. Land Cards seem to be the key. I check how many I have.
I have 24 Land Cards. I have 26 pounds worth of booster packs. Almost 300 cards. And only 24 Land Cards. Now, when you bear in mind that my original plan was to buy all these cheap cards and then have fun constructing a couple of good decks for myself and my girlfriend to play with, this Land Card thing becomes a total bastard.
I’m confused again. I re-read the rules. How was I to know you need Land Cards aplenty before you can play the game properly? Is it so wrong to assume that if you buy HUNDREDS of cards you might be able to…you know…PLAY THE FUCKING GAME?
This is me realising I'm light on Land Cards
Have no sympathy for me, though. A man should always take care to inform himself before entering a new world. I didn’t do that, and I paid the price. And it’s karma, for all those times I rolled my eyes.
The game itself? I feel like I have a handle on how it works. Not by playing with the actual cards, of course. (Because, and you may have heard this story, I don’t have enough Land Cards to make decent decks.) But by playing the trial version of the recently released Magic: The Gathering – Duels of the Planeswalkers Xbox Live Arcade game. There’s a tutorial in there, and I’ve let it lead me through the basics. And you know what? It looks like Magic might actually be a wonderful game.
It just isn’t an easy game to start. It feels like a world that’s difficult to force your way into. It’s difficult to know what to buy first, or how to tailor your purchases so that you have enough game to be getting on with. I’ve often heard people saying the game’s a money pit. And I’ve always thought “yeah, you just have no self-control.” And yet here I am, with all these lovely cards, and no way to play without shelling out more cash for a couple of theme decks or starter packs or-
And see? There we go again. I don’t actually know what my next step is. I don’t actually know what I’m doing yet. I’m mystified. Baffled. Worried.
Worried because last night I opened a pack and a beautiful shiny thing came out. A shiny foil card. A forspecial. I held it under a lamp and watched it shimmer. For a moment, it seemed to have just as much appeal as any funk CD or thigh-high sock. It was beautiful. Magical. And I knew I wanted more.
What can I tell you? I’m a late starter.
I’ve got a couple of friends are massively into Magic. They’ve travelled to enter national competitions, and everything. One’s a bit of a kleptomaniac. He’s spent all his money on speciffic cards from ebay, a couple of times before. He’s got no fucking sense, though. I’m sure if you’re level-headed enough, there’s not too much risk of spending ridiculous levels of money on it.
I can totally relate to the mention of your “Is it?” in school. I remember being a complete fucking hypocrite arse when I was in school. In my mind, playing Magic made you the worst kind of sweaty, stinking, Star Trek: The Next Generation loving geek, while playing the Pokemon TGC meant you were okay, because it was “in”. I feel like going back to everyone I ignored or took the piss out of in school, and appologising.
I actually never got into Magic The Gathering, but other card battle games did suck me in. When I was younger I did get into the whole Pokemon Card Game, Then when I was a little bit older I went into Yu-Gi-Oh.
Yu-Gi-Oh is a kind of copy of Magic The Gathering from what I have heard, but looking at Magic and Then looking at Yu-Gi-Oh, yu-gi-oh is so much better to get into and easy enough to learn.
I quite like these card games, but the problem is. You have to have someone else with it as well(not like board games where you can just bring it around someones house and you can all play it) which means you have to choose your card game carefully otherwise you may find that its one of the less popular ones and your stuck there with cards you cannot play.
Wow, thats so cheap! You could always proxy the land.. if you buy some deck protectors you can put a bit of paper in with some cards you don’t like that says “forest” for now. You can get by with 22 land for most decks, so its not THAT bad…
A few gaming shops over here sell land in bulk for quite cheap, I reckon you’d be able to pick up however much you wanted fairly easily.
I’ve been playing MtG for about 7 years now and, yeah, money pit. Although, it really only gets crazy bad when you:
A. Get into competitive MtG (you need to fork out much $$$ for the required kit to even vaguely compete!)
B. Want to trounce all your more thrifty-minded friends with various forbidden magics and ridiculously mean/gigantic monsters.
C. Are a sucker for thematic shenanigans. For example, I maintain a Golem/artifact based deck which is, to be honest, terrible! But it has….GOLEMS.
All in all, once you get some of the abstract rules concepts down (ie. ‘The Stack’), MtG can be a damn fun time for any gaming group!
What was the name of the card game where you had to scratch n sniff (well at least scratch) different bits thing to see the card attributes?
From a recommendation point of view at the other end of the scale is Fluxx.
Totally accessible. Different every time. Zombies booster pack. The ace up the sleeve though is the fact anyone can join in at any time. No snooty ‘we need to finish this game first’ crap – Fire in mate, grab a card (win 2 seconds later but we’ll leave that as its grounds for murder).
Games can last 10 seconds or 4 hours. It desn’t waste any time setting up. As the rules are made up and changed as you go along.
I luurve it.
Draft tournaments are a good idea if you’re ever after new cards in future. What happens is each player buys three booster packs, opens the first, chooses one card to keep and passes the rest to the player on their left. Then you repeat with the second and third packs once all the cards from the first set of packs are taken. You build a deck using only the cards you’ve got from the draft and whatever lands you need (if a game shop is hosting the draft, they’ll usually lend you the lands).
It’s handy because it lets you choose which kind of cards you want to buy instead of buying blind. And since everyone is playing with decks they’ve made with cards bought on the day, you don’t have to have spent thousands of pounds on cards to be in with a chance.
The new Live Arcade Magic game turned out to be a pretty great way to introduce yourself to Magic. You’re forced to use set decks, so there’s none of the initial confusion of working out how the hell you’re supposed to put one together. Winning games unlocks new cards locked to the deck you’re using, so you can tweak
those core decks with extra cards. It’s a little simpler to play than the real thing too.
Of course, once you get into a CCG, half the fun is cooking up your own decks and strategies. Magic Online is a frightening thing, especially when new booster packs are just a few clicks away.
UPDATE:
A lovely lad sent me a load of Land Cards. (Cheers midi)
I bought Louise a starter pack for her birthday.
I bought Kenny a starter pack just out of kindness.
I bought loads more cards.
Help.
In my experience, the easiest way out of any addiction is to find a more costly and addictive one. You’re fucked, mate.
Glad you got the land ok Rab. If you need any help, you’ve got my details. Magic is a very very very expensive hobby. I’m lucky to have played is some amazing places around the world and must have somewhere approaching 100k cards by now.
It’s such a deep game. I’ve never found anything which comes anywhere near as close in all my (limited experience).
Lots of love,
midi
If you can duck and weave past the collecting aspects, it’s a superb game. Try buying the pre-assembled theme decks and play those; that’s what I do – it’s my eldest daughter’s favourite game. If you want to try deck construction, buy some boosters on top of those; but you don’t have to, you can stop there. The complete set of those decks, for each new release, is about the same cost as a boardgame, and has more playability than most. Playing the odds and the market to assemble tournament standard decks is what will kill you.
Magic was heavily influenced at the outset by Cosmic Encounter – each card breaks the rules, or creates loopholes in the rules of the game. If you love CE, you should be able to love MTG, and it’s possible to play it for fun without burning a fortune.
I remember getting a starter deck for Christmas, and off the bat comes a mighty Leviathan (10/10, trample)! I was such a neophyte I didn’t figure the card was actually crap (huge summoning cost, enters game tapped, must sacrifice TWO islands to untap, ALWAYS TAPS next maintenance phase). Yet I always tried to put it into my combat deck. And always I lost.
Good times, good times.