Magic: The Gathering - what I've learned so far

Serra Angel by Greg Staples, 2013

Through most of the past year,  I've been playing Magic The Gathering at an increasing rate.  It's come to occupy a significant portion of my mind and a good chunk of my spare cash as well.  It's a habit pushing addiction, but I love it.

I first started playing Magic in 1994, with the Revised Edition.  I was in Jr .High, and I had a pretty good pool of peers to play against during lunch hour.  Back then, my cash flow was very limited, as were the cash flows of my peers.  We played with the few cards we had, and we were competitive, but not on a professional level.

I was pretty serious about it while I was in school, but eventually I dumped all my cards except three or four decks*.  My peer group shifted after high school, and I didn't find I was playing  much, if any Magic.  Every few years, my friends Ramsden and Ghost would break their cards back out, and we'd buy a few packs whatever set was out at the time, and then marvel at all the changes that had happened between sets.  Then, about 9 months ago, those two split an entire box of Magic 2013, and asked me to play.  I had no cards, but my neighborhood Target did!  So I rushed to catch up, purchasing starter kits and packs when I would buy my toothpaste and socks.  

This latest run is the deepest I've ever gone in Magic since the original round of play.  Deeper, in fact, since the game itself is deeper, and the number of informational resources are greater.  And the game has changed a great deal.  I've learned a lot, and it is to my great pleasure that I will attempt to explain what I've learned, and outline what I hope for from the future of Magic: The Gathering and me. 

It has been tough leaping over dozens of sets and thousands of cards into the modern era of Magic, but I think I've done a pretty good job.  My progression has been aided by regular play, a podcast called Limited Resources and Magic Online.  Magic Online was my first taste of playing magic against anybody but my two friends who got me back into it.  Limited Resources is a fantastic podcast for people who love the game, and consistent play with Ghost and Ramsden has facilitated much learning and conversation about the game, past and present.  Through the last few months, key vocabulary words have changed from obscure to well understood.  I'd like to talk about a few of these today, and then get into further detail in a forthcoming series of posts.

Serra Angel by Douglas Schuler, 1994

Format:
Because of the incredible wealth of magic cards out there,  Wizards of the Coast has begun to group them into different categories, called Format.  There are a bunch of formats, but ones I'm most interested are Constructed, Limited, Modern, Standard, Singleton, Draft and Sealed, Cube.  You know, not many.  Today I just want to talk about Constructed and Limited, but other terms may pop up along the way.   

Constructed:
Constructed is the form of Magic I have always played.  You have your collection, and so do the other players.  You go through ALL of your cards (give or take) and construct a deck out of them, and play them against one another.  For years, this was the only form of Magic I knew about, and it was tough for me to think of magic in any other way.

Within Constructed, there are other forms, such as Modern, Legacy and Standard.  Legacy allows you to use all of your cards from any time period (minus those on the restricted or banned lists).   Modern is a collection of all the Magic cards after a certain point in time.  (coincidentally, Modern seems to start shortly after I stopped collecting originally.) Standard is constructed only of cards released in the last year or two.  There are further specifics if you care to read about them.  I originally rejected Standard, seeing it as money-making scheme, but it's actually come to be my favorite way to build a constructed deck.  I'll tell you more in exhaustive detail with a future post

Limited:
Limited is a really interesting and different way to play.  It relies on good analytical skills and a familiarity with the latests MTG sets.  There are two forms of Limited Magic:  Draft and Sealed.  And the gist of it is, everyone buys some packs and builds a deck right there on the spot.  

What attracted me to limited play is that it reminds me of my earliest days of playing magic, when I didn't have any collection to speak of, and I did just have to make decks from the packs and starter kits I bought.  I would read every single card, having no idea what it might do, and put my favorite ones in a deck.  The key difference is that limited play is highly competitive, whereas those early days were anything but.  Sometimes we didn't even have the necessary cards to build a functional deck, but we played it anyway.

Many years and many dollars later, Magic the Gathering has come a long way, and so have I.  I plan to detail my understanding and opinions on each of these formats I have mentioned, and when I'm done with this project, my intention is two fold:  To find the best way to introduce new players to Magic.  To find the least expensive way to maintain maximum fun with Magic.  I've got a pretty good idea how to do this, and I'm ecstatic at the opportunity to share with you. 

-D

*for the record, the main deck I kept was a back/red/white deck full of royal assassins, vampires, serra angels, lightning bolts and seven dual lands!  Of course, I never used plastic sleeves to protect my cards, so all of these are in very poor condition.

**If you'd like to read more, here's a link to our previous references to Magic.