So who plays Magic the Gathering?

[Berserker]

Or used to? I still play!

[Kaebora]

I do. Just not very many players around here. The nearest comic shops constantly tote Yu-Gay-Oh tournaments, and rarely have magic players. The last large match I had was in high-school, back in 2004.

[Scott Gardener]

I played it heavily about a year after it first came out. By the late nineties I had a huge collection, including an Unlimited Black Lotus. I since sold it and a lot of my other cards, a decision I now regret. However, it may have been for the best, as I have not really had a chance to do much gaming since 2000 or 2001. As I got older, the other players got younger. I started out as a college-age young adult playing against others in more or less the same age, with a mix of teens and a few older people, around 1994 or 1995. Six years later, I was an adult playing against mostly kids, and not very often. The cards mostly just sat in holders.

I miss it, but it's a bit time-consuming, and I've got other interests that are equally expensive, and my free time is also a commodity. Still, there will always be a place in my heart for planeswalking and the wizards' duels.

As a side note, back when Revised and 4th Edition were still fresh, and the Shivan Dragon was one of the top cards, I used to joke about doing the "Shivan dance ritual" when opening a booster pack, hoping to get a really good card. It dawned on me soon afterwards that in Hinduism, that means bringing about cataclysmic destruction. Needless to say, I stopped doing that.

[Berserker]

It's weird. I played a lot in high school. Then I went to college, and all the people who played at the local store were college kids. Then I left college, and all the players were college graduates.

The players followed the game with time. Out of the 40+ people at our Friday Night Magic, only a couple of them are younger than 21.

[outwarddoodles]

I DO!


Of course, the only other players I know around me are my brother and my best friend. There isn't really any place around me to join in any competitions. I love the game, and own a fair amount of cards, but I wish I had more people to play with.

I play with White and Black by the way. Anyone else?

[Berserker]

I play competitively and casually. I have many decks, but my Standard format deck right now is a variant of this one:

http://sales.starcitygames.com//deckdat ... ckID=26116

But my favorite deck is this multiplayer white/black deck, which I designed myself:

http://www.mtgfanatic.com/Decks/ViewDeck.aspx?ID=33194

[Sunbane]

I used to play at entry level, but I fell out of it when people started getting serious. I still have my deck somewhere. I used to play black/white/green most of the time.

I rather prefer a good PnP RPG session. The cardgame thing never really bit me I suppose.

[WerewolfKeeper3]

I do. Just not very many players around here. The nearest comic shops constantly tote Yu-Gay-Oh tournaments, and rarely have magic players. The last large match I had was in high-school, back in 2004.

Ouch... dude, i still play Yugioh, and am not afraid to say it...

anyway, i was going to, and got enough cards to make a descent rogue deck... now Eventide is getting my attention... but i'm still playing Yugioh... Magic however, will be the "In case the first dies out"... that was the way it was when Pokemon kicked the bucket (or put the revolver to its temple... whichever you choose to believe...) Yeah... i hear that's coming back too... anyway... It was an interesting game... and i missed out on asian themed sets... but... eh...

[Kaebora]

LoL! Forgive me, but I bash Yu-Gi-Oh regularly for how it stole away many magic players when it was released nearly 5 years ago. I was hoping it would mostly die out like Pokemon did, but it was the nail in the coffin instead. Now YGO players outnumber magic players emmensely. Its the game that took over Albuquerque. Half of the game's mechanics are quite pointless by comparison. I prefer magic, because it has everthing you need, nothing you dont. I think card games should never require a calculator.

Magic will always have a dedicated following, but it mostly lost its place in the mainstream here in the USA.

[WerewolfKeeper3]

Lol... it's cool... i was kidding anyway...

But i get trounced in most of the card games i play in, except this one for the most part... and i've gotten pretty lucky at the cards i've been pulling...

and i expected it to die too... but, it didn't... and i'm glad it hasn't died out completely... plus... have you actually played it, and given it a shot yet?
( i smell conversonary tactis at work...) {clamps hand over mouth} Zip it... i am not trying to get him to give up magic... i have a whole crap load of cards that players just chucked cause they didn't want... and i'm a scavenger by nature... not a hunter so... anywho... i Magic is cool, but they seriously need to change the age rating on Yugioh... in the Japanese version of 5D's, they swear, and some of the cards aren't exactly kid friendly either...
(I still don't understand the aversion to Black in card names...) Neither do i...

[Wselfwulf]

Yeah, I used to love that game. Black and blue, and I had a preposterous Mirrodin deck.

[Kaebora]

I'm a fan of all colors. My best decks include:

Green Saproling Deck
Black/Green Zombie Deck
Blue/Colorless Golem/Artifact Deck
Red Burn Deck

All are quite on the expert level, mostly oldschool cards, with death dealing blows causing fifty to five million damage in at least two of them.

I should try to make something out of the white cards I have.

[outwarddoodles]

Keabora: White is my absolute favorite colour. I've been known to win a game with my health multiplied from what I originally started with.


Also, I won't go so far as to bash Yu-Gi-Oh, but I honestly find MTG much more challenging. I never found many opportunities for stragety in Yu-Gi-Oh as I have Magic.

[Berserker]

My beef with YuGiOh isn't necessarily the system. It's the players.

[WerewolfKeeper3]

My beef with YuGiOh isn't necessarily the system. It's the players.

Certain ones yes... and what about the players annoys you?

[Berserker]

Ok first of all, I've played cards at 3 different game stores in 3 different cities here in Georgia. That's the only sample of Yu-Gi-Oh players I have, but I'm going to generalize anyway.

Magic players are typically between 16-30 years old, have a basic awareness of personal hygiene, and are relatively sociable. These players are tolerable.

Yu-Gi-Oh players are mostly between 6-13 years old, and are loud, immature, and obnoxious. The ones who aren't little kids are usually highly eccentric and physically disgusting 20 to 30-year-olds with no social skills and no sense of personal hygiene.

If Yu-Gi-Oh players are somehow different in other parts of the world, that's great, but everywhere I go they're intolerable.

[Scott Gardener]

My main deck was all green, with Llannowar elves and other fast mana tricks. I more than once was able to get out and maintain a Force of Nature on the third round. When Alliances came out, Yavamaya Ants became a regular. My strategy in competitive Magic was pretty creature-heavy, also employing a Juggernaut and whatever that green Djinn was that's 5/4 and does a point of damage to you every round. I knew my weakness was anything that could stop creatures--blue Stasis and white Moat-type decks--anything that made the game slow and tedious. My basic strategy with those kind of decks before I could get into the sideboard was to outrun them and kill the opponent before he or she could have the strategy working.

But, I really preferred group gaming, in which I'd pull out some of the forced heavy hitters in favor of slower-buildup cards. One variant employed the Verduran Enchantress and whatever the name was for the irritable badger thing that gained 2/2 for every enchantment on it. I really liked the Master of the Hunt as well, building an army of wolves.

I also played black, largely during group games. After Fallen Empires came out, I used a Breeding Pit / Bad Moon combination to, again, build an army. I designed my own tokens, little slips of paper with sketched thrull characters. It was a lot of fun.

A few times I managed to play with moxes, the sacred Black Lotus, and a full compliment of dual lands--original duals, with striped "T: add A or B" rule texts, with no "comes into play tapped," "jabs you each round," or any other penalty. I was stunned how fast I could be with it, and I quickly saw why five of the most expensive cards in the game had exactly the same capabilities as five of the cheapest and most common cards in the game--moxes and land.

Today that deck would have been worth a fortune. Even then it was. But, moxes, dual lands, and the Black Lotus have all beat the Dow Jones and the S&P 500. They weren't affected by the market conditions after 9/11, and they make a good hedge against inflation. But, sadly, most of the other cards can't boast the same collectability, only the big name ones. Thankfully I kept a lot of other alphas and betas. I still have a Lich, for instance. I never played it.

One of my favorites was Chaos Orb. It was one of the only cards in Magic that got better with practice.

[Berserker]

The game is very different from those days, but in term of the money involved it seems it is coming full circle. Back in the days 1996-2004 you could build a tier 1 Standard deck for as little as $100. Now, some of the top deck run between $700 and 800, which is kind of ridiculous. So many $15-30 cards floating around out there... if you're not buying booster boxes when new sets come out, it is very hard to catch up.

[Kaebora]

The decks I built were back in 2001 - 2005. My high-school days. Since then I've been out of the loop after I moved for college. Though, every time I come back to visit my hometown, my friends try and see if they can upgrade my decks to be more powerful. Thus far, I have the best Saproling deck I've ever seen in action, and one of the best Golem decks. A semi-decent Zombie deck is also something I have doodling around with. I've ended games with an opponent at -5,000,000 life, and me at +250,000 life.

Due to the fact that my friends are DCI tournament winners, they always had decks that ran extremely complex and effective combos. Whether its running into a stand-still against my buddy's resurrecting chimera deck, or facing off against my other friend's immortal artifact creature deck. They played so tough and hardball that I had to adapt. I still lost a lot, but they helped me to get my decks up to par. (Though they sometimes built decks specifically to counter mine. Grrrr.) Then I moved to New Mexico, and discovered that my decks and skill were unbeatable here, with my friends to thank for that. Planeshift and Invasion sets are my bread and butter, complimented by Ravnika.

[Berserker]