Magic: The Gathering

yeah, i figured it out, thanks

 

http://store.steampowered.com/app/213850/


MTG 2014 is F2P this weekend.

First impressions: I hope whoever designed that interface got fired.

 

And then shot in the head... 7 times.

 

How much money does it take to be reasonably competitive in the online version?

 

Who ever came up with Biovisionary card should be forced to play Yugi-Oh in hell in eternity. Btw only stage in MTG 2013 that needs thinking what deck to use.

 

I can speak as a newish MTGO user since I started using it not more than an year ago.

It really depends on your skill and also what you are into. Buying up the cards for the constructed formats is rather expensive, even for standard most of the times the cards that are being played in the top decks cost even more than the paper versions which is insane. If you want to draft or play sealed it costs more or less as much as your local fnm, but the prices are usually bigger, so if you are able to win drafts consistently it can be pretty cheap.

In the end I still prefer paper magic and I consider mtgo overpriced, but I play it from time to time as I don't aways have the time to go to the club.

 

What's this draft thing?

I'm not sure I understand it fully.. a quick google left me with the impression that it is a sort of game that multiple players buy into. Then take turns picking cards from the same pool of unopened booster packs. Then they play a tournament to win a prize of some sort. I'm not sure if you keep the cards after you pick them or after the tournament?


If you keep the cards this sounds like a good way to get into the online version though. It sounds like deck building skills and luck are the dominant factor in victory instead of owning the right cards.


Although I did find a group that meets every friday in my area.. might be worth considering joining up with them. I'll have to think on this.

 

Well.. I thought on this and i've decided to give the in person play a go and think about the online version later.

There is a weekly get together at the local comic book store here in a couple hours... I'm gonna go to that and give it a shot. Maybe I'll go a little early so I can learn how to play again before buying into the drafts.

Drafts are only $13 the guy said.. which is cheaper than I expected.

 

Ok.. the drafting and tournament took way longer than I expected. Before I go next week, I'm definitely going to take a nap when I get off work. The whole tournament took like 4 hours.

They did a draft on a set called Conspiracy, everybody said it was a really bad set for collecting cards but it was fun to play. It had a lot of unique mechanics to the gameplay. Add that to the fact that I have no idea what 90% of the new things do in magic since the 2nd or 3rd edition, I made a lot of mistakes in my gameplay.

I think that might have ultimately helped me win the tournament though. In conspiracy you play 4 man games, and since I was the obvious noob, didn't know which cards to pick, and felt like the easy kill to everybody they all fought each other and tried to pick me off last.

That sort of turned to my advantage because I had terrible cards, which everybody informed me after the draft, but I played them in "unusual" ways, which was kind of amusing watching everybody *blink* at me like wtf after I did things. I chose a lot of instants and It also helped that the guy with a really good deck build was trying to help me get into the last round also. He did some 5 conspiracy card combo that killed both other competitors in one round as an example of the game play. I could barely figure out 2 conspiracy card combos.

On the last round I got my first decent hand draw from my deck. I really need to do a better draft next time, I went with a white and red combo deck but I think I probably should have done blue and red. The last round went fairly quick because I guess everybody got bad draws so when I played a dethrone creature I was able to pump it up fast and I played a few extra "pinger" cards that nobody wanted from the draft and it helped me finish off the smaller creatures people put out. I guess nobody likes larger creatures.

So I won a gift card to the store and I'm thinking about buying one of those commander decks with it. The commander game sounds like an interesting format because I like larger decks. So I'll see about giving that a go next time. i bought a few boosters of Journey into Nyx but not enough to make a deck out of it just yet. I'll look into getting more cards later. Maybe I'll order a batch of cards off amazon or an auction site so I can try to build some standard format decks.

 

Hmm.. I'm trying to think about how I want to go about collecting these cards.

I'm thinking of printing out a list from somewhere and maybe spending 30$ a week toward collecting cards. I don't want to spend too much money on a hobby but I think 30$ would be ok without getting too invested.

I ended up using the gift card I won to buy a 4000 common card box from the comic shop. The common cards were from a lot of different sets.. I think the oldest cards I saw in the box I bought was from the Arabian Nights set. They had tons of boxes in the back and I also bought some other game related items (sleeves / dice / various sized boxes / etc). The cards aren't great but I just needed something that I could build random decks with and play with friends.. maybe get them interested in this also. I played with some of them on Sunday and they were more interested in it than I expected. We spent a few hours just rummaging through the box and making random decks. They were terrible decks but we had fun so whatever.

Although Sunday appeared to be Warhammer day at the comic shop so we ended up going to my friends house to play.

edit..

I heard something about a new set coming out next month.. the comic shop mentioned something about it and they are already planning to do a draft on it when it's released I think. I figure I'll keep doing the draft tournament things as long as my work doesn't interfere. I don't care about winning the tournaments.. but I get to see how others play when I do the draft format so it's a worthwhile investment imo.

 

sealed deck does seem kind of lame.

Can you at least look at a card list pre-release to try and figure out a strategy? If you can trade cards around from the sealed decks it might be ok.

 

There is usually a full spoiler of the set up at least 3 days before the physical prerelease, so at least 2 weeks before mtgo events start firing. You can not trade cards between people when sealing, just as with drafting.

Sealed deck is pretty much babbies first limited format, and way less fun than drafting.


I'll be drafting innistrad on wednesday. What is the most fun archetype to draft? Are there any haxor-op cards I need to look out for?

 

Invisible stalker

 

yeah, triple innistrad.

but there's not even anything to enchant him with !

 

Played my first draft of Vintage Masters yesterday. 2-1 Swiss with Blue/Green madness. Deck was TONS of fun. Why must this format be so expensive?

 

Self-milling UGb Spider Spawning/Gnaw to the Bone decks are both powerful and fun. Burning Vengeance decks are also great, but harder to draft I think.