[BLOG] Reconnecting with Magic: The Gathering
I knew this day would come, but I wouldn't have guessed it would be so far away. I'm excited by Magic: The Gathering again, and the road to this point was neither short nor simple.
I hung up my card-flopping spurs back in 2001 after 6 years of play. I was a senior in high school with little interest in social gaming, I had fewer people than ever to play with, and it felt like the game I knew had lost itself. Then there was 7th Edition.
If ever there were a Magic set that felt like it "jumped the shark" it was 2001's 7th Edition. Yet Another Recycling of cards; arbitrary (and really stupid) card art changes (that still piss me off every time I looked at them - how dare they change Prodigal Sorcerer's iconic art on a whim); and a seeming throw-them-down-the-stairs-and-see-what-goes-furthest methodology to card selection. I really hated that set, and the expansions did nothing to offset it for me. It seemed like the blocks had become mere extensions for a long-running and farcical fantasy story rather than enhancing the game. It seemed to me the magic had been lost, if you can forgive the pun, in the name of selling books and the "multiverse" idea.
Last year, I went and bought a few hundred cards to see if Brian's kids wanted to play. It was an exciting experience to be in a card store after all those years. Brian likened my conversation with the clerk to a drug deal going down on 8 Mile; I immediately fell back into the dialect I knew so well as I tried to get a feel for what had happened to the game over the last 6 years.
I bought some cards from the latest expansion set at the time, Lorwyn, and some from the latest core set: 10th Edition. Yup, they'd kept recycling cards while I was gone. At least it didn't appear they'd committed more art-change blasphemies and, from what little I saw, it seemed the card selection had improved.
The kids didn't bite, so I stashed the cards away and that was that. Then, at this year's Expo Icrontic, Colgere sponsored a booster draft complete with prizes. I walked away from it with 6 packs worth of the latest sets, and was really surprised and pleased by what I'd found. The new mechanics were fun, the multi-color theme was inspired, and, most important, I had a blast doing a booster draft.
However, I still wasn't quite hooked. It was just back on my radar.
I found out 2 weeks ago that a local friend of mine is an avid Magic player, and in fact kept decks in the car. We agreed to play the following week at Icrontic co-working at Foran's bar downtown. When I remembered the previous year's card purchase, I was ecstatic -I had enough cards to build new decks! I set about the task of crafting two new decks and enjoyed myself quite a bit, especially that I had such a limited pool of cards.
By the time I quit Magic, I was a pretty hardcore collector and was buying a booster box per new set. That adds quite a hefty price tag to the game and takes a lot of non-game time. It burnt me out! Here was a whole new scenario where instead of wading through tens of thousands of cards, I was challenged to build from only 600. With limited options I had to focus, and the focus was fun.
We dueled on Sunday and had a blast; it was the most time I'd ever spent at Sunday co-working and it felt like no time at all.
Now here's the bit that sealed the deal: I started reading the Daily MTG. Back-in-the-day, communication between the set designers and players was almost solely through magazines, which had precious little space for our one lonely game in a broad-focus publication. Here was page after page of weekly blog-style entries by many authors; it's my old beloved InQuest magazine on steroids.
In it, I found out about the new 2010 set and rules change and I loved what they'd done. They resolved to stop numbering them and instead go by years; they simplified the core rules; they redesigned the core set (with fresh cards!) to properly function as the core set it should have always been; and they told us all about the process of doing so and explained their rationale in great detail.
I've been back on that site almost every day this week, reading up on the new environment and changes, and making plans to attend casual local tournaments. When I go home to Pennsylvania for a family vacation in 2 weeks, my first trip will be to the storage unit to rescue my collection from its purgatory. I knew this day would come, so all my cards are neatly boxed and cataloged, protected by layers of boxes and plastic. Waiting. Waiting for this.
I knew one day I would be back, but I didn't expect this level of excitement. I thought I'd coast back into, like one does old habits. This is something different; this is not the game I played, but a reinvented pastime that I am enthusiastically diving (back) into.
Now if only I could afford a few more cards.
I hung up my card-flopping spurs back in 2001 after 6 years of play. I was a senior in high school with little interest in social gaming, I had fewer people than ever to play with, and it felt like the game I knew had lost itself. Then there was 7th Edition.
If ever there were a Magic set that felt like it "jumped the shark" it was 2001's 7th Edition. Yet Another Recycling of cards; arbitrary (and really stupid) card art changes (that still piss me off every time I looked at them - how dare they change Prodigal Sorcerer's iconic art on a whim); and a seeming throw-them-down-the-stairs-and-see-what-goes-furthest methodology to card selection. I really hated that set, and the expansions did nothing to offset it for me. It seemed like the blocks had become mere extensions for a long-running and farcical fantasy story rather than enhancing the game. It seemed to me the magic had been lost, if you can forgive the pun, in the name of selling books and the "multiverse" idea.
Last year, I went and bought a few hundred cards to see if Brian's kids wanted to play. It was an exciting experience to be in a card store after all those years. Brian likened my conversation with the clerk to a drug deal going down on 8 Mile; I immediately fell back into the dialect I knew so well as I tried to get a feel for what had happened to the game over the last 6 years.
I bought some cards from the latest expansion set at the time, Lorwyn, and some from the latest core set: 10th Edition. Yup, they'd kept recycling cards while I was gone. At least it didn't appear they'd committed more art-change blasphemies and, from what little I saw, it seemed the card selection had improved.
The kids didn't bite, so I stashed the cards away and that was that. Then, at this year's Expo Icrontic, Colgere sponsored a booster draft complete with prizes. I walked away from it with 6 packs worth of the latest sets, and was really surprised and pleased by what I'd found. The new mechanics were fun, the multi-color theme was inspired, and, most important, I had a blast doing a booster draft.
However, I still wasn't quite hooked. It was just back on my radar.
I found out 2 weeks ago that a local friend of mine is an avid Magic player, and in fact kept decks in the car. We agreed to play the following week at Icrontic co-working at Foran's bar downtown. When I remembered the previous year's card purchase, I was ecstatic -I had enough cards to build new decks! I set about the task of crafting two new decks and enjoyed myself quite a bit, especially that I had such a limited pool of cards.
By the time I quit Magic, I was a pretty hardcore collector and was buying a booster box per new set. That adds quite a hefty price tag to the game and takes a lot of non-game time. It burnt me out! Here was a whole new scenario where instead of wading through tens of thousands of cards, I was challenged to build from only 600. With limited options I had to focus, and the focus was fun.
We dueled on Sunday and had a blast; it was the most time I'd ever spent at Sunday co-working and it felt like no time at all.
Now here's the bit that sealed the deal: I started reading the Daily MTG. Back-in-the-day, communication between the set designers and players was almost solely through magazines, which had precious little space for our one lonely game in a broad-focus publication. Here was page after page of weekly blog-style entries by many authors; it's my old beloved InQuest magazine on steroids.
In it, I found out about the new 2010 set and rules change and I loved what they'd done. They resolved to stop numbering them and instead go by years; they simplified the core rules; they redesigned the core set (with fresh cards!) to properly function as the core set it should have always been; and they told us all about the process of doing so and explained their rationale in great detail.
I've been back on that site almost every day this week, reading up on the new environment and changes, and making plans to attend casual local tournaments. When I go home to Pennsylvania for a family vacation in 2 weeks, my first trip will be to the storage unit to rescue my collection from its purgatory. I knew this day would come, so all my cards are neatly boxed and cataloged, protected by layers of boxes and plastic. Waiting. Waiting for this.
I knew one day I would be back, but I didn't expect this level of excitement. I thought I'd coast back into, like one does old habits. This is something different; this is not the game I played, but a reinvented pastime that I am enthusiastically diving (back) into.
Now if only I could afford a few more cards.
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