Anyone here play Magic: The Gathering?

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Sima Tuna
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Re: Anyone here play Magic: The Gathering?

Post by Sima Tuna »

I play some ripoff Magic game called Faeria on my Switch and it's pretty fun. I'd play magic IRL if it wasn't such an obvious money pit. I got sucked into yugioh when I was a kid and already feel I wasted enough of my money on that.

I suppose there are probably video games/simulators for Magic now though. I tried one of those years ago and thought it was shit. I think it was magic 2014 for xbox 360. Terrible ai and single play options and I didn't feel motivated to learn the game.
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BryanM
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Re: Anyone here play Magic: The Gathering?

Post by BryanM »

The Heads I Win Tails You Lose product's been in limbo for over like a year now. This guy's comment on ordering the deck really hits in the feels:

"I ordered it as a way to get into EDH at my LGS. My LGS went out of business yesterday."
I play some ripoff Magic game called Faeria on my Switch and it's pretty fun.
I've been wanting to make a TCG RPG thread here for a while, since it kind of seems like it's coming back into vogue (by that, I mean more than one game in the genre was released in the past few years). The Shadowverse Switch game, and, something absolutely noone saw coming and long given up asking for: a port of SNK vs. Capcom: Card Fighters Clash. In english. For real.

It really seems like the whole genre peaked in the 90's, with the Pokemon TCG gameboy games, card fighters, SMT Card Summoner, and MTG: Shandalar. They really ought to make a few more of these things...

The fangame MTG Forge has a league/RPG kinda mode, though I didn't like it much when I tried it 18 years ago. Maybe it's better now..
guigui wrote:I stopped playing the game in about 2005, so here comes the question : is the game still good post 2020 ?
I think it's subjective. There's good sets and bad sets, and what you like is gonna be different from what other people like.

I actually like that they've upped the churn rate on planes: in the old days, by the second and especially third sets of a place, you could tell they've run out of ideas and are just making a set by going through the motions. Dragon's Maze is the poster child of that kind of thing, the only new thing it had was the Fuse mechanic, and it felt like they had been holding it back from the other sets. The two sets that came before it would have been better if they just had the dumb Fuse cards to begin with. I think the only reason they originally did the one year = one plane thing was to give their aesthetic design teams an easier job on art.

What isn't subjective is the number of banned cards has gone through the roof since they've been pushing the power level since power = $$$$$. Standard's seen like double or more bannings in the past few years than it had for the rest of the game's life combined, I believe.

Also foil cards are universally assumed to be as curved as potato chips these days. I guess that saves them $0.0000001 per card or something. The "joke" is you can tell proxies and counterfeits from the real thing, because the unofficial cards are of a much higher quality.

Their MTG Arena game is free to play (aka, a being in a jealous marriage kind of game), so I guess if PvP against anonymous internet people on the internet appeals to a person, it's better than ever.

...argh, this reminds me that the Pokemon TCG Online game (which came out years earlier than Hearthstone) is getting an overhaul. While there's a few things that could be improved on it... like how this kind of thing usually goes, it seems it's change more for the worse.
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guigui
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Re: Anyone here play Magic: The Gathering?

Post by guigui »

BryanM wrote: I've been wanting to make a TCG RPG thread here for a while, since it kind of seems like it's coming back into vogue (by that, I mean more than one game in the genre was released in the past few years). The Shadowverse Switch game, and, something absolutely noone saw coming and long given up asking for: a port of SNK vs. Capcom: Card Fighters Clash. In english. For real.

It really seems like the whole genre peaked in the 90's, with the Pokemon TCG gameboy games, card fighters, SMT Card Summoner, and MTG: Shandalar. They really ought to make a few more of these things...
Oh please do create the thread. I think played MTG Shandalar in early 2000 and had a really nice time with it, definitely would like to find this vibe back 20 years later : I'm not really into the "rogue" deck builders ala Slay the Spire and such.
Bravo jolie Ln, tu as trouvé : l'armée de l'air c'est là où on peut te tenir par la main.
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Sima Tuna
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Re: Anyone here play Magic: The Gathering?

Post by Sima Tuna »

Roguelike deckbuilders aren't for me either. I like building a deck that's persistent and being able to summon monsters 'n' shit. I don't like those games where the cards are just "attack" or "attack while defending." I wanna summon muh blue eyes, dude.
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BryanM
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Re: Anyone here play Magic: The Gathering?

Post by BryanM »

omg, the ceo of Hasbro really is "Cocks" >_<

I thought that was just a floppy Rudy meme.

The computer simulation we live in is just making fun of us, now.
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BryanM
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Re: Anyone here play Magic: The Gathering?

Post by BryanM »

The drama of M30th keeps paying out. A Yu-Gi-Oh guy got sent a box, did an opening, and from the garbage fire realized it maybe wasn't the right thing to do. The very next day he privated the video and issued an apology. You can't blame the guy for not knowing a company would charge $250 for a random rare; much like my assumption it'd be impossible to screw up a Jurassic Park movie or a To Be A Power In The Shadows adoption, some things you think are impossible are quite possible indeed.

It's been heading to this for awhile now. Their greed has really crossed a cartoonish threshold. When "Double Feature" was just two sets mashed together with the color taken away, lots of us played a game of trying to guess the various ways they could screw even more money out of people with little to no work.

Can't wait for the full illustrated by Mark Rosewater in crayon set. They'll at least have to pay an artist like $150 for the art.
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Air Master Burst
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Re: Anyone here play Magic: The Gathering?

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It would be kinda funny if this is how MTG finally dies; but at the same time, I wouldn't count it out just yet. I thought for sure it was gonna die back in the day after the Urza block came through and basically destroyed all levels of competitive play. I switched to sealed only at that point, and was out of the game before the end of Invasion block.

Best-case scenario here is they go bankrupt and have to sell the rights to Netrunner to someone who will release a proper 3rd edition.
King's Field IV is the best Souls game.
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Steamflogger Boss
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Re: Anyone here play Magic: The Gathering?

Post by Steamflogger Boss »

I don't think it's gonna die just yet but I did just dump all my high end RL cards. Fuck it.
BryanM wrote:The drama of M30th keeps paying out. A Yu-Gi-Oh guy got sent a box, did an opening, and from the garbage fire realized it maybe wasn't the right thing to do. The very next day he privated the video and issued an apology. You can't blame the guy for not knowing a company would charge $250 for a random rare; much like my assumption it'd be impossible to screw up a Jurassic Park movie or a To Be A Power In The Shadows adoption, some things you think are impossible are quite possible indeed.

It's been heading to this for awhile now. Their greed has really crossed a cartoonish threshold. When "Double Feature" was just two sets mashed together with the color taken away, lots of us played a game of trying to guess the various ways they could screw even more money out of people with little to no work.

Can't wait for the full illustrated by Mark Rosewater in crayon set. They'll at least have to pay an artist like $150 for the art.
LOL
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BryanM
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Re: Anyone here play Magic: The Gathering?

Post by BryanM »

I'm immeasurably disappointed they actually put the One Ring into the boxes instead of lying about it. Or that some kid didn't throw it in a trash can.

Was enjoying this greater fool lottery scam draining idiots out of their money, and now prices are gonna come crashing to earth all too soon.

--

People like to call gacha games evil, but good lord. MTG tries to hold friendship behind a paywall..

.. but these days it feels more like a speculation scam than an actual game. If in all things you must consider value, then in all things you are bound by money.

--

The new secret lair with four commons/uncommons with art that's just a low-res screenshot of the LotR animated movie sure is something though. $40 for $0.07 cards, pliz.

Like with Double Feature, it's amusing to watch the innovative ways they can ask people for money in exchange for doing no work. This is a far more entertaining show than any regular 'ole game could possibly be at this point. I'm constantly surprised and astonished almost every month at how audacious they are~
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Re: Anyone here play Magic: The Gathering?

Post by Steamflogger Boss »

People are blasting that secret lair but of course it doesn't matter because even when something doesn't do well for them they are still just raking money overall.

Gacha and Magic are similar tbh. Biggest difference is that I would think it's easier to get some money back out of it. I'm sure you can sell stuff on gacha games but idk how easy it is, how flavor of the month they are etc... Magic is a proven commodity at this point.

I haven't given WOTC money in well over a year at this point. I am healing.
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Sima Tuna
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Re: Anyone here play Magic: The Gathering?

Post by Sima Tuna »

The danger of a gacha game is the dev can close the game down suddenly for any or no reason and then you're SOL on the value of whatever dumb shit you wasted money on. You don't actually own anything.

As lame as it sounds, at least with TCGs, you do have that 7-cent piece of cardboard in your hand. Short of making the TCG illegal to play/own (which would be hilarious,) there's no way for them to do something similar to what mobile games get away with.
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guigui
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Re: Anyone here play Magic: The Gathering?

Post by guigui »

Reading MTG's developpement through this thread only, I am wondering. When I used to play (2000-2005), there was this deep strategic part of the game : deckbuilding, meta, learn how to play that I really liked.
Does that still exist ? Are there still people out there using the actual game part of MTG ?
Bravo jolie Ln, tu as trouvé : l'armée de l'air c'est là où on peut te tenir par la main.
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BryanM
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Re: Anyone here play Magic: The Gathering?

Post by BryanM »

Lots of people still play, but I do think the netdecking and profiteering have taken larger roles than they used to. (There's something about that Taco-lovin' Rudy and the financialization of the game that's seedy!) Pile on the greed from corporate and the magic's gone, for many. The impression is that Commander is now the default way to play the game.

I think most of that comes from the playerbase getting so damn old. Can't learn to play if you've been here 20+ years and already know. Affluent millennials seem to make up the majority of the base... it's just not the kind of thing that brings in new blood on its own. The rules are complicated and clunky (playing with priority using the proper rules of having to check if you can continue every. single. time. you. breath. isn't fun), the art stagnant and subdued. (Example: Full art basic lands haven't become standard yet.)

Pokemon in comparison has a onboarding route for new players; tv show, flashy looking cards that don't require you to mortgage your house to make a deck, etc. Like some kind of card game, yanno?

Those cards just seem to explode with passion and joy... while the love of classic 80's DnD doesn't really seem to have stuck with MTG. They're both technically soulless corporate products at their core sure, but, there's degrees between them. Universes Beyond using every other IP in the world makes it feel like they've given up on that completely.

I read the rules for Wixoss the other year, and could only think to myself how smooth it all sounded. No mana screw/flood. A built in catch-up mechanic for a player on the backend of battles. The "second deck" is actually just like a tech tree in an RTS: playing generals and upgrading them determines what cards you can play. Like you need a Level 2 blue general to play level 2 blue cards. It seemed refreshing, like some kind of new game or something.

Magic Arena is probably fine if all you want to do is play the game without a social aspect to it. The format I'm most interested in, Penny Dreadful, has zero official support and is apparently extremely dreadful to get a game started with someone.

... without friends, a table, and a cube I recommend playing other games though. A week of Shadowverse and then moving on is probably worth a month of Arena...
Sima Tuna wrote:The danger of a gacha game is the dev can close the game down suddenly for any or no reason and then you're SOL on the value of whatever dumb shit you wasted money on. You don't actually own anything.
It really is a bloodbath, sometimes it feels like more games get shut down every year than launch. You'd think at least a couple companies that care about their reputation would keep their legacy games up in maintenance mode at least, but precious few do.

I've pointed it out already a few times, but the etymology is very similar to card games. Old mobage browser games that'd launch dozens of new cards per month, and the characters on them would be largely be pervy stuff or cool monsters or anime characters or perverted cool anime monsters.

There's always something special about when an obviously doomed mobile game comes out. The new Muv Luv Alternative game seems like a really bad squad-based Robotron thingy, and doesn't seem to be advertising any dating sim elements that were core to the franchise and its fanbase. The thing was up for four hours before closing it for a year for maintenance, a world record.

(I guess that's like card games too: remember the hundreds of dead card games that were released trying to ride the trend MTG started? A cardgame for every franchise. From The Addams Family to Full House. Such a low cost of entry with massive potential profits.)

And something weird whenever a game that someone seems to have given a shit about gets announced. The Wizardry thing could be a terrible game, but the preview videos seem to show some actual love for the material.
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Davey
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Re: Anyone here play Magic: The Gathering?

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BryanM wrote:No mana screw/flood.
I don't think it's a coincidence that every other Magic-like card game either tweaks the land system or does away with it entirely. Figuring out your mana base can be an interesting puzzle when designing a deck, I'll give it that, but I don't think it makes for good gameplay once you're actually in the game.

Obviously this is a generalization and maybe a little overly harsh, but I think the gist of this Brian DeMars quote hits uncomfortably close to the truth:
I have a feeling that roughly 25% of games are decided by a player drawing too few lands, 25% of games are decided by a player drawing too many lands, 25% of games are decided by a player having a legitimate bomb not get answered immediately, and the last 25% of games are the ones that everybody hopes for where there is a ton of back-and-forth on both sides.
BryanM wrote:... without friends, a table, and a cube I recommend playing other games though.
This can be frustrating, though. If you find a similar game that you like, hopefully you already have friends that are just as interested as you are. One of Magic's big strengths is how many people play it; if you don't already have friends that play, it's probably not too hard to find people that do. At local shops, I saw a lot of other niche card games come and go over the years, most of which I never played, although some of them looked kind of interesting. But they usually just had a small group of devotees that you'd eventually stop seeing as the game inevitably failed to gain enough traction to keep going, at least locally. I've heard fighting game players sometimes run into the same problem: you find some obscure game you really like, but the community is all about the current iteration of Street Fighter or whatever, so you begrudgingly go with the flow.
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BryanM
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Re: Anyone here play Magic: The Gathering?

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Davey wrote:One of Magic's big strengths is how many people play it; if you don't already have friends that play, it's probably not too hard to find people that do.
Yeah, that's the problem with activities that make you dependent on other people. There's a natural monopoly that forms; that's why I keep saying the Magic basically gatekeeps friendship behind a paywall.

There's no real solution to that, than fake people I guess. The RPG Cardgame videogame genre kind of almost would work, if designers put more effort into the imaginary friend aspect of the games. In AI bots are now to the point of being able to start revitalizing dead MMO's (it's the golden age of launch day hype, 24/7!).

I know that feel of it being 1 AM and no one to play ping-pong with : (
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Re: Anyone here play Magic: The Gathering?

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RE mana system: Yeah it's pretty bad but it's an ingrained part of the game. In some formats having more non-games due to mana not working is even a FEATURE (hello Wasteland).
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Re: Anyone here play Magic: The Gathering?

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Yeah, mana screw is sometimes pitched as a feature of the game, I think Maro said so himself in his blog back in the day. I get that every card game needs some RNG to keep it from getting predictable and monotonous, and to let players of different skill levels play together, but the games where you can't make any meaningful plays due to flood or screw just suck for both players.

I don't play it anymore, but I was hooked on Marvel Snap for a while. I appreciate the snap system since the ability to retreat takes a bit of the sting out of non-games and gives back some sense of agency. It'd be like in Magic if you mulled to 5, then got Thoughtseized turn 1 and said "meh, fine, I scoop" and it only counted as losing half a game. This is probably a "yeah, no fucking duh" thing for poker players, but it was a refreshing new concept for me.

And on the subject of "hey I like this game but nobody plays it anymore," Keyforge is releasing its first new set in years. Game had been dead locally for a while, and probably overall I assume. I guess I'll have to get my fill before it dies off again. Then back to playing online games where I meet fellow internet nerds IRL once in a blue moon, I guess.
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guigui
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Re: Anyone here play Magic: The Gathering?

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Steamflogger Boss wrote:RE mana system: Yeah it's pretty bad but it's an ingrained part of the game. In some formats having more non-games due to mana not working is even a FEATURE (hello Wasteland).
I remember my type 2 (does the format still exist ?) deck designed around wasting your ennemy's mana base :

Stone Rain, Rain of Tears, Despoil, Dark Ritual to destroy lands
Tangle Wire to tap many lands, the best card out there.
Rishadan Port to tap yet more lands
Veteran Brawler to attack
Flametongue Kavu to kill what could come to play
Terminate to kill what could come to play
And my favorite unplayed card : Plague Spitter, total wrecker of green turbo mana elf/bird deck at that time.

A joy to play for me, a nightmare for the opponent.
Bravo jolie Ln, tu as trouvé : l'armée de l'air c'est là où on peut te tenir par la main.
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Steamflogger Boss
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Re: Anyone here play Magic: The Gathering?

Post by Steamflogger Boss »

Yeah at some point "type 2" was changed to "standard". Functionally it's the same thing. Cards from the most recent sets only (gotta sell packs, after all).
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BryanM
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Re: Anyone here play Magic: The Gathering?

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Fudge, AI's gotten better... asked Bard to make up some Mario cards and got
Spoiler
Daisy, Princess of Sarasaland

Legendary Creature — Human Noble

Flying

Whenever you cast a spell, you may pay {1}. If you do, draw a card.

3/3



Bowser Jr.

Legendary Creature — Bowser Horror

Flying

Haste

Whenever Bowser Jr. deals combat damage to a player, you may pay {R}. If you do, destroy target artifact or enchantment.

3/3



Toad

Creature — Frog

Whenever Toad deals combat damage to a player, you may return target creature card with converted mana cost 3 or less from your graveyard to the battlefield.

1/1
Which are totally cromulent cards, just missing mana costs. I asked it to add some, and it gave them WU, BR, and G respectively. Which is pretty undercosted, and completely busted in the case of Daisy~ But they're in the appropriate colors (though toad feels more white mechanically) which is impressive for a stupid toaster.

It's not remotely as much fun as the insane gibberish old robo cards had... but is actually playable in a real game.

Reminder that while having a computer design and draw all the cards in a set is indeed very lazy, it's still not as lazy as many real products they've really released, for real!





.... Oh shit. I used to joke about lazier ideas when they released Double Feature, trying and failing to come up with something I didn't believe they'd ever do. They literally did effectively reprint an old set as-is with the anniversary cards when it came to the cost+effort on their side..... they're gonna do this one day they're gonna do this one day they're gonna do this one day they're gonna do this one day

..... okay, got my existential dread out of my system. Universes Beyond has a bright future in front of it!
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BryanM
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Re: Anyone here play Magic: The Gathering?

Post by BryanM »

The IP collaboration/crossover thing has always been a staple of card games and gacha games and sometimes games games. That Magic resisted for so long, even having an entire decade where the lead designer Mark told people it'd never happen on his blog, is commendable to its dedication to conservatism.

I'll be the first to admit things that came before around the original Ravnica tended to be rather stale: every set, here's some goblins, elves, angels, etc. All in the same colors, all basically the same characters. Crusty things like pointy-hats on wizards or bottle gnomes just wouldn't be marketable today.

Recently they announced the sets that are coming out in the next two or four years, I forget. But it's a long time to go without being surprised by their world building themes.

I love the idea of Duskmourn. It's nice they're not regurgitating Innistrad for a fourth dryhump of an empty well.

All of this is to say: I never thought the day would come that a Magic expansion would have 80's guys walking around wearing a t-shirt, leather jacket, denim pants, while holding a PKE meter from Ghostbusters.

The natural endpoint of this is obvious: They'll largely do away with the Tolkien-fantasy roots of the game. Except for the occasional Tolkien set. That stuff's for nerds. The theming of the game will be like Ready Player One: It costs the same to draw a dwarf as it costs to draw a Batman, so why wouldn't they pick the road that leads to more sales? Ditching the planeswalkers makes sense too: card type's too complicated for casual fans. Nobody cares about those guys anyway. A failed experiment in building up the brand.

Technically I even think it'd make the game better. More variety, yeah? But at the same time would have to agree with the Professor: Magic won't be Magic. It's a bastardization of what the game was originally designed to be.

Remember when Wizards briefly experimented with making other card games? Haha, what dopes.....



(A reminder during The Brother's War, they put in cards featuring those two well-beloved MTG characters, once brothers who became enemies: Megatron and Optimus Prime.)
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