Got into the Magic craze in the very beginning, and have gone back several times. 8 years ago or so though, I sold all of my physical cards because I liked playing Magic Online and never used them. I got some decent money, but I wish I would have held onto some of the Power 9 I had way back when (Multiple time walks, moxes, but never did have a Black Lotus).
To this day I still really like the game-play. I dabble in the more recent Planeswalker digital games. Maybe I should check in on MtGO - it’s been awhile…
I remember in my very first Revised starter I received (I think) two dual lands (tundra and something else) while my friend unpacked a Serra Angel and a Doppleganger. So unfair! I couldn’t wait to get rid of these lands masquerading as rares.
I stopped playing sometime around Ice Age. A couple of years ago, I had a co-worker who was really into magic. I brought in my “fast” black deck for fun and his “slow” deck totally smoked mine. They really ramped up the power of newer cards since; I doubt there’s anything valuable from my era (other than the dual lands, long gone.)
My boys (7 and 10) got introduced to it at Cub scouts last year and 4 Weeks later all that shit was in the literal garbage. And our house has been peaceful ever since. I think they were just too young to understand all the rules, mix in some normal brother shitiness and it turned into a non stop fight. And yet they somehow couldn’t stop playing at the same time.
Anyway my opinion as a horrible father is that this is a shitty fucking game and I hope I never see it again.
I’d urge you to let them revisit it at some point, it’s a fantastic way for young kids to learn math, problem solving skills, social skills, all that stuff. 7 and 10 may just be a bit young, though.
I think it’s the last rare I own. Last time I checked it was going for about $105…just checked and it’s at $120.
About five years ago I went through my rather modest collection (fair bit of 4th edition, Ice Age, Alliances and then I got back into it some with Mirage / Weatherlight) and sold about a hundred cards for just under $700 to one of the online re-sellers.
Yeah, prices for some of the OG dual lands have been getting more and more nuts, especially in the wake of the recent announcement that the 25th anniversary Pro Tour will be a three-format Team Constructed event that features Legacy.
Good thing the only one I really want for any of my decks is Taiga (red-green), one of the cheapest of the bunch!
Also, my tournament didn’t happen last night, presumably due to a lack of interest from other players. :(
So I will just take a moment to say that I think the WotC practice of keeping a never-print-again list is fucking terrible for players and great for collectors, and I wish to fuck they’d remember which one of those two groups actually pays them money for cards.
Sure, they’ll drop a From the Vaults with 20 kinda shitty old cards and 5 money rares (but nothing from the never-again list, of course), print like 20 copies of the whole thing, and let prices continue to go insane, but the literal physical stock of things like Duals, Moxen, Ancestral Recalls, etc. is only diminishing over time, and damn, I’d just like to play with em. Keep em tournament illegal, hell, give him a goofy golden border or whatever, but just print em in quantities that I don’t have to drop the down payment on a car to get a playset of duals for my deck.
I agree with all this. Collecting is the worst part about the game. On the one hand, it’s awesome when you open a pack and get an amazing rare that you would otherwise never be able to obtain. So from that point of view things are “mostly” fine the way they are, but never revisiting those older cards is silly. Even the Modern Masters sets that do repeat older cards are crazy expensive, so that isn’t a great solution either.
The best though are the commander decks, that’s where you can get some really great cards for a decent price, actually. And most of the double- and even triple- lands that are very easy to get are great. Not as good as the originals (because modern dual lands come into play tapped) but good enough I don’t really mind. It’s $1 vs. $120 just to have a card that doesn’t come into play tapped.
And some of the double-lands printed these days actually have cool bonuses (like Scry 1) when they come into play, or a means by which they needn’t come into play tapped (like if you only have 2 lands or fewer in play, or if you pay 2 life). It’s fine. I would really like to play with an old power 9 card though, they were impossible to get even when I first started playing in '94 with Revised. Well, impossible for a kid that just graduated high school, at least.
Sadly, the common consensus at this point seems to be that the Reserved List still existing is firmly because of WotC’s Hasbro overlords, rather than something WotC itself has any power over, hence the company’s near-total inability to even discuss the list.
WotC clearly felt they need an answer to Hearthstone, Eternal, f2p card games in general (and apparently the one they already had, Magic Duels, wasn’t good enough for some reason?), so now we have MTG: Arena.
Agreed, it looks pretty fun and I also signed up. I like Duels for the single player aspect, but I could be on board for something closer to Magic Online but that looks really nice, and this fits that bill. At first I was worried it was using alternate “rules” but nope, it’s just good ol’ magic, but in a faster paced package (or so it seems from the footage I’ve seen). They basically took Duels and the previous digital games and just made an easier to digest form of that.
@ShivaX pointed out the tapped cards being only slightly askew instead of being tapped proper is a little annoying, but it didn’t bother me as much as it did him I think because they darken and have a “tapped out” symbol on them. I suspect they are trying to keep the cards “square” to fit them easier on battlefield to avoid the need to zoom in on a card and read it, and a square card that’s tapped isn’t as clearly defined as being tapped. Or, that’s my theory, at any rate.
I can see why they mothballed Duels (wanted to add lots of multiplayer and draft options that probably couldn’t have been easily bolted on to the existing product)…I’m just annoyed about all that grinding wasted.
Magic Duels was a product in search of a market. It was a cut-down version of the game, with a lot of cards in the real game intentionally not implemented due to not playing well in the format, and a restricted deckbuilding system that made it even more useless for paper players wanting a way to test decks without spending money on Magic Online or on the go at all.
Magic Arena looks like a much smarter approach, and I look forward to trying it out in the coming months.
Also in happy news, spoilers for Iconix Masters started at Hascon today, and a lot of sweet (non-Reserved List) cards are getting reprinted (and having their prices tank as a result). I can’t wait to finally play with cards like Mana Drain and Flusterstorm!
The modern Duels of the Planeswalkers games suffered far more from their lack of deckbuilding than any benefit they may have gained from it. I was around for Duels of the Planeswalkers 2012 and its ridiculous monowhite deck with Stoneforge Mystic, a card that was so strong it ended up banned in Standard at the time.
Also, nothing about deckbuilding requires you to go all-out with making something designed for a tournament metagame. I love building goofy decks that take advantage of odd interactions (like Zada, Hedron Grinder and Silverfur Partisan), or decks that just get to jam cool cards that aren’t necessarily the best thing you could be doing (like my current Standard deck, which plays a bunch of really strong cards that aren’t positioned well in the format despite their strength).
I’m the same way with Xwing, I am aggressively anti meta chasing in my lists. I love nothing more than building a list around unloved and unpopular ships and pilots, and building around their quirks. I also almost never fly the same list twice, so that’s a thing.
Life is just more fun when you are chasing your own thing, doing something because you like it rather than because it is the ‘strongest’ option.
