::A Geek in Korea::

I had invited two people over to the house to play some Magic: The Gathering. We didn’t have a full assortment of people around to play D&D like we normally do, and due to different commitments, one person had to bail. I ended up playing cards with my coworker. He now has a phone, and the Internet, so it will be much easier to organize different ways to keep in touch.

Seeing as I had invited people over to play Magic, I needed to be familiar enough with my cards to play and make decks. I got all the cards from a random stranger on the Internet. I didn’t have any background with these particular sets of cards, and I didn’t know which cards were good or bad. I was sure I could make something once I familiarized myself with the decks, but I wasn’t ready to play.I spent three hours one weekend separating the different cards into various different piles. Black, White, Red, Blue, Green, Land, Funky Land, Artifacts, Multicolored…etc. I had been playing other games so long that I couldn’t really wrap my head around deck building mechanics at the time and let them sit for a few weeks.

The time away from the game helped with my clarity. I was too much in “D&D” mode when I first got the cards to make sense of anything. Last night, however, I got the deck building itch and went into a frenzy creating several decks. My wife sat in as I worked, stating that when I get an idea about something, I tend to focus my energy on it very intensely. This is something I know to be true about myself. I tend to get obsessed about something that seizes my attention, occasionally to the detriment of those around me. Interestingly, she said she hoped our baby will share the same focus I had. I wonder if that is a good or bad trait to have sometimes.

Anyway, after my mad spate of building, I had three really fun decks that all played completely differently. I wanted a few different decks to try out, so this morning I got up and made a few more. I tried to build one of each color, after reviwing the cards and picking out the best themes and abilities from each. I think I did well enough on most of the decks, but nothing tests decks like an actual game.

My coworker came over and picked a black/artifact deck. He stomped me handily, and it turns out the other decks I had made were low on mana and had too few cards. Better that than too many. Once we got the card number sorted out, he beat me a few more times. We were rotating decks, so I was grabbing something new on defeat. I think one of my deck concepts was a little too weak, but each one I played worked pretty well. Playing “against” one of my other creations was a fun challenge. My coworker had been in Magic: The Gathering tournaments and had a brother that was deeply involved in the game, so he played well.

We both had fun, and he liked my apartment. He had been asked out to meet some people, so he bailed early to go out. I had gotten to test a few decks, which was cool. It turns out that I had used a banned card in the format I had chose, and my coworker told me that one deck’s underlying mechanic had been banned in another format, unbeknownst to me. It did seem a little too good. Some of the other decks might have had some illegal things going on too, but I don’t know all the banned cards I might have accidentally included. I just used what was available to me.

We’ve got cards from several different eras of Magic going now between everyone that has cards sitting in their apartment. As you allow in other sets of Magic cards, the banned list for the cards I have is much less restricted. When you let the old cards in to play, I can use every tactic that’s been banned for more recent play. So, while I can use all the decks I’ve built to play other people in different block formats, some of the cards I used can’t be played if played exclusively within the sets of cards I own. Some of those old cards are powerful, so I’ll keep every trick available to me on the table when I play my friend’s old cards, but if we ever try to get rules compliant about limiting things to the newer stuff, I’ll still have some fun stuff to play too.

While I haven’t built a Magic deck for close to a year by now, I got back into the habit again pretty quickly. The luxury of having cards to host games with and build stuff with while not worrying about every single combination that might defeat you was a lot of fun. It’s like a puzzle to solve that expanded from sixty cards to several hundred. My options are greatly enhanced, and thanks to my Internet benefactor I didn’t need to import ridiculously expensive cards to achieve it. I’m totally fine with playing with older cards that don’t have all the newest “must have” abilties as long as I can still play with some friends. As long as my influx of cards doesn’t possess anyone else to start up the treadmill of buying more cards to keep up, I’m fine with Magic: The Gathering being a semi-regular thing again.

Damn it, even as I write this, the urge to buy cards is starting to gnaw at the base of my brain. DAMN YOU WIZARDS OF THE COAST! DAMN YOUR CARDBOARD CRACK!