I Finally Gave In - I'm Playing Magic the Gathering

Yeah. Whatever. I finally played some MtG. As with pretty much every gaming store in the country my local store has Friday Night Magic along with various and sundry other times when people play. As with Warhammer 40k this is one of those games where you're pretty much guaranteed to find other players.

Now before you start doing the Nelson 'ha ha' at me I have a caveat. I'm not buying cards. Nope. Not a single one. I borrowed decks at the start and I still do. But for my own decks I'm printing proxy cards. 100% printed proxy. I know I can't use these in sanctioned and/or sponsored events and I'm fine with that. But I'm also not buying into the cardboard crack.

The game has thousands of different cards. Each card can have multiple printings. The cards vary in rarity and therefore in price. You can get cards for pennies. You can get cards that cost more than cars. Most of them fall in the lower range of that spectrum but I am NOT going to pay $20 for a piece of printed cardboard that has no actual value. It's ink on cardboard. It's got a secondary market scarcity price. And I just don't care.

So my decks can be 'expensive' decks. Why? Because they don't cost me anything I don't already have. I know that's not completely fair to the people who do collect the cards and buy into the game. I do. And I'm very up front with the fact my deck is a full proxy deck in case they don't want to play against me. It's the same as my 3D printed 40k army. It's a choice the other player makes.

All the disclaimers out of the way, lets talk Magic!

When I told one of my friends I was starting to play he mocked me and rightly so. I can take it. He immediately knew what kind of deck would be best for me and it turns out I had already played a deck like that and found it to suit me. Go figure. Because there's all kinds of decks.

There's five colors that relate to the major play style of the cards. There's also colorless but that's kind of a mix into all of them. And those five colors can be mixed into the same deck if you like. There's names for the various mixes that I'm still learning and then there's the single color - mono-color - decks that are one color and colorless.

I'm a brute. I like to go in and hit things. That's my strength and weakness as a tabletop player. When I play D&D I'm a fighter or a cleric. When I play other games I build my armies to curb stomp my opponents. So it only made sense for me to go with the color that's designed to roflstomp my opponents. That color is green.

I'm going to get spanked for this but I don't know how many people reading this have played Magic. Probably more have than not. But if you haven't played it's a mystery like any other game. I've been learning and still have questions as I go.

The core of the game is to get mana (a term we've all heard) which is what you use to 'cast spells'. Everything is casting a spell. Almost everything. But we'll get to that.

You mostly get mana from the land cards. I put a picture of one because it's pretty. Each turn you get to add more land if you have it in your hand and then use it all to do stuff. There's a few things you can do but the core of it is putting out creatures to attack and defend.

This is what took me longer than it should to figure out. You're not fighting the creatures. Nope. You're fighting the player. The creatures are just there to take the damage that would have been done to the player. For some reason I was more focused on the creatures than the player. Blame role playing games and tabletop for that one. Once I got that through my thick skull I started playing a lot better. Fine. A little better. I still suck.

Each turn has a player setting up to do combat and nasty things to the other player(s), then they each do their thing. A few of the cards let you do things out of turn so that can make it interesting. But in general you're trying to hit the player for more points of life than they have. That's the goal of the game. It doesn't matter how many creatures you destroy, etc. It's all about the life points. I have to keep remembering that.

My first printed decks were ones I found pre-built on one of the many sites that has decks. There's also sites that let you print out cards. This all made it very easy for me to turn a list into a sheet of cards to be printed, cut, trimmed, edged, and sleeved. After all that I end up with a deck of my very own that I can bring to the game.

My local friend has thousands of cards and he's building me a deck that I want to try. It's a pair of colors that take more finesse than the brute strength of my precious green. I asked him if he would make one before I started building my own decks and only then realized just how much work it can be to do that. I consider it work even though I'm doing it all online. I can only imagine how bad it is when you actually have to dig through cards. I'm not pushing for him to finish that. He's got enough going on without that.

The format I've been playing is 100 cards where you have one of each card, except for basic lands. A basic land is what that picture is. It just gives you mana. It doesn't do anything else. You can have as many of those as you like but they recommend your deck has about 40% land since you need that to buy the other cards and do stuff with them. That's a big freaking deck and shuffling is interesting, to say the least.

Games tend to last about five turns or so. It's a build up to get enough mana to start buying things to put into play then it goes in all kinds of directions based on what color(s) you're playing. So it can be a fast game and this format can be multiplayer which makes it more interesting in a lot of respects.

So how do I feel about this? I'm fine with playing. It's not a bad game. I can see where people would get into the artwork of the cards and want to have special sets. I haven't played the other game formats where the decks are built and work different. I haven't had to do it so I don't bother right now. I'm sticking with the format that's most commonly played around here.

Because I print my cards I don't have to swap them around. If I were buying them I wouldn't buy a full deck and then buy duplicates for the next one. That would be wasteful. It would mean tracking what cards I have, what decks they're in, and moving them around. For me it's flat out easier to print an entire deck at once, even if I'm printing thirty of those land cards at a time.

Why would the cards have to be moved? Because the decks are sleeved. That means the cards are in plastic sleeves with opaque backs. That's to protect the cards but more so to make sure that they're not identifiable from the back. There's been big cheater scandals about marked sleeves in the tournaments. So if I were to take cards from Deck A and use them in Deck B I would have to move them. But if I wanted to play both Deck A and Deck B in the same evening in different games I'd have to shuffle cards around. Playing proxy it's just easier to make entire decks.

I just made a new deck tonight, using what I learned from the previous deck I built. I think I may have gone too hard on this one but I won't know until I play it. It may be a nasty deck but in my hands there's no guarantee it will play that way. If it does play too heavy for our casual games I'll sit down with the other players and see what's wrong with it so I can fix it. Again, I can print new cards.

I mentioned all the steps involved with me making a deck. I'll expand a little here.

I print them, either on the inkjet or color laser printer. The inkjet gives a bit of a brighter and clearer image, at the cost of using photo paper and all that ink. The laser printer is a bit duller and lower resolution but they're still perfectly usable. I have a lot of inkjet photo paper I bought at the thrift store over the years so that's not an expense. And now that I have the inkjet working properly again I can take the time to print some that way. The laser is faster and easier.

To cut them I use scissors. I have a fancy paper cutter somewhere but in this case it wouldn't be as much use as it could be. There's a gap between the cards so no matter what the cuts aren't going to be usable right out of the box.

Trimming takes off the bits that were left behind so the cards are nice and clean. I'd have to do this with scissors anyway. Probably. I might be able to do this with the paper cutter too for most of them. I'll have to try that when I find it. But for each page I cut I then carefully trim off any offcuts so the cards are just that card.

I make a decent amount of print and play games so I have a corner rounder punch. You'll notice almost all the cards in games have rounded corners. This is no exception. By rounding the corners the cards suddenly look much nicer.

Magic cards have black edges (mostly) and are printed on black core cardstock. I therefore take a black Sharpie and carefully color the edges so that they're black. I do this on game cards too. I have a bag of colored Sharpies and can edge the cards to match their inks but most of them are black. This step makes a surprising difference in how the cards look. You might want to try it on one of your own games.

The final step is putting them in sleeves. Open the sleeve, slide in the card, push it gently so it's firmly seated in the bottom, put it in the box. Lather, rinse repeat.

I spend a lot of time on this and I don't mind. I like doing print and play stuff. I have the time to spend. I have all the materials here. I did have to buy card sleeves and boxes because what I have here wasn't game appropriate. But that let me spend some money at the local game store so it's not a total waste.

So there it is. I'm one of those people who show up on Friday night to sit around playing cards. Honestly it's not that different than the people who get together to play poker, in my opinion. We're playing cards and having fun.

For everyone who's laughing at me for finally getting sucked into the game you can see where I've kept a bit of my distance. I'm really not going to spend money buying official cards. I just can't deal with that. I'm not kidding about the card prices. There's one I like and I have it in two decks now. The card price is $700. For one card. For a small piece of printed cardboard. People play with proxies for those far more often than the ones that go for $0.05 but for me it's the principle of the thing. I'm not buying into the game any more than absolutely necessary.

I'll get this deck ready tomorrow to use Friday. Hopefully there will be players I like there this week. Otherwise it will wait until they do. I'm not going to jump into another deck type until I've got one or two I'm happy with in green. Then I'll start to branch out. It gives me something to do.