Magic: The Gathering

Magic: The Gathering. What can I say about  this game. For me, there is a love/hate relationship with this game. It is the game that first got me into modern board gaming, or card gaming over 20 years ago. It is a game that after 20 years, is still going strong by gaining new players, pushing the boundaries for coming up with new and creative ideas and could arguable be the game that on its own, keeps the board gaming hobby alive.

In Magic, you take on the role of a wizard who is trying to bring your opponents life down to zero. This is the main path to victory but there are others such as getting rid of all their cards, playing certain cards or giving them poison counters. To achieve this goal, you will use your cards to cast spells and summon creatures. You can then use these creatures and command them to attack or defend attacks from your opponent. Each game can take an average time of 10-60 minutes to play. There are also many formats that you can play that range from 2-infiate number of players but it is normal for no more then about six players.

In Magic, there are five different colors that represent the world. White for Plains, Black for Swamps, Red for Mountains, Blue for Islands and Green for Forests. Each color represents a certain type of magic. White is holy, healing and honor. Black is death, destruction and evil. Red is fire, mountain creatures and spells that deal direct damage. Blue is control, sea creatures and creativity. Green is Forest creatures, healing and spells that help your creatures get stronger.

To play, you will choose what cards you want to use in your deck before you face your opponent(s). You may choose to use one color or all the colors in your deck. It is typical that one, two or three colors are in your deck and I would say most decks are two colors. You will then shuffle your deck so it is random and draw seven cards from the top.

To play your spells or creatures you will need to create mana. This typically comes from your lands. Your lands are generally what was listed above such as Plains, Swamps, Mountains, Islands or Forests. Lands are free to play and you will want to put those into your deck. However, you can only play one land a turn so your more powerful creatures and spells will not be able to come out until later in the game. If, for example, you wanted to cast a creature that you had in your hand that cost four mana, you might wait till turn four. Hopefully you were able to play a land on each of your turns. Then you will turn your four lands sidewards. This is called Tap. Tap means to turn a card from right side to sideways indicating that it is being used or spent. In Magic, at the beginning of your turn you will Untap your cards that are tapped so you can use their abilities again. Tapping something that first came out in Magic and since they copyrighted the term, other games have to use a different term.

Creatures are a normal way of reducing your opponent(s) life total down to zero so you will most likely want to put some of those in your deck. After you generate enough mana to cast a creature, they will stay in play until they are destroyed. You will then be able to command your creature to attack one of your opponents or stay and defend so that you will avoid taking damage. Everyone each typically starts out with 20 life points.

This was a basic overview of Magic. I say typically a lot here because it is not always the case. In Magic, rules were created so that cards can be innovative and break these rules. I am grateful for Magic as it got me into world of modern gaming. It is an amazing game that has lots of depth, great art, replay ability and strategy. It is also a game that can be expensive and was the reason I went into what I would call my dark ages of gaming. I’m not going to go into that right now but I would say I like the game.

As I said Magic can be expensive. I know people who have invested thousands of dollars into this game. Since it is collectible, you don’t know what you may get in one booster pack. Some people try to collect one of each card in a set and some try to get four as you can possibly have up to four copies of the same card in your deck. There are also cards that are not printed as much called rares and even mythic rares. There are four sets that come out each year and each set can have around 250 cards. This has been going on for the past 20 years. This means that there are a lot of cards.

Moving on, there are different formats or ways to play Magic. Some popular formats are Commander, Draft, Standard and Sealed. I have played them all and my favorite is Sealed. Sealed can be expensive as you are suppose to purchase new cards every time. To play sealed you will need six booster packs. Each pack cost about $4. You will then create your deck with these cards and adding any amount of land in addition. You will mainly play one on one or duels best two out of three playing someone else who opened the same types of booster packs. I enjoy this format and is the only form of Magic I have been playing recently as it puts everyone on a somewhat level playing field and it is your skill that you use to beat your opponents.