Before we get to the meat of the post – I’ll be at Market City Comics in High Point this Saturday, 9/15 from noon til around 3PM signing books, talking comics, playing cards, whatever folks want to do. If you’re in the area, come on by!
If you’ve never played Magic:the Gathering, this post will be ungodly boring for you. If you have played, you know my pain. And if you currently play, look me up at NY Comic Con, I’ll have a deck in my bag. If you beat me in a 2 out of 3 match, I’ll give you a free book! Seriously, I’ll play Magic againsy anybody that wants to play at NYCC, and if you win, I’ll give you a free book (my choice!)
I hope not a lot of really good players take me up on that, or I could go broke.
Anyway, if you’ve never played the game, what kind of nerd are you? Regardless, it’s a collectible card game where you try to beat your opponent down to zero life (or a couple of other ways to win, but that’s the main one), and it’s been pretty hugely popular since my college days playing on the counter at Dave’s Comics behind the steakhouse on Cherry Road in Rock Hill. Dave’s still around, but his shop is in Fort Mill now, and nowadays I play most Monday and Friday nights at Get Some Game, which is super-close to my house.
No, I’m not putting my address on the interwebs. I’m stupid, but not suicidal.
BTW, this is ALL Brandon Sanderson’s fault. If he hadn’t invited me to do a Magic draft tournament with him at LibertyCon, and hadn’t been so damn nice and cool to hang out with that weekend, and if the rest of the LibertyCon folks hadn’t been so awesome, I wouldn’t have had such an amazing time, and I wouldn’t have gotten back into playing Magic. So thanks, Brandon, and curse you all at the same time! And congrats on the Parsec Award!
But anyway, there’s a new set coming out next month that looks awesome! It’s called Return to Ravnica, because apparently in the fifteen years that I was on hiatus from the game there was a set called Ravnica, and it was pretty cool. Well, I have a couple of RtR predictions for any of you that care. Just a couple, because I haven’t spent a ton of time studying the set yet.
1) Tormod’s Crypt will become a must-have card for sideboards. The Golgari decks are all about playing with the graveyard, and being able to kill an opponent’s graveyard is about to become really important.
2) Quirion Dryad will be a MONSTER in the aforemention Golgari decks. Since there are a ton of Green/Black spells, the Dryad gets bigger with almost anything you cast. Therefore – HUGE.
That’s all I’ve got, since Suzy and I have just been playing with the Izzet v. Golgari duel decks for a couple of days, but those are a few things that jumped out at me. Oh, and with the shock lands having the classifications of both land types, Farseek is going to be a heavily played card. Because you can go get shocklands with Farseek.
Never played Magic (played the Weird West card game – Deadlands?). Had friends who, did what, 15 years ago? They eventually gave it up and sold their cards off – made about as much as they had spent on them!
Also had one friend who went into the collectible card game business, back when brick and mortar hobby stores could still survive.