by john | Apr 25, 2016 | Magic:the Gathering
So this post is for Magic nerds. Book nerds and writing nerds probably won’t understand half of what I’m saying. Oh well, it happens.
Yesterday I played a PPTQ (Preliminary Pro Tour Qualifier) at a local comic & game shop. The format was sealed Shadows over Innistrad, which I have been enjoying greatly, and played with some success, and the field was very small, only 13 players. The format was to be four rounds of Swiss, with a cut to Top 8 and then Top 8 would draft and play single-elimination until a winner was determined. Winner got an entry into the Regional Pro Tour Qualifier, which comes with a limited-edition card (Snapcaster Mage) and a shot at getting onto the Pro Tour.
I felt pretty good about my chances to make Top 8. Really, I only needed to win two matches to do so, and as I opened my pool of cards to build from I saw that I had the most expensive card in the set, and one of the best cards in the set, in my pool – Archangel Avacyn.
My pool was fairly straightforward – I only had enough creature density in Green and White to build decks out of those two colors. I probably could have gone with a Blue/White deck if I was willing to stretch to get enough playable creatures, but I felt like my green cards were so good once I got delirium online, that green was the stronger play.
That was my first mistake. I was missing a couple of key delirium enablers, particularly Vessel of Nascency, and that made it just a little bit too hard to get delirium going. I really think that if you’re going to be as all-in on delirium as I was, that you need at minimum one, and probably two, green Vessels to make it happen.
But anyway, here’s the deck list I played –
Loam Dryad
Threaten Gargoyle
Stern Constable
Topplegeist
Moldgraf Scavenger
Obsessive Skinner
Autumnal Gloom
Paranoid Parish-Blade
Militant Inquisitor
Byway Courier
Runaway Carriage
Solitary Hunter
Intrepid Provisioner
Inspiring Captain
Pack Guardian
Archangel Avacyn
Reaper of Flight Moonsilver
Wicker Witch
Haunted Cloak
Eerie Interlude
Quilled Wolf
2x Aim High
Vessels of Ephemera
Warped Landscape
So there are a few things to notice here – 1) there’s not a removal spell in the deck. That’s a problem. It meant that if I fell behind and I couldn’t get Avacyn on the board, and get here to flip, I was fucked. And with a curve this low, if I stumbled out of the gate on mana or on threats, I got behind quick. Since I mulliganed to five two games and to six in three other games, you could say that I stumbled out of the gate a little. I ran 17 lands for a total of 41 cards, so I don’t think my man abase was the problem, but you have to account for variance in deck construction, and I didn’t.
Another thing you might notice are the cards that are just really mediocre if you can’t get delirium online. Reaper of Flight Moonsilver is a house of delirium is happening, but not really worth a shit otherwise. a 3/3 flyer for five mana just isn’t where I want to be in this set. Paranoid Parish-Blade is fine, he’s a 3/2 for 3 that gets +1/+0 and first strike with delirium, but I’d play him anyway. Runaway Carriage is just bad, and I was playing him just to have an artifact that was easy to get into the graveyard. But I had Wicker Witch for that, and it not only counts for two card types (artifact + creature) but it probably takes something with it when it dies. Ditto Thraben Gargoyle. I should have only played those two artifact creatures.
I also shouldn’t have played Haunted Cloak just to get the +1/+0 on Militant Inquisitor. Again, a 2/3 for 3 mana isn’t great, but he’s still a playable 19th-23rd card even if I can’t pump him, and the ability isn’t worth playing terrible equipment. Autumnal Gloom can be a trap card, and I fell right into it. if you have delirium, it flips into a 4/4 trample hex proof dude, and that’s significant. But again, without delirium, it’s pretty unplayable.
Stern Constable just doesn’t have enough impact, and I didn’t have any madness to turn on, so he was a bad call. And Eerie Interlude – yeah, that’s a constructed card. It’s very fringe useful in limited, but I misread the card and thought it could blink a bunch of my opponent’s creatures, which would have been way more effective.
So here are the cards I should have not played, in retrospect –
Autumnal Gloom
Runaway Carriage
Reaper of Flight Moonsilver
Haunted Cloak
Eerie Interlude
Stern Constable
Without any equipment, Militant Inquisitor gets put on the chopping block, too.
Upon looking back at my pool, G/W is still the only deck to build, unless I wanted to try to go three-color. I had fixing in U/R and U/W, so maybe there was a Jeskai build. Let’s see what that would look like.
Topplegeist
Threaten Gargoyle
Village Messenger
Insolent Neonate
Daring Sleuth
Ember-Eye Wold
Wicker Witch
Paranoid Parish-Blade
Apothecary Geist
Drown yard Explorers
Pyre Hound
Archangel Avacyn
2x Stormrider Spirit
Press for Answers
2x Inner Struggle
Gone Missing
2x Catalog
Uncaged Fury
Ongoing Investigation
Vessel of Ephemera
This makes a 40-card deck with a very different game plan, and I don’t know if I can stall long enough to get a couple of big flyers out there, but that’s kinda the plan. Basically this deck wants to get Insolent Neonate or Village Messenger out on Turn 1, following that up with Ongoing Investigation. I’d likely include 2 green mana sources to activate the investigation, but that might be too greedy. This deck plans on everything but Topplegeist dying early, using its removal and tempo cards carefully to make my weaker creatures trade up in combat, and then use Stormrider Spirits and Avacyn as finishers. This deck won’t ever go as wide as the first deck, but it might be a little better. I do think it’s more resilient, because the creature base in general is better initially than the first deck. The GW deck’s creatures are much better if I can make delirium happen, but that doesn’t always happen.
Or since I have UW fixing, maybe the answer should have been Bant. What does that look like?
Topplegeist
Threaten Gargoyle
Loam Dryad
Daring Sleuth
Hinterland Logger
Moldgraf Scavenger
Obsessive Skinner
Wicker Witch
Paranoid Parish-Blade
Apothecary Geist
Drown yard Explorers
Solitary Hunter
2x Stormrider Spirit
Archangel Avacyn
Ongoing Investigation
Gone Missing
Press for Answers
2x Catalog
Vessel of Ephemera
Aim High
I think that’s probably the deck I should have built. Flyers are strong, and the Stormrider Spirit is a house, especially if I can flash it in on Turn 4 with Loam Dryad. The power of Catalog is something I overlooked, because I was so focused on the delirium beatdown, and that was to my detriment. There were several games I would have won if I’d had enough horsepower to tussle with my opponent’s slightly larger creatures, and while the Bant deck doesn’t do that all that well, it has enough more reach and card draw than the GW deck I built to make me think it would have at least won me the one more match I needed to make Top 8.
So there’s an exceedingly long-winded explanation of my scrubbing out of a Magic tournament that I should have realistically made Top 4, if not won outright. Thoughts? Feel free to post them in the comments or hit me up on Facebook.
John G. Hartness is a teller of tales, a righter of wrong, defender of ladies’ virtues, and some people call him Maurice, for he speaks of the pompatus of love. He is also the author of the EPIC-Award-winning series The Black Knight Chronicles from Bell Bridge Books, the Bubba the Monster Hunter series of short stories and novellas, the Quincy Harker, Demon Hunter novella series, and the creator and co-editor of the Big Bad anthology series, among other projects.
In 2016, John teamed up with a pair of other publishing industry ne’er-do-wells and founded Falstaff Books, a small press dedicated to publishing the best of genre fictions “misfit toys.”
In his copious free time John enjoys long walks on the beach, rescuing kittens from trees and playing Magic: the Gathering.
For samples of John’s ridiculous sense of humor, check out these free ebooks – http://bit.ly/1U8eASF
by john | Oct 21, 2015 | Magic:the Gathering
So a lot of folks who stop by here know that I play Magic: the Gathering. A lot. Like several times a week I’m at a local game shop playing cards, and pretty much every day I’m reading articles about the game, tweaking my deck lists, checking the value of cards, swapping out good stuff for bad stuff in my trade binder, etc.
You could say I’m into the game. Just like I was into poker before this. Yes, I understand that part of my nature and continue to posit that it’s better than drugs. But really, it’s just like drugs – I spend all my money on magic and therefore I don’t have any money to buy drugs.
Since I’m only a mediocre player of the game (leave me alone, the game is complex, and I’m not really all that bright), one of my favorite things to do is trade magic cards. I also will often buy collections from people and resell them for money, or sell cards when money is tight. This post is intended to help you maximize your fun and profit without being a dick to the people you’re trying to trade with. We’ll talk a little about buying and selling, too, but mostly about trading. If you follow these simple rules, you don’t have to worry about getting ripped off, and you’ll have a better time trading.
1) Tomorrow/yesterday/next year/last year values don’t matter – In most cases, it makes no damn difference if Bonfire of the Damned was a $50 when it was legal in standard, it’s a $5 card today. Nobody cares that Snapcaster was $20 when Innistrad was in print, it’s $60 today. Prices fluctuate, and you’re trading based on the current value of the card, not the recent value or the possible potential value. Live in the now, trade in the now. The possible exception is when you’re trading new cards for old cards. Depending on how bad your trade partner wants an Unlimited Chaos Orb ($100), you might be able to get 2 Snapcaster Mages ($120) for it, because there are fewer Chaos Orbs in print that there are Snapcaster Mages. So you may be able to get a premium for older, more rare cards, but that’s typically part of what determines the market price anyway, so it’s unlikely except in extreme cases. And don’t get butthurt when you trade away a card that goes through the roof the next weekend. Yeah. maybe somebody had extra information that gave them an edge, but you’ve probably been on the other side of that experience, too. Or you will one day. It’s all one big cycle, like my buddy Richard and my Circle of Cinder Glade, where we traded the same land back and forth four times in a weekend because we needed filler for different trades.
2) It doesn’t matter what site you use for pricing. Ever. I use Star City Games because I find it easier to navigate. If you want to use TCGPlayer, that’s fine, but I’m going to make you look everything up because I find their interface clunky. As long as you are on the same page, literally, then it doesn’t matter if you use SCG, TCG, eBay or the kiosk in the local game store. Just make sure you are both on the same site, because you don’t want to be valuing your cards from a notoriously lowball site and have your trading partner value their cards from a notoriously high-dollar site. That ends in drama. And nose punching.
3) It’s okay if you don’t want anything in my binder. My binder is small, and eclectic, and it won’t hurt my feelings if you don’t want anything there. But I also do a lot of trades just for value, so if you find something, don’t be shy about asking to trade for it. We’ll find a way to get there. Last night I wanted a foil Windswept Heath ($40) off a guy at the shop. He wanted a bunch of Unglued basic lands off me ($60), so when we locked in the deal for the foil Heath, I just poked around his trade stock until I found an extra $20 to get the rest of the deal done.
4) Don’t be a dick. Don’t be that guy haggling over a quarter. Nobody cares that much over a quarter. Don’t be the guy making fun of what’s in somebody else’s binder. They might only have enough money to draft once a week, and this is their draft rares. Or maybe they just put a binder together and don’t really care about trading (I don’t understand this mindset). But basically, trading is an opportunity for social interaction, often with new people. Take the time to be nice, to be welcoming, to say something nice about their binder or cards, point out something unusual or cool that they have – a funky foil that looks really cool, or something. Make a friend. Trading is a chance to interact with other players when you’re not actively trying to beat them in a competition, so make it pleasant. And really, don’t be that guy who haggles over quarters. Usually, if I get within a dollar or two on a decent-sized trade, I’ll let the difference slide. It makes it easy, it keeps the trade from getting bogged down, and prevents a lot of hurt feelings.
5) Don’t expect retail for your shit. This is a strictly selling thing, not a trading thing, but you’re not a store, so don’t expect to get the same price as a retail store for our cards. Retail stores have overhead – rent, lights, employees, taxes, inventory and much more – that you as an individual don’t have. So most normal people, when they look to buy a card from an individual, are going to expect a discount. A steep one. Personally, if I’m paying cash for a card, I look to pay about half what I could get it from a store at. So if I’m buying Snapcasters for cash, I’m looking to pay about $30. Snapcaster is in high and consistent demand, so I’d pay $40, but that depends on the card. I’m looking for a 30-50% discount if I’m paying cash, and that will move your cards quickly and without complaint. At the very least, and this will still take you a while to move, you should be cheaper than the cheapest place to buy singles online – eBay. If you aren’t cheaper than eBay, be prepared to trade at retail, or sit on your card for a while.
There are a few tips to help you trade magic cards more effectively and enjoy the process more, and move your cards for sale more quickly. Feel free to tell me how wrong I am in the comments, I don’t really read them. 🙂
by john | Dec 31, 2013 | Magic:the Gathering
As I’ve gotten back into playing Magic:The Gathering, it’s given me a way back to blogging, but I realize that not everyone who reads my blog plays Magic. Or has any idea about how to play Magic. And when my friend T was trying to learn the game, she wanted to know what book she could buy that would teach her how to play, and how to build decks, and all that jazz. That’s when I realized that there really isn’t a good beginner’s guide to Magic right now. So I figured I’d write one.
You know, along with all my other projects.
But I also thought that if I did it as a series of blog posts first, that would allow me to kill multiple birds with one stone. I get to write the Magic book I want to see available. I get my blog back on track and it becomes a place for people to find out more about me and my writing. And I get to do it in small enough snippets to fit it in between the other projects I’m working on.
So here’s the beginning. This is Part 1, the general concepts.
You are a Planeswalker. This is the intro to Magic:The Gathering. Four little words, that started a bajillion-dollar business. You are a Planeswalker. Right there in that sentence is a lot of information, and a lot of mystery. It tells you that you’re going to go somewhere outside yourself, you’re going to have an element of roleplaying in the game, and that there will be something new and exciting involved. Planeswalker – what the hell is that, anyway? Well, we’ll get there.
At its heart, Magic (or MTG) is a collectible card game. Two or more players (but for the purposes of most examples here, two) take on the role of wizards trying to destroy their opponents. Both players start with a predetermined life total, and they can win the game either by reducing their opponent’s life total to zero or by forcing them draw a card when they are out of cards to draw. That’s most of it. There are a few alternate win conditions that are dependent on cards, but those are the most common paths to victory.
As with life, there are plenty of examples in MTG that contradict the basic rules. There are advanced cards that literally change the win conditions of the game, but they are few and far between. What I’m going to try to do is present the normal circumstances of the game, and you keep hold of the basic understanding that if there’s a card on the table that says that the normal rules are suspended for a time, that card applies. For example, some cards say that if you have X amount of life (where X is typically greater than your starting life total) you win. If that card is in play, you have a third path to victory. But those are outliers and we won’t spend too much time on them.
So you have a deck of cards, and you have a friend with a deck. Those two things are all you really need to play Magic. Cards and a friend. And frankly, if you’re short on one and have plenty of the other, there are local game stores to help you acquire whichever one you’re lacking.
So sit down with your friend and your deck, and you’re ready to play. You each start with 20 life. Your job is to bash your opponent to zero while not allowing your opponent to bash you to zero. You do this by casting spells. And you cast spells by using something called mana.
Mana is the energy of the world around you. The elemental forces, if you will. There are five different colors of mana, each representative of a different style of magic. Over time, you’ll determine what type of magic best suits your personality and play style, and you will naturally gravitate toward those types of decks. Each color has a personality, and types of creatures that go along with it.
The five colors of mana are Black, Blue, Green, Red, and White.
Black is the color of death, disease and things that go bump in the night. Creatures like zombies, vampires, ghouls, ghosts and demons are typically black. Black spells frequently use your life total as a resource. You may spend life to draw cards, summon creatures, deal damage, etc. Black has a lot of spells that take life from your opponent and give it to you. Black also has spells of disruption, that take cards out of an opponent’s hand or destroy the creatures that they have out on the table. I play a lot of black decks, because I write horror novels. What do you expect me to play, decks full of sunshine and unicorns?
Blue is the color of rational thought and control. Blue is also the color of the sea and sky , so lots of fish, merfolk, birds and flying creatures. Blue has long been considered one of the most powerful colors in MTG, partly because it features lots of spells that let players draw extra cards. Having more cards than your opponents is a huge advantage in game play, so it’s never something that should be overlooked. Blue is also very disruptive, because it has counter-magic. Basically spells that just say “NO” to anything your opponent wants to do. I like to play blue because I like to be in control, but it’s sometimes considered an “un-fun” color.
We’ll get to the other three colors next time, because I want to keep these under 1,000 words and I babbled too much in the beginning. Anyway, I’ll try to do at least one of these Magic intro posts each week, and maybe by the end of the year I’ll have the guide written. If anybody has any hookups at WOTC, I need to know who can give me permission to use their trademarks like mana symbols in illustrations.
by john | Dec 27, 2013 | Magic:the Gathering
So I think of myself a something of a Limited specialist. At my local game shop (Get Some Game) we draft every Friday night, and there are a fair number of really solid players there. I’m not the best in the store, but I’m usually in the top 5-6. But Theros drafting has completely dumbfounded me. I have had only limited success in the format since the set came out (get it, limited success in Limited? See what I did there? It’s gonna get worse, I promise), winning very few of the drafts that I’ve played and rarely coming in Top 4 in our weekly drafts.
So there are few things that I wanted to talk about as my failures have continued to pile up, all of these being things that have kicked my ass over the months that we’ve been drafting this set.
1) Green/Red Monsters is pretty good, and often pretty open. I actually went against type last weekend and won a three-round draft going with Green/Red Monsters. I started out trying to be Blue/Red, but moved into Green after a Nemesis of Mortals wheeled. That means it went all the way around the table and made it back to me. When a really strong card like Nemesis of Mortals does this it typically means that no one is playing that color, so you can take anything you want in that color with impunity. From there I started picking up Satyrs. Not the piping one, I think Satyr Piper sucks ass, but all the others. Voyaging Satyr is an incredible two-drop in Green, giving a body and ramp. Satyr Hedonist has an awesome sac effect that lets you drop a monster really fast, and Satyr Rambler is just solid, a 2/1 body with trample for two mana. Slap a Dragon Mantle on him and you’re golden. So I rode the back of my Nessian Asps and my Nemesisesisesis to victory. And a Mistcutter Hydra, which is just really bad news for your opponent who is playing almost mono-blue.
2) Green heroic guys are trap cards. I have been such a sucker for Staunch-Hearted Warriors that I must have lost half a dozen matches because of them. The initial cost is too high, and they fall prey to Voyage’s End or Griptide just as easily as a more reasonably costed card. And don’t get me started on the Battlemaster. So Green heroic guys are to be avoided.
3) Minotaurs are fun. There are a fair number of minotaurs in the set, more than enough to draft a tribal minotaur deck, and the Kragma Warcaller often gets passed around the table, so he can be a fairly late pick. Grab all of those guys you can and just curve out perfectly from Deathbellow Raider to Minotaur Skullcleaver to Borderland Minotaur to Kragma Warcaller and smash face. Supplement with Harpies for flyer defense and it’s a thing.
4) Flyers are tough. Blue/White flyers is totally a thing, and when you add in that white has the best heroic guys, and blue has the best bestow creature, you can make an unstoppable air force pretty easily. Wingsteed Rider, Phalanx Leader, Nimbus Nyad, Fabled Hero, Akroan Hoplite, Battlewise Hoplite, Triton Fortune Hunter are all valid cards, and then at the top of the curve you have all the sphinxes for beatdown. Definitely a solid strategy, but a popular one, so you’re gonna have to fight for your cards and get a little lucky to get enough stuff to make it work. But one Phalanx Leader and a couple of Chosen of Heliod makes for a decent little army.
5) Pay attention to what’s open. I have such a problem with this, because I’ll try to lock in a strategy based on one rare, and I do better when I pay attention to the signals and just take what the table gives me. I have to pay more attention to taking early removal and bombs, then worrying about solidifying a strategy in packs 2-3.
So there are a few tips based off my mistakes in Theros drafting. If you’ve got anything to share, leave it in the comments!
by john | Dec 23, 2013 | Magic:the Gathering
So folks who sometimes stop by this little corner of the interwebs may have seen that over the past year and change I’ve gone back to an old pasttime – Magic:The Gathering (or Magic:The Addiction). I started playing again at LibertyCon because Brandon Sanderson invited me to a draft with him, and I had a blast, remembering how much I enjoyed the game all those years ago. That was the first step. Then I found a local game shop that I really like, and it was all downhill from there. I’ve spent a piece of almost every week since slinging cards, trading cards, and generally nerding out over chunks of cardboard.
For those that have never played, Magic is kinda like a blend of poker, chess and Dungeons & Dragons. It’s a collectible strategic card game set in a fantasy environment with awesome art and lots of smart marketing. And I’m totally hooked. I’ve primarily focused on my Limited play since coming back to the game (Limited is when you take a set of new packs of cards, open them and build a deck from what you find there). I enjoy Limited because the playing field is pretty level, and I can fall back on my game theory and understanding to lead me to some modicum of success. I’m a decent Limited player, but most of the major tournaments are Constructed format (Constructed is when you build a competitive deck from all the cards you own or can borrow and bring that to the tournament), so I decided about a month ago that it was time to step up my Constructed game.
In Magic there are two main ways to build a deck – homebrew something that you think will be awesome, or go on the internet and get the deck list from last week’s major tournament winner. After a year and change of homebrewing without real success, I moved on to Plan B and built a Mono-Black (with a splash of white) deck. I splashed white for Blood Baron of Vizkopa, because it has protection from white and black, which makes it very difficult for many decks to deal with. Once it resolves, it’s going to give a lot of people a lot of problems.
Last weekend was a Star City Games Super Invitational Qualifier tournament at Be There Games in Indian Trail. It’s not far from my house, and I’d heard good things about their events, and a bunch of my friends were going, so I decided to give it a shot. I got there and started to register my deck (bigger tournaments have you list the cards in your deck and then do random deck checks to fight cheating) and took a little advice from my friend Joe. Joe has had a lot of tournament success recently, winning two major events this year, so I listen to his advice. I was running one Prophetic Prism so that when I stole a card with my Nightveil Specter I could cast it no matter what. Joe suggested I cut that, because I’ll often pull land with the Specter and be able to cast the card anyway. That allowed me to add one more Blood Baron, upping the threat level of the deck considerably.
Unfortunately I had no answer for the other glaring error Joe pointed out in my deck. When I was tweaking things I cut back on my white mana sources from eight to four. I cut the Godless Shrines and kept the Temples of Silence, which meant that there could be times I was going to have mana troubles. I took a live and learn attitude to this mistake and hoped it wouldn’t screw me too badly. It didn’t crush me, but definitely ended up being relevant.
Round 1 – I played against a very nice guy from Atlanta (which set my tone for the whole day – all my opponents were very cool, which made the day way better) who was playing a Mono-red aggro deck. This deck feels on the surface like a terrible matchup for me, and in fact I had play-tested with Taco in a small tournament the week before and got my ass kicked by his mono-red deck. My Round 1 opponent had a couple of rough draws, but was still able to get some early threats on board, but I managed to push through his pile of early attackers and bad draws and beat him down 2-0 (Magic tournament matches are best of three).
Round 2 – Another nice dude, one of the other oldest guys in the room (he even had a few years on me). His name was Stephen, and he was playing a white weenie deck (lots of small creatures that kill with a swarming strategy). He couldn’t get anything going and once I resolved a Blood Baron (which has protection from white so he had no answers for it) it was pretty much game over. Game 2 I think I killed him with a swarm of Pack Rats. 2-0 and I was feeling pretty good about my deck and myself.
Then I got to Round 3, and found out what a problem my deck could be when I played a mirror match (a mirror match is what happens when two players piloting the same deck get matched up against each other). And my opponent had a lot more tournament experience than me, and more experience with the deck, and had better draws to boot. So a better player with more experience and better draws beat me in less than fifteen minutes out of the fifty-minute round. I was still in the running at 2-1, but couldn’t afford to lose another match.
Round 4 I clashed with Chris, another nice dude from Augusta. I don’t remember what his deck was, but I remember they were very good matches. Beating him was far from easy, with back-and-forth matches and the first time all day I went to Game 3. We were 1-1 going into Game 3 and it was going to come down to who got their deck going first. I got the advantage and took down the match, but don’t remember any of the details of the match.
Round 5 should have been better than it was, but I got stuck in the mirror match again, against a better player again, with more experience again, and got my ass kicked again.
Since I was eliminated from contention for Top 8 and major prizes (major for Magic, but first place was $400, which is a good day no matter how you look at it) I went ahead and dropped out of the tournament and entered a booster draft. Back in my Limited comfort zone I went 3-0 to win the booster draft and redeem myself a little for the day.
by john | Sep 10, 2012 | Appearances, Magic:the Gathering
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.
