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Day Discovers Magic’s Douchiest Deck
May 30, 2013 by dracs
Felicia Day recently starred as a guest vlogger on Geek and Sundry vlogs and in her vid she talked about a new geeky discovery which has her in its clutches; Magic the Gathering.
Ah I remember when I opened my first booster pack. The feverish hunting through for cool cards, the meticulous need to categorise them all and then to boast about the rare ones! The shiny syndrome is strong in this one.
Though I have to say I never before thought of the white deck as "douchy". I guess if the white deck are arrogant jocks it makes the black deck goths. What are blue, green and red?
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:L i remember that much enthusiasm… and i still have the gollum thing with vampires traded 3 cards for a pretty bad vamp the other day :/
Blue are nerds, green are hippies, and red are the crazy survivalist people that keep weapons in their nan’s basement.
I figured that out before I quit playing the game, once I realised I was doing math instead of having fun, and paying through the nose for it.
Yeah, playing Magic is like a cross between Fluxx and following the stock market. Every card your opponent plays has the possibility of radically altering the game, and knowing which cards to use (sorry, pay large sums of cash for) is like trying to make money daytrading. I like the strategy of deck-builders, but I’ll take LCGs over TCGs any day of the week.
It’s essentially the same, but the cost doesn’t spiral out of control. It’s scheduled and predictable (and loads cheaper).
I am pleased to say I am recovering : my last game of Magic was during Alara, and my last WOtC RPG session was also a long while ago. I am definitely more a Dominion person now, if I absolutely have to play a deck-building game.
Way back when I still had that enthusiasm Felicia Day shows, when the world was young, I almost felt MTG was like role playing games : You’re playing a powerful wizard, summoning creatures and casting spells… no wonder Wizards of the Coast bought back TSR. It was Richard Garfield’s dream come true, after all.
How the mighty have fallen… Or risen, as the case may be. To me, the “magic” in Magic is simply gone, as all roleplaying elements have been replaced by nonsensical combos that have no base in the game’s background, only cold numbers for logic. It doesn’t make sense anymore. It has become an elitist game, made for well-funded number-crunchers and hopeless min-maxers, and they’re hoping to pander to the video-game crowd with the latest generation of products.
Speaking of such a description for a game, I cannot help but think of D&D4. What a disappointment… Oh, well, it was a long tima ago, and we should not dwell on past editions. There are other games, and future prospects.
There’s definitely a “collector” element to every game in this hobby, but some focus on the collecting at the expense of everything else. Magic is like that. I like the collection element to be much more subdued in my games (I have enough “stuff” in my life).
If you want a deck builder with more of an RPG feel, and you don’t mind going scifi over fantasy, I think the reboot of Garfield’s other much better card game, Netrunner, is pretty good. Each corp/runner has a pretty unique playstyle that gives the game a lot of personality but still remains balanced. The complexity of the game required to accomplish that can be a bit daunting at first, but it actually starts to feel much simpler than it is after you get a few games under your belt.
Hopefully it will stay good for a while, but so far the expansion packs have been pretty enjoyable (not super hard considering they’re basically rereleasing the old game with different art and a few new card ideas). I think Garfield’s biggest problem is that he’s just too damn good at designing these things. They inevitably take off and become the property of a large company that cares more about milking the enthusiasm than making the best game.
I don’t think we need to dissociate Garfield and the big bucks companies that much… first, it’s not a sin to make money and run a business, especially if your product is enjoyable. Second, Richard Garfield has rightfully enjoyed money from his games as part of WOtC, and he left Wizards of the Coast of his own accord once his fame and fortune as a game designer was made. He still contributes to MTG from time to time, and MTG hasn’t been stolen, nor has it become useless as a game : many people enjoy it. Not me, but many people. Success doesn’t lie.
In any case, I will give Netrunner a try if I get the chance ! 🙂
I could never get into Magic. For me it just didn’t have a soul and felt more like plopping cards down for the hell of it.
I much preffered games that were interesting and weren’t just plopping cards down.
Babylon 5 ( the greatest CCG EVER )
Kult ( A great game untill you met somebody that had no life and had built a deck that broke the game )
Lagend of the Burning sands ( Legend of the 5 rings spin off )
And loads more. It’s just annoying that they no longer exist and yet Magic does. Which is a shame when it’s so much worse than most of the others were.
Magic has the benefit of being (ultimately) owned by Hasbro which gives it a guaranteed spot on the impulse-buy shelves of every big-box retail outlet in the world right next to the Pokemon cards (licensed by Nintendo, made by Hasbro/WoTC) and the baseball cards. Watch those shelves over time and you’ll see a lot of CCGs come and go, but Magic and Pokemon are a constant. That’s what you get when you have the capital investment of Nintendo and Hasbro behind you.
I don’t complain as much personally. WoTC is like the US Games Workshop. They basically keep a lot of independent stores open. Three of the stores I like to play at get more of their income from Magic cards than they do from GW stuff (or any of the games I actually play). If Magic went away, those stores would be hurting.
MTG is a license to rpint money… But to say that its success is only due to Hasbro is missing the point entirely.
It’s a good, simple, competitive game with great mechanics. Some people (many people, in fact, is you take into account every other game on the planet) prefer other games… That doesn’t make it bad.
Magic started out as a little unknown game sold in some geek stores, next to minis and RPGs. In fact, it’s solely because of teh success of WOtC (buying D&D, of all things) that Hasbro bought WOtC in the first place !
It’s not that Magic is bad. The core mechanic of the game is great. It’s that the core mechanic can only be messed with so much before you run out of ideas for cards. Then the next step is to wipe out all of those cards and start over, which is pretty much what WotC does. You can spend hundreds (if not thousands) of dollars building the perfect deck only to have it become completely irrelevant in about a year.
The game is fun and well-designed, but that only accounts for its original success. Most other CCGs die out after a while because the capital investment required to completely reboot a game every year or so is beyond the reach of most companies. When FFG finally runs out of ideas for Netrunner they’re not going to suddenly print a brand new, totally re-rebooted edition and let all the old cards expire. They’ll just quietly stop printing new expansions and slowly let the old ones sell out before the game disappears again. Hasbro’s money does have a noticeable impact on MTG’s success.
These are all fun games, but you have to accept the inevitability of their shelf life. Most CCGs are printed for a few years and then disappear completely. MTG is remade over and over again, every three expansions represent essentially a new edition. It’s not that it’s the best CCG ever made and the other CCGs are inferior. It’s that MTG is a well-maintained and -marketed brand with money behind it and distribution channels that get it on shelves in stores other games can’t reach. That’s part of business too, and it comes from being owned by Hasbro.
I think it’s fair to say that the quality of the game suffers a bit, if you consider economy part of game quality. The reason I don’t play MTG is because it’s too expensive, and I don’t want to learn a whole new set of cards every year. I’m not accusing WotC of doing anything wrong, but it explains why the games mentioned by tasker are gone and MTG isn’t.
You’re absolutely right, but MTG only got there because it was good, and because it was the first of its kind (although collectible cards weren’t new). Withuout the Hasbro money ? Well, I think it would still be sustainable.
Of course it would. Investment is one thing, but if the game required constant subvention, Hasbro would drop it in an instant for something that generates more profits.
I have not played MtG for years since I dropped it for YGO that I was already using more time and money for. Now I have dropped YGO for CFV but I’m thinking possibility of trying my hands to MtG once again by getting one those new event decks (most likely Boros one) and using it as basis for standart deck althought I do have lot of older cards that I could use if I don’t want to play standart. After all I would play it casualy without any need to go competive.
I haven’t played magic in a long, long time. Back then, one had to hunt all over to even buy the blasted packs. My first packs were purchased with hushed voices, “limit x per customer” from boxes hidden under the store counter from a shop employee who had to ask another employee what they were.
On the plus side, my ancient cards have done quite well for me in the past year after I dug them out of storage. Two Black Lotuses (Lotii?) alone have paid for my upcoming wedding. And I’ve doubled that with the other cards. So…. hurrah for MTG. It’s done ok by me.
I’m wondering if the boxloads of unopened OOP 40k stuff will treat me half as well. My ambitions there always far exceeded my available time, so hopefully it’ll pay off.
Ah MTG ….I stoped playing after making myself the “ultimate”deck (the artifact draw cards deck from the ursa cycle). After winning 5 games in a row on turn one the challenge of the game somewhat dissipated (pun intended).
For me I tottaly agree with mpopke I stick to the relaunch of Netrunner Its a very interesting game and the stategy is very rewarding. And when i sell al of my magic i got a buget to keep me going for quite some time.
As for favorite CCG I stil play Doomtown/deadlands one of the best ever in my opinion. if they ever relaunch that game they got me, hook line and sinker. I mean who can resist vampiric dancehall girls 🙂
Yes… That’s why they reboot the MTG game regularly : old cards that were extraordinarily powerful, and weird combos between new and old ones. There’s still a power creep, though.
I found that rebooting to be annoying since it meant to during time lot of my collection was unusable in standart and it felt like artifical way to force buying new cards. This is why eventually I started to prefer banning and limiting certain cards over dropping entire sets worth of cards and that had some effect why I eventually stopped playing MtG. That would not be so big problem if other formats were more common than they currently are.
My friend built a Zur’s Weirding Deck…..look up the card…better yet here it is…..http://gatherer.wizards.com/pages/card/Details.aspx?multiverseid=83343…..yeah look at that stupid op card mix that with some health regain cards never……also……Slivers……
Man I love that woman. So much fun. You guys should try to get her and/or Wil Wheaton as guests someday.
It’s like a lot of these kinds of hobbies though, where its almost a recipricated thing between the player and the company. You can blame the company for making a product OP or else highly desireable by making it stand out from the rest of their releases in some way, but ultimately most players want to win and happily buy the product in order to do so. I’m not saying I like it as its a cynical trend seen all too often in games like Magic & 40k (for example) but players have to take at least some of the responsibility for choosing how they play these games. For example you can limit the amount of rares or uncommon’s in a Magic deck if you wanted greater balance etc. Ultimately it’s your game.
In a way the more invested (emotionally or competitively) you become with a game, it’s innevitable you will spend more money or time on it. The question is does x company exploit that or do they serve the growing demand of the majority? Players always want new toys, so it’s not enough to simply re-release the game. It needs expansions, options etc if the game is going to survive and grow. So, from my lowly perspective, it’s a double-edged sword for any games company where there’s a need to refresh the game and with something like Magic its been going for a long time, so a lot of more, perhaps, balanced ideas have been done with previous sets. Once you develop a product to be different in each incarnation (while using the same base mechanics) it becomes very difficult to change the formula – all you can do is up the ante each time after a certain point.
I find games like Magic and 40k have become more akin to an arms race, which is sad, but also I think innevitable given their popularity, or even BECAUSE of their popularity? This can be why some other games are more “balanced” as a result, because they cater to a different part of the same niche market that’s become fed up with such cash-fueled franchises, but these companies also know/hope most players will expand a faction or collect a different one once they become invested in the game.
Personally I try not to care too much and only buy what I feel like, or else I change some selection rules to suit how I wish to play. I’ve got a few Magic cards and like the Deckbuilder’s toolkit as a product. One of those a year, a few boosters and maybe a set deck pack or two is more than enough for me and opens up many different types of decks to build and play if I fancy a game. In a sense the more basic you keep Magic I think the better an experience it is from a balanced POV, which can be said for a lot of these types of game. However the inner uber-geek (I’d wager akin to an unhealthier, cave dwelling version of Nietzsche’s ubermensch) often shines through and desires more of the initial thing that they love – be that a game mechanic, fiction/lore or else POWER! Bwa-hahahahahaha…
We all know power, or rather the desire for power, corrupts, so its innevitable that company’s only mirror that corruption in their product/prices, feeding/creating the demand and renewing the cycle ad infinitum. Yet as individuals, geeks and players – we all ultimately decide which path to follow. Adventure? Excitement? A Jedi craves not these things 🙂
If you’re fed up of constant arms races or continual edition changes – that’s probably a good and potentially very liberating thing…
Taken from my Zen Book of the Geek – not available in all good book shops 😉
Mtg the crack cocaine of card games. ..
I think you’ve mischaracterized Magic subatomica. The first hit of crack is usually free.
I am waiting for the likes of Angelic Accord and Archangel of Thune to be released in Magic 2014 before I make my Modern deck. It’s all about gaining life, bringing 4/4 angels and pumping up all my creatures with +1/+1 counters.
With the likes of Serra Ascendant, Soul Warden, Soul’s Attendant, Suture Priest and a few other creatures you are looking at an updated Soul Sisters deck that should do well.