Magic: The Gathering, My Newest Addiction

I thought I'd kill two birds with one stone and write a post about what has recently taken over my weekends and also explain why I haven't been as active on here as of late.

Magic: The Gathering is a collectible card game made by Wizards of the Coast (originally an independent company, now owned by Hasbro) where you play as a planeswalker casting spells and summoning creatures and such against another player or players doing the same. Each player has a deck of (usually 60) Magic cards which are a mix of lands (what you use for mana to cast spells), creature spells, sorceries (spells you can only play during your turn), enchantments, artifacts, and instants (spells you can play at any time). The rules are far too complex and convoluted to explain here but if you would like to know more about it then check out the official website.

The game came out in 1993, I started playing in the late 90s but stopped for the most part by 2004. I recently rediscovered my collection of Magic cards from then and when I mentioned this to my pandemic partner they wanted to learn to play. We've dove rather wholeheartedly into the Magic world, starting with my old collection and then getting new cards each weekend since.

Wizards of the Coast sells starter kits as well as premade decks, and beyond that you can also buy a variety of different sorts of booster packs. It can become an expensive hobby quickly, that's just shy of $60 USD in packs in the photo above. They're kinda like baseball cards that you can also play a game with, the cards you pull from packs are of varying rarities, utility, and value, and there's a huge market in the sale/trading of individual cards. I recently sold one of my old cards for $250 USD but that's not something that happens very often. None of my cards from the packs pictured were 'worth' more than $5-10 and only a couple were in that range.

Pulling a really rare and valuable card from a pack is always nice but that's not the main reason for buying packs typically. Players use the cards they get from packs to build and modify decks and the combinations and strategies that go with this are near endless. Part of the fun of Magic is figuring out all the fun ways you can get cards to work together to win or at least annoy the hell out of your opponent.

As you can see from the last two photos, I've had lots of 'help' opening my packs and building a new deck this weekend. There's 5 different types of 'basic' land that generate the five colors of mana which is used to play the various spells. In the photo above I was in the process of building a green and white deck as can be seen in the color of the cards (cards are referred to and colored to match the color of the mana used to cast them).

New cards and abilities are introduced regularly so that adds another incentive to buying cards. It can be lots of fun experimenting with the different ways cards and abilities can be used. Even once you get a deck built you often wind up tweaking it to improve it or make it able to deal with the new stuff so it's a bit of a never ending process. I hadn't played in 12 years or so before we started playing so I still have a lot of catching up to do before I'm fully up to speed on all the stuff thats been introduced.

There's tens of millions of Magic players at this point, so surely there's at least one or two here on the hive. Any of y'all play or have played in the past? We stayed up past 3am last night playing, if you're ever wondering why the colonel isn't very active on here, especially on the weekends, odds are good we're binging on Magic games again. On that note, I should probably go tweak my new deck before we get back to playing. Y'all have a good one and stay warm out there!

(I apologize for the blurry photos but me and my phone camera were not getting along yesterday)