MtG

[TheAnarchitect]

Hmmm. My Heydey was during the Mirrodin lineup, when my was living on student aid and my friend owned the game store. I picked up new games expressly to have things to buy from his store. MtG was my third most expensive foray. I still have hundreds of wizkids pirate ships, and the big mistake was a few warhammer 40k armies. So there are worse hobbies to pick up. I think at one point I accounted for 5% of his store's total sales.

My best deck was a white/artifact deck that centered on a card that gave both players 1/1 token artifact creatures whenever they summoned a creature. Giving your opponent bonus creatures seems like a terrible idea, but nearly every other card I used had some effect when an artifact came into play, giving me absurd health, modular tokens, and other horrible feedback loops. It was never quite up to the reigning tournament decks (a little slow to get going sometimes), but was second tier for sure and had the ego advantage of being my own design.

[DaveYanakov]

And if you think the ante rule is bad, some of the people I played with early on had been with it from the start when they played with ironman rules because they didn't know cards would be worth money later on. The rule was simple. When a card gets removed from the game, tear it in half.

[rmdashrrootsplat]

And if you think the ante rule is bad, some of the people I played with early on had been with it from the start when they played with ironman rules because they didn't know cards would be worth money later on. The rule was simple. When a card gets removed from the game, tear it in half.

Fun times... We used a cross-cut paper shredder. :D

[Nexus Trimean]

FUCKING ELF DECKS. Now that that is out of the way, My brother was heavily into magic in middle school and high school, untill someone in his gym class stole about 200 dollars worth of cards. That's the price of all the booster packs, no idea what the cards were actually worth. Crappiest part is, it had to be one of his friends, no one else played, or would have wanted the card or even known they were there. He quit after that, and i go what was left of his collection. i was about 8-9 at the time. i started playing again in Highschool after the collapse of Magi-Nation, I ran prebuit decks for the most part, Green Replicators, and i bought myself a pre-built sliver deck that owned a lot of face. When Shadowmor came out i built a scarecrow deck that looses a lot but i still love to play (when you get 2 http://magiccards.info/shm/en/260.html what else can you do)
In recent years ive played a lot less, few of my friends still play, and i dont live anywhere near the ones that do.

Also, I Play 40k, my plastic crack addiction leaves little room for TCG's.

[morvelaira]

Haha jackpot.

I remember a few reactions like that last time I went through things.

[BinoAl]

Just picked up a basic starter deck today :) I picked it because the card shown in front was a powerful red color monster, and that happens to be my favorite gameplay style :) Looking through it, it's a little odd. It has a lot of monsters with the Undying ability, dominated by red and green cards. Aka, fast to build up your mana pool from the greens, but has the powerful monsters of red. I think I made a good first choice :)

[MoRmEnGiL]

Can I stop you right there? I played magic for almost a decade, and honestly it is such a fucking waste of money.

Absolutely amazing game, but newer sets kept alienating me more and more, plus sets kept rotating out so fast I couldn't even use my decks some months after I finally nailed them down.

Oh shmucks. Anyone up for magic workstation duels? :P

[Andellmere]

I never liked any of the new cards. I used a red/green Kavu deck and played against friends. Mainly because the only tournaments I have around here are the 'buy four booster packs and make a deck!' style.
If you're not interested in playing in tournaments, Bino, you may want to try laying hands on some earlier cards. Any of the landwalk abilities (i.e. islandwalk) are fun and so many people use new cards that can't stop that. And some of the early red/black cards could really mess someone up in the right combos. Pestilence and the Artifact Urza's Armor or Sanguine Vampire with Sadistic Glee come to mind for ways I got slaughtered. Rampaging Kavu, Crown of Flames, and Explosive Growth was my favorite combo to use when I could set it up.
I'm with Mormengil on one thing. Some neat stuff in a couple of the newer sets, but the old sets, before everyone started worrying about making everything 'even' were much more fun. I don't think it's possible to win a MtG game without creatures anymore. Which is a shame, since there were some (really) old black decks that punished your opponent for having creatures by wiping them all out and dealing direct damage.

...And now I want to go dig out my decks and find someone to play. Dammit.

What is this 'Magic Workstation' you speak of Morm?

[Poppycocks]

I used to love MtG... from afar. At first it was nearly impossible to get in my area, then I realized that even if I bought a pack or two... or a thousand, I'd never have anyone to play it with.

By the time that phase passed, I made a shocking revelation: "Keeping up with this is like trying to catch the horizon".

I still wish to play, but I'm not willing to sacrifice any money on it. At all.

[TheAnarchitect]

Yeah, after my first few legitimate decks, I bought a whole bunch of cheap land cards. This was at University, so I had access to an HD color printer. I printed out the cards I wanted, cut them out, and spray-glued them to the cheap cards. I never passed then off as real or used them in "official" matches, but it made casual play a lot more fun to simply make my own cards.

Yeah, I was a MtG pirate.