magic: the gathering poll

not really - a card in play is already "paid for", so to speak. you do it when your opponent has a creature out that he'd rather not lose. like if it's just some generic 3/3 he might just trade, but if it's like some bomb-ass creature that you can't deal with otherwise, it's worth a shot

if there were a culture of bluffing they might think 'hmm is this a bluff or does he have a good card' instead it's like 'hmm this guy probably doesn't know the rules, but maybe he has a good card'

ehhh, I would never think that. even people who just learned how to play don't just blindly send their creatures to death

yeah I mean it depends on the situation and creatures, I guess. ime even when someone is doing this and I think they prob have a card in their hand, I'm still gonna block it - that card in hand would prob be used eventually anyway.

kinda surprised no one is repping for artifacts either, feel like theyre p cool

ive been trying to work on a card pick up deck w/ivory tower and library of alexandria

what sets are you working w/?

cards from the first sets up to revised and then the early expansions like arabian nights, ice age, legends &c

are you playing w/ cards irl or online? I would so love to play w/ those old school cards irl even though I know that's just bizarre object fetishism and the game's the same regardless.

you guys ever try magic workstation? lets you play online with any card ever released, very cool program

ya like a year ago me, rev, gravel and sometimes a few others were playing fairly regularly online. I think we all got busy at the same time tho and my internet connection became too unreliable.

i'm just playing around with it now...so cool that you get to view the old world champion decks with cards like Llurgoyf and Man o' War

it's pretty dope, esp when you download the card art

are you playing w/ cards irl or online?

we play with my friends old cards. i think he stopped collecting in like 97 but he was p into it before that so has binders and binders of cards. i put my deck together online before we play tho

that's pretty cool, even his crappy cards are super rare at this point

http://www.cockatrice.de

Most folks I know have migrated from Magic Workstation to this very similar freeware program, since MWS hasn't been updated since 2005 and yet is still shareware w/ locked features etc.

that's good to know actually, since mws got fucked up on my computer and was always buggy as hell. does it do card art / sealed games?

are there a bunch of people online to play? usually no problem finding a game on mws

it does card art. does not do sealed pools yet to my knowledge, you'd have to find another tool to generate those and then import them into cockatrice

there's usually plenty of people on the server, though it's pretty much unmoderated so i dunno what type of people you'll run into on there. i only use it with people i know.

welp, MWS just crashed for the 3rd time in a row, guess i'm in

hmmm well if anyone itt is up for some games this weekend my gf is head over heels in schoolwork and I will be amazingly free

rip mws long live cockatrice

gah i hated blue decks. my first deck was a white one with serra angels, so really liked whoever said upthread that killing with them was very majestic ^^ second was a red/black one. i think i've had decks of every color but blue (that's how much i hate this fucking color... hate playing againsst it, hated playing with it too)

been trying it out - had no idea MWS was 'dead' so to speak but it would randomly crash like all the time so I hated it (plus the deckbuilding interface is really goofy)

so far, so good. I wish there was (and maybe there is?) a better way to filter cards when deckbuilding (like, show me all the type 2 legal cards that deal with the graveyard) but otherwise it's been great and doesn't crash, so that's awesome

programs like that are really good for me since it allows you to get bad decks out of your system and realize if something will or won't work before you actually go out and buy or trade for the cards

yeah the deckbuilder is the part that they haven't caught up to MWS on yet. i use http://www.magiccards.info advanced search for extreme card filtering options

FORK

dual lands

fork was so sick; was def in the statis/burn deck

if any of you have the original dual lands sitting around those are worth like $40-100 each now depending on which ones

I have exactly zero mtg cards left irl, but my cards were in such bad shape regardless. I just had piles of cards around my room, I was like scrooge mcduck w/ crappy fallen empires commons instead of gold pieces. but I mean, I was 9.

sold everything including a blue mox & lotsa duel lands for $400 iirc in 1999

i did briefly start buying some new stuff just to futz around w/ in 2008 or so..those are all...somewhere...

i had a deck with a bunch of banding creatures because no one really knew how banding worked so they couldn't play against it properly

most of the early sets were amazingly well designed in retrospect and I think that's why this game is still so playable 20 years later

but I think banding was the first-wave of shitty card abilities

banding was in alpha

some of the early sets are pretty suspect though. Legends only exists because some guys at WotC wanted to make magic cards for their D&D characters. Fallen Empires was so weak that it almost sunk the game commercially before it really got started.

haha yeah I mean alpha cards were super balanced, the first expansions were a real mixed bag in comparison, shit like this

http://images.magicmadhouse.co.uk/images/products/medium/1298911919-36779600.jpg

yeah the problem with banding is it's fucking impossible to figure out, and then when you do it's not that great.

I think if the game had started out w/ the early expansion set as the card base instead of the very solid and balanced alpha/beta/revised base, it prob wouldn't have caught on the way it did.

sets

yeah definitely the best thing about the recent sets, like the past 4 or 5 years maybe, is that they've really gotten rid of the terrible unplayable cards like that. when you crack a booster now you're gonna get at least 10 cards that you might consider playing in a sealed deck or a casual constructed deck, with the old sets you'd get maybe half that.

though it did make the good cards that much more exciting when you did open them

w/ rev and gravel we played some of the 'newer' sets, and by that I mean we played up to like invasion and masques

even those are suspicious imo and after that I just feel like an 90 y/o white dude listening to a rap album or something 'what is this, this isn't magic'

I mean the planeswalker cards? wtf

i gave up on the game (for like the 4th time) when planeswalkers came out.

invasion block was dope imo

i guess it's because i'm a bit younger than folks here and got to play w/ invasion, odyssey, etc when i was still a kid but i definitely like those sets just as much as the super-oldschool ones if not more

Way back in the day of NetDraft and Apprentice, we used to do Arabian Nights/Antiquities/Legends/The Dark drafts which were completely unplayable. You know all the overpowered stuff like Library of Alexandria, Mana Drain, Nether Void, etc. but you guys are right on with how incredibly bad the rest of those sets were. I remember the lands that just said things like "all your legends gain bands with other legends" and didn't even produce mana!

IMO set design only started to get "good" around Mirage. In fact Alliances is really the first expansion set that wasn't like, completely terrible. Even Ice Age had a ton of cards with these walls of text that ended up doing almost nothing. In fact I remember Necropotence going completely unnoticed because nobody could figure out what it actually did! (obviously it turned out to be the best card in the set and maybe one of the greatest cards ever)

yeah i think that's all pretty on-point.

yeah they were sorta designing sets on the fly until then, w/o really doing the leg-work to make sure things were balanced. even after they started doing it, people always found cards and combos to exploit that you wouldn't have thought of w/o a careful analysis.

Mirage was the first set they made with sealed/draft in mind iirc

mirage block was a blast to play

I actually liked the planeswalker idea a lot at first but they basically ruined it by A) making them all stupidly powerful, and B) making them "mythic rare", so there were much less to go around

Basically all my problems with the game now can be summarized with this card:

http://www.examiner.com/images/blog/EXID21272/images/Jace,_the_Mind_Sculptor.jpg

IIRC this thing went up to nearly $100 a pop before it got banned. I remember somebody showing me this on a spoiler list and thinking that it was one of the best cards they've ever printed, then actually seeing it and realizing that it actually costed four instead of five and was even better, needless to say every blue deck needed to play it

i just didn't get it--they were always so good at making powerful cards that were balanced and had some kind of drawback, and then they made planeswalkers which literally had no drawbacks.

yeah it's like someone just wanted to fuck up the game also it doesn't even make any sense, I thought you were a planeswalker, how can you have your own planeswalker pet

yeah jace tms was a mistake, they basically designed it to be an all-powerful card, and it was, and people started quitting the game over it so they had to ban it in t2.

the planeswalkers they've made since then are much more build-around cards and less general-utility have-to-play-it ones, which is a bit of an improvement. i don't really mind planeswalkers but they feel more like a marketing triumph than a game design triumph, since they finally managed to create cards that are techy enough to appeal to competetive players and splashy enough to appeal to casual players at the same time.