trading cards you like

King of Posters
125

Nowadays, its a pretty important distinction. Because, there are soooooo many cards out there.

I mean, if you are gonna play modern, you never know what the heck you are going to see from the other player. It doesn’t matter how cool you think your deck is. And you may have spent a long time looking through sets and piecing together your neat idea. It is probably no good against many decks possible in “modern” because there are mechanics out there for which you will have zero answers to. and if someone has actually taken the time to read about the bestest and lowest cost cards, you could stand absolutely no chance and be dead in a very low amount of turns.

I dunno, maybe I’m kinda salty on this. But I don’t find it fun to randomnly pull a “modern” match.

When I went to my first local event, I did a “modern” event. I like the deck I took, a lot. I will never forget this one deck I went up against. the guy had a card which allowed him to turn any permanent on the board, into any card type. And i had no way to directly remove that card. So he would turn my lands into artifacts and then all of his creatures were anti-artifact. As a result: I had no more than 3 mana, at any given time. So, I couldn’t do much. It was a reality check for me that Modern is kinda dumb if you are just doing your own thing.

I think standard is a much better format, simply because it has a dramatically smaller card pool but more importantly, a much smaller set of mechanics in legal play. They also balance mana costs to keep the game pace slower (I like it when games last longer). And they changed the rotation setup, now cards last longer in standard. So you don’t HAVE to spend as much money to keep a deck idea legal. (As long as when you start, you build your deck with cards which are early in rotation.) There are still probably a few too many cards in standard. But It is way more balanced and its possible to actually have some predictable success with a homebrew idea, because you know what mechanics you will see. The meta is more complicated than ever, however. So Its still kind of a painful game. A little less could be more, I think.

Some of the other formats are much smaller, as well. So I would probably feel similarly about them. If I were to learn about them and try them. And if you are in an actual community, its possible to do games where you pick a set or a couple of sets, and build decks from that.

I don’t actually play much magic.

Anyway, I like this card. It has a lot of utility. But in particular, is a great way to kill plainswalkers:

I’m also a fan of “Fling” which was reprinted and is currently legal in standard:

I have a deck which is all about sacrificing and/or gaining benefits off the death of Yours or the opponents.

1 Like
126

All of the official non-rotating formats have so many weird kinds of hate cards that can disable entire decks that it’s kind of a weird proposition. Who is going to feel good about saving up for a set of fetchlands only to have a Blood Moon thrown at them and have them become basic mountains from time to time? One of the reasons you don’t see as much pro play at Modern is because it has so many cards that it’s impossible to have the answers to most/all decks, and so pros feel like there is more randomness/luck inherent in whether you win those than in Standard, where the problem space is much more limited.

I guess that perceived randomness works both ways though: Modern gives you such a rich pool of cards to work with that you can maybe come up with a weird janky deck that glides past the blind spots in your local metagame by using very specific hate cards. But does anyone actually want to create a deck that is so specific in what it targets that could be terrible in any other matchup? Probably not.

Anyway, come to Pauper, the only non-rotating constructed format where buying a single of each staple card costs $150

1 Like
127

Yeah, while we still played our format was a sort of “courteous vintage”: bring cards from whatever era you want, since a couple of the old-timers didn’t want to keep up with the modern sets, but you’d better exhibit some restraint when it comes to excessively broken cards or really unfun disruption mechanics, 'cause everybody has an asshole deck or two like Eggs or Narcomoeba Dredge or Carl’s stupid Myr Battlesphere deck that we’ll pull out whenever the games get a little too tournament viable, and after a few rounds of being as degenerate as possible, everybody’s ready to play a bit more casually again. Then again, this may only have been as viable for us as it was because we all were usually more interested in goofing around than playing competitively, and a group with more Spike-style players would have found us insufferable.

128

I am glad as someone that played Magic for 5 years any tournament talk is uncomprehensible.

1 Like
129

Wow, what? What is this? Automobiles?
Also, what is this, er… second resource?

130

I’m in the same boat. I like a wide selection of cards to play because I think the stuff you can do is cool, flavor and mechanics wise. Not sure how the formats are called nowadays, but what used to be a typical 1vs1 Vintage match necessarily evolved into a very reduced, hyper-focused metagame around the strongest cards, making it kinda boring again.

I have a theory that you could make Magic feel fresh again while keeping the Vintage card pool if you played many vs many matches, but I’ve never been able to test this yet.

131

Kaladesh introduced Vehicles which are artifacts that can become artifact creatures by tapping one or more creatures with a total power equal to the Crew cost, and there have been more Vehicles printed in Aether Revolt and Ixalan. The added cost of needing to tap those creatures allowed them to discount the mana costs for the power/toughness you get out of them, which made them rather powerful in the meta.

(pls print more vehicles at common wizards)

I’m guessing ferrets is referring to Energy. Most Energy-related cards grant the player one or more Energy counters, which you can then spend to gain more powerful effects with any energy card. Probably the simplest example is Harnessed Lightning. You play it and it gives you 3 energy counters, and then you can spend as much energy as you want to deal that much damage to a target creature. So it’s a 2-mana bolt if you use the energy you are granted, but you can also just use 1 energy if you need to take out a 1/1, have 2 left over, and then when a bigger 5/5 threat comes onto the board, play another copy of the card and use 5 energy to take it out.

Energy is a really strong mechanic in Standard right now because of how flexible it is, and it’s one of the top-tier decks at the moment.

While you can make a $10 deck that is technically Vintage-legal, no one would ever take it seriously as a “Vintage deck”. Formats are useful because they give you an idea of the average price and power level of decks you can expect to play against faced with a group of strangers, and “kitchen table decks” adhering to no specific format are really hard to gauge the average power level for unless you’ve got a regular play group to form your own mini-metagame with.

I think Commander as a format is a really good place place to showcase heavily themed decks (provided there are enough cards to offer support for it), and it provides a pretty good framework for being able to play a bunch of cards from throughout Magic history in a context where power level and price is kept fairly reasonable. Having your commander provide more consistency and support to the rest of your deck’s strategy is just the cherry on top, really. I’m not so much of a fan of the multiplayer and politics because I’m bad at being social, but otherwise, I like the format a lot on paper.

3 Likes
132

And here I am still bummed out that there are literally only three cards printed with pictures of or references to ferrets

2 Likes
133

Managed to get some old Netrunner CCG booster packs on the cheap. This one is cute as heck:

10 Likes
134

Gimme that Mark Tedin Doom.

135

Yeah my takeaway from several evenings of research is that this game is obscenely hard and a vortex kept alive by raw money

My thx for the longposts up there though folks

1 Like
136

I always cared a lot more about theme and art when building a Magic deck than effectiveness. Not theme as in focusing only on a particular creature type or mechanic. I needed more variety than that in my decks.

One thing that kept me interested in the game is that the creatures often avoided generic fantasy. If it had been all dragons and elves, I would never have stuck with it.

Here is another creature that I like, Assault Zeppelid:

Assault_Zeppelid
Assault_Zeppelid1000×725 487 KB

I think the key to spending too much rather than way too much is to play only with people who have invested at roughly the same level. Which always worked for me, as I didn’t care for my very limited exposure to anything other than very casual play.

money_the_wasting

3 Likes
137

I will say, they’ve done pretty well over the years here
Sure, it looks like they raid every tropespace going but there’s summat in the water at WotC that helps them
Very into the Phrexian horrorbeings

2 Likes
138

Yeah, the other thing which I think would greatly benefit magic, is to change things so that cards aren’t so expensive. The only reason I can see for the current sales model, is the false idea that you buy random card packs and build your serious deck from pure luck.

But nobody does that. People use internet tools to construct a deck and then buy the exact cards they need, individually. the 90’s are gone, man. And its super frustrating to “build” a deck and then see that it would cost $200 to buy those exact cards from a third party, which is the only way to do it. The structure of how you get into building a deck, is based on a third party economy and means your ability to be competitive is directly tied to your money.

packs are only used/useful for “sealed” games where the gimmick is-----you build from sealed packs. and then people who have some sort of mental switch which gets flicked, from opening packs.

making cards more available (official supply chain for individual cards) and cheaper for the various rare types, would have zero affect on pro tour, how the game is played, overal integrity of the brand. Profits for WotC would probably increase, because more people would be buying official product (when you buy that $12 card, WoTC didn’t make that money. They make a couple of dollars from the pack it was originally pulled from), Rather than going to third parties for individual cards. Lower prices would mean Teenagers wouldn’t be price locked from affording to play cool stuff. Would mean anyone wouldn’t be price locked from affording to play good stuff.

The only question mark would be third party shops: would they be hurt, about the same, or more profitable? I bet they would at least be about the same. Card prices would be lower for the upper end-----but more would be sold. and part of that is because they would even be available. No Magic shop has every card, let alone, 4 of them for any person who may want to buy them.

2 Likes
139

How do all their videogames handle artificial scarcity

It’s… it’s bad isn’t it

140

How many booster boxes do you think game stores crack for singles in search of that chase mythic rare? This is no different from any other gacha/loot box monetization scheme, but the third-party store is the whale doing the pack opening instead of “the customer” because there is an expectation that the card shop will have singles of all the worthwhile cards on day one and that is the only option available to them.

141

I’m sorry, I’m not sure I know what your point is, exactly.

I’ll say that yes, that seems to align with my point? Indeed, its a stupid system, a stupid way to sell cards in 2017. There isn’t even a point to the boxes anymore. You don’t have to buy them and the card odds are carefully tuned so that you don’t usually get much from them. There is a guy on youtube who I just watched, he has opened like 10 boxes from a few different sets. and only two of them ended up containing cards which put the total worth over the retail cost of the box.

Since we don’t have to buy them----Wizards of The Coast may as well set up an official supply chain so that customers can order individual cards through their local stores. Shake up the market by selling cards for flat rates which are overall much lower as you go up in rarity. WoTC would make more in the long run and Magic would be a better game.

*Imagine if you could go to your local Magic shop, hand them a deck list, and a week later (if the cards weren’t all already at the store) for about $60, you could have any 60 card deck!

1 Like
142

I’ve been wondering how much the 3rd-party store makes Magic more palatable than gacha systems in videogames because it provides an outlet for chasing down specific items. If Magic had been able to block card resellers entirely, would they be worse off?

1 Like
143

Fantasy Flight sells all their card games in fixed boxes. This is a really good model.

1 Like
144

I pay 15 bucks to get three copies of twenty Netrunner cards every 1.5 months or so. The competitive scene is super welcoming and kind and (outside of the initial buy in) no one is priced out due to card rarity. I’ve never played a CCG but I really enjoy the open possibilities of deck building, trying other people’s decks and having literally the entire card pool available to me in the living card game model.

1 Like