When I started my adventure into gaming, in particular board games, one of the first things that I started with was Magic The Gathering. I was at a company where we would play it during lunch hour. The games were just random casual play for a a while until we started dabbling in commander, and even then it was still very casual decks. No broken combos or anything like that, and it was a great experience.

Then as people changed jobs and all of us went to new places and had kids, that made it harder to play. It came down to drafting new sets and maybe once a year days of playing commander. Now it is something that I don’t do anymore and I sold my decks and cards for the most part. But I do miss it, so what are the things I miss about the Magic The Gathering and what don’t I?

Deck Building

This is definitely an area that I miss about Magic. I love planning out decks, even if I didn’t use all the greatest cards in them, or create the greatest combos. In fact, I would pretty often figure out ways to create decks around specific cards or mechanics that weren’t that great just to see how they’d work.

In particular, I remember a very expensive card that I built a deck figuring out how to put it in play. My co-worker basically called it a countdown deck. You had a certain amount of time to beat it, and if it built up just enough, it went from great health to you dead in a turn. Or a coin flip deck was another fun one. Did it work? Not that well, but it is fun to create a deck around an absurd mechanic like that to get it as good as possible.

Blind Buying

This is something that I like and don’t like about Magic. And it’ll actually tie into the next one as well. But I like it because there is something about grabbing a pack and opening it up to see what you got in it. See if you got a crazy card that you can build a new deck around, or a staple that allows you to make an existing deck better.

On the flip side, you get a lot of trash in there as well. It is smarter and better to buy cards one off than blind. But the experience of splitting a booster box three ways or two ways and just having an evening of sitting around and opening packs, that is great. Especially because we weren’t trying to maximize our money off of it.

Common Cards

However, with blind buying does come one issue, and that is that you just get a ton of cards out of it. I think I had several thousand common and uncommon cards that were worth a penny each. So that is annoying. Either you sell them online as a lot, trade them to a local game store, or just store them. And I stored them for a long time and that takes up a lot of room. Less than you might think, but also more because you open up a few boxes or buy a booster pack when you walk past the rack at Target, you add up fast.

That is the huge downside to buying blind. I want to get that feeling of opening up something great, but because you get so many cards, you mainly get junk. And now you need to do something with those junk commons, which can be making a pauper deck.

Magic The Gathering Events

This one is also a mixed bag because most of the time it is fun. But also, most of the time I would prefer to do it with my friends not an official one. Why, because at an official one there are always some people who take it way to seriously.

With friends you crack open some packs, draft some cards and have a good time with it. In fact, we’d normally instate the rule of you keep the rare card from your pack at the end of the day. That doesn’t happen in an official event that is drafted, so if there is a great card and it doesn’t work for your deck you take it because it’s worth money. That isn’t fun, but that is how it works.

Final Thoughts on Magic The Gathering

I miss playing Magic The Gathering, I miss having that group that we could sit down at lunch and play. Or get together on a Friday after work, have some pizza and knock out some games. But I also don’t miss it in some ways.

And what I know about Magic’s process now, I am glad, in some ways I got out when I did. When I left Magic the Modern Masters set was a new thing. A chance to get those awesome older cards that if you came in later, like I did, you didn’t get from a random blind pack as you weren’t buying them then. But it was expensive, and they have just added more expensive sets since then. And they aren’t a one off thing they are more and more common.

I still do own a few decks though, not that many cards in it, but some fun ones. I debate from time to time if it is worth keeping them. That said, I haven’t played in years, but some of the EDH/Commander decks that I like, I kind of want to keep. And maybe, someday, I’ll play them again.

Do you play Magic The Gathering? What is your favorite way to play? Or what colors did you normally play, I was a Simic or Izzet player pretty often.

Send an Email
Message me on Twitter at @TheScando
Visit us on Facebook here
Support us on Patreon here