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[Mesa]

A brief search didn't bring up any immediate results about the existence of a thread for this (though I'm convinced that one exists somewhere in here but is probably like 20 pages deep into General Discussions*) so I felt like making one isn't inappropriate, at least.

MtG's website if for some reason you never heard about this well-over 20-year-old trading card game.

This is meant to be a catch-all discussion thread for all things Magic - physical, digital (MTGO, the newly-announced Arena, XMage, Cockatrice...), casual, competitive, draft, commander, lore, spoiler season and whatever else comes up. Newbies (yours truly included**) and veterans alike are welcome.


* - or in Other Games, as the case may be, since I wasn't sure where to put this. Can move if necessary.

** - I've been casually interested in the game since around Battle for Zendikar (so since mid-late 2015), but actually buying into it is a bit beyond me (it's not very popular in Poland to begin with, and the nearest store, at least according to Magic's website, is like 30km away from where I live, an hour-ish bus drive. Couple that with my social anxiety and the fact I'd most likely have to use English with strangers in public and you have me, playing solely online via XMage, and very briefly Magic Duels in the past.


A quick note regarding upcoming set spoilers/leaks (at the time of writing, this being for the Ixalan set): Use the spoiler tags when linking to images or discussing those until the set actually releases properly (ie. not the prerelease).
(For Ixalan, this is September 29th 2017. So until then, keep it in spoiler tags.)

[Flying Carcass]

Personally I'm looking forward to Arena, should be fun.

Magic Duels has been a staple of my gaming for the last two years and I've collected all the cards for it. I'm currently using a blue/black artifact deck and a blue/red/black discard deck, both quite fun.

Blue/Red/Black Deck:

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

1 Ruthless Sniper
2 Sanitarium Skeleton
3 Lightning Axe
1 Jace, Vyrn's Prodigy
1 Wharf Infiltrator
1 Sigiled Starfish
1 Heir of Falkenrath
1 Shadowstorm Vizier
2 Smuggler's Copter
1 Pull From Tomorrow
1 Censor
2 Nagging Thoughts
1 Murderous Compulsion
2 Avacyn's Judgement
1 Reckless Scholar
2 Drake Haven
2 Catalog
2 Fiery Temper
1 Forgotten Creation
2 Curator of Mysteries
1 Diabolic Tutor
2 Archfiend of Ifnir
1 Horror of the Broken Lands
2 Never || Return
2 Smoldering Marsh
2 Sunken Hollow
2 Sulfur Falls
2 Dragonskull Summit
1 Geier Reach Sanitarium
2 Evolving Wilds
5 Island
5 Swamp
3 Mountain

The idea is to play cards that discard (or have the option to cycle) to trigger effects on cards such as Drake Haven (spawn 2/2 flyer), Wharf Infiltrator (spawn 3/2), Archfiend of Ifnir (apply -1/-1 counter to all enemy creatures), and Curator of Mysteries (scry). The cards discarded should either have madness (so the card can be played while discarded) or can be returned (Sanitarium Skeleton) or used (Never || Return) from the graveyard.


Blue/Black Deck

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

3 Bone Saw
1 Thraben Gargoyle
1 Pyramid of the Pantheon
1 Consulate Dreadnought
2 Inventor's Goggles
2 Renegade Map
2 Battle at the Bridge
1 Consulate Skygate
1 Servo Schematic
2 Alchemist's Vial
1 Cartouche of Knowledge
2 Esperzoa
3 Tezzeret's Touch
1 Artificer's Epiphany
2 Metallic Rebuke
1 Mechanized Production
1 Thopter Spy Network
1 Tezzeret the Schemer
2 Reverse Engineer
1 Wind-Kin Raiders
2 Bastion Inventor
1 Noxious Gearhulk
2 Gearseeker Serpent
1 Herald of Anguish
1 Barricade Breaker
2 Sunken Hollow
2 Drowned Catacomb
1 Inventor's Fair
2 Foundry of the Consuls
2 Evolving Wilds
10 Islands
3 Swamps

The idea is to get some cheap artifacts on the board to help pay improvisation costs to get some of the more powerful cards out relatively early on. Tezzeret's Touch also provides a means of having a 5/5 creature on the board early on. Esperzoa + Alchemist's vial is a nice combo for drawing cards each turn, or alternatively I can send bonesaw back to the hand and put it back in play for its zero mana cost. Mechanized Production, aside from providing an alternative win condition, is also good to play as it can spawn copies of an artifact each turn (very good with alchemist vial).

[NullForceOmega]

Most MtG discussion occurs in the tabletop games thread in general discussion, if your intent is to curate a thread here in other games you might consider dropping a link to that thread in your OP, and maybe dropping a link to this thread over there.

That out of the way, I've never been big on MtG but I do have a very nice green/colorless deck which contains all three of the Eldrazi primes, otherwise it is a fairly typical mana-ramp deck.  It is very, very effective against pretty much everything.

[TheDarkStar]

I've played a fair bit of magic. I think the silliest deck I've ever seen was one that one of my friends used for Commander games that everyone called the "group hug" deck because it had tons of cards for letting everyone draw more cards and get more mana from lands. He actually won a few times when people were unexpectedly milled to death (iirc there was a card that let people draw X cards, where X was the amount of mana spent and where everyone could contribute to the cost of the card and then everyone got greedy and ended up milling themselves).

[Robsoie]

My first experience with MTG was probably 20 years ago when a friend in our roleplaying gaming group bought a couple of self made small decks to show us that card game stuff.
Fortunately for our wallets , that card game didn't hooked us at all for some reason, it didn't even triggered my interest.

Years later, Microprose released Magic the Gathering that was a great card battle game, setup with the Shandalar plane in which you explored in real time a big map , had to convert towns to your cause and do some questing, defeat bunch of enemy carrying their own decks and some trying to conquer back your towns, explore various location to obtain more cards etc... to make the best possible deck you could in preparation for the final duel against an overpowered opponent.

It was a fantastic game at the time. Though it didn't managed to get me interested in the MTG card actual business, as my hobbies were very far from this kind of stuff, thankfully again for my wallet

And a few years ago, i found some discussion about how Microprose during their time had made so many good games before their unfortunate demise, and there were people mentionning their Magic the Gathering (and the expansion i never played with) and pointed that there were people that were modding it to include much more content.
Following links i discovered there were 2 projects : Manalink and Shandalar, Manalink was the dueling engine that was part of the original game and Shandalar was a reactualisation of the actual adventure game.

Found this rather interesting to see some people were still keeping this good game alive with their work despite all those years.

But on the same place i discovered there were fan-made programs that allowed to play the actual MTG card battle, though i didn't cared much about those cockatrice, MWS or xmage as i am not an online playing guy, there were 2 other programs that kept my attention as those weren't player vs player or online based, but focused entirely into player vs AI.
The names were Forge and Magarena, that after playing with them a bit found that both were truly great.

And they're still being developped nowadays, i'm not linking as i'm unsure if this would be allowed by the Bay12 board rules, but you can easily google and find them if interested, they're really impressive piece of work and very well worth for people wanting to try without having to deal with other people or even for those testing their decks before going into competitions and stuff.

There's even a website named "Project Firemind" (again easy to google) that is using the AI from Magarena and allow people to have their deck played in AI vs AI.

[MrRoboto75]

Found this rather interesting to see some people were still keeping this good game alive with their work despite all those years.

MtG is honestly quite a breadwinner for game/comicbook stores, at least around here.  Draws in a lot of repeat customers and there's often MtG events held multiple times a week.  New sets creates crowds.

[Mesa]

Spoiler: The full Ixalan spoiler is out, it seems. (click to show/hide)

Can't quite comment on it given my game knowledge (or rather, relative lack thereof), though.

[Flying Carcass]

Woah, Tishana Voice of Thunder looks like it could be an incredibly powerful card.

[ThtblovesDF]

If she wouldn't cost 7, then yes.

Still, relevant creature types.

[Culise]

I haven't been playing beyond family in quite some time, but I kinda want to put her into my Damia EDH mill deck, actually.  In EDH, that kind of prohibitive cost is not quite so prohibitive anymore.  On the other hand, I can't really justify picking it up for a one-game-a-year thing.

[Rolan7]

I haven't played in probably a decade, except with friends once at a con.  I had a friend... well, a friend of friends, really, who became an official judge.  And the one time I visited his apartment, in college.  It was literally covered in cards.  They were everywhere.  And I was astonished, in a good way, but I was too shy to ever tell him.

In high school, I had a favorite card: http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?multiverseid=23164

Later it was Whirling Dervish in the Shandalar video game.

I'm green to the end:  Larger numbers, amirite?
Destruction, Nullification, Lies, ...White.  Idealism empowered.

Life was never "meant".  But if it was, it would have been green.  Primal.  Fierce and honest.

[Mesa]

So far I feel like all the colors have something in them that I like, though I seem to lean towards Red much more heavily than towards other colors.

Something about "simple yet effective" and "straight to the point" tactics appeals to me. Also I value freedom and creativity a lot which lines up with Red's philosophy.
Also I very much enjoy dragons, which are very much Red, so there's that.

[Culise]

For me, white and blue.  My very first deck, as well as my favorite for the longest time, were those colors.  As a child, I loved the knight errant, but I also loved the itinerant scholar.  Justice and virtue mixed with knowledge and inquisition (not in that sense, except in white/blue Azorius); all that jazz.  It also tended to play well with how I tend to play card games at large: someone once had to point it out to me that I tend to build even the most highly aggressive of archetypes or strategies with unusual amounts of defensive or control elements.  As such, the disruption provided by blue and the defensive tactics from white tend to appeal to me strongly.  I'm simply not aggressive enough for red in particular, as amusing as it can be to watch me dither and stumble through running someone else's Izzet decks.  Red is aggression and passion, both of which tend to flow through my milquetoast hands like water.  Black's selfish ambition tends to leave me cold and Green's emphasis on instinct and rejection of higher reasoning tend to clash with my blue tendencies towards reason and rationality, but I can play decks I've built with them somewhat effectively: the Damia deck I mentioned earlier is one such example, and amusingly, I also consider it my "cleric" deck to facilitate every other players' turns where my main EDH deck, White/Blue, is basically all about punching things in the face with glorious enchantment power.  That arguably rather turns everything above on its head. 

As for my favorite card back when I started?  Serra Angel, without a doubt.  I had precisely one copy which I found in a local shop and bought for what pocket money I could scrounge up.  In my white/blue flying deck, she shone.  On the blue side, Tim was probably my favorite.  It's probably ironic given what I said above, though; if WotC were remaking him, they would (and did!) make him Red.  Otherwise, Counterspell, Celestial Convergence, and Hush (the latter being my first introduction to Rebecca Guay's work) also rank.  Yes, that Celestial Convergence...

[Flying Carcass]

So I was playing Duels of the Planeswalkers 2014 and came across this card and quickly realized its potential to do big damage in landless decks:


Now, the decks in DoTP 2014 are all preconstructed so I couldn't use it there as anything more than some random damage creature/player damager. Powerful, to be sure, but I reckoned I could make a nasty deck based around it in Forge (a fan-made MTG program with AI and most cards). Using various mox artifact cards to generate mana without lands and some cheap scry/draw artifacts to find the charbelchers (as well as some 0 mana artifact creatures to block attackers), the charbelcher deck I threw together is a nasty deck capable of very fast turn 2-5 kills (though I suspect I could make it faster if I tinker around with it).

[TheDarkStar]

My mental picture of that is someone picking up their entire deck and throwing it at their opponent.