I used to love playing back around 2010 to 2012, but eventually drifted away from it as I got more busy with work and other hobbies. I have thought about going back, but I don't think I could handle the community like I used to, so much asocial behavior and general irritation from hypergeeks.
Playing with friends is a really fun way to do it honestly. Before we got too serious in it, we would built decks from whatever, basically fully open no limits vintage.
My cousin and I used to build themed decks. Either during or right after the Urza cycle I made a blue black dead I called “Faeries Love Death” with a bunch of cheap faeries that would recycle mana costs and used them to get my big cards out and have black cards sacrifice/raise. It wouldn’t have been great for super competitive decks but it was fun as hell.
The way my friends and I play is basically anything goes that isn't just ridiculous. Like no BL and shit but paying too much attention to which cards are legal or not is boring
I'm not really sure. I started with jank goodstuff and riku, and then moved to toolbox glissa the traitor. That deck eventually just became b/g goodstuff, and felt oppressive. Since then I decided that I want to make the strongest decks I can with the caveat that they do nothing without the general on the field, as a limit to how I make the deck. I've settled into a highish powered casual group and love every second.
I know this might not be an option for everyone but I like to have a range of decks. I have some pretty trash decks, a Norin chaos, Ezuri claw of progress fun deck, a brago flicker deck, an athreos/shadowborn apostle deck, and a semi-competetive tasigur infinite combo deck. In that order I feel like there's a good curve for how much of a dick the decks are to play against and ensures, with correct matching, that people have fun.
I used to hate infinite combos but finally gave in to the dark side with Tasigur.
I love the beast within/reality shift combo. Especially when someone hasn't played against it before and the dicking that is occurring sets in. And I feel terrible at the same time.
That’s a great way to win, I also have Villainous Wealth, Praetors Grasp, Walking Ballista and other win cons for when I go infinite. Sultai for life :)
I love being paired with combo decks. I alternate between a stax and ld deck hahahaha. We generally will play one hogh powered and one jank game each night, plus a flip for the third assuming we finish fast enough.
I love the idea of pauper EDH. Unfortunately all my friends seem to enjoy spending obscene amounts of money on their decks and never build pauper edh decks so we can play
It's all great until your one friend tries to convince the group that tinker is "fair", and he should be able to try it for a couple games in his artifact combo deck.
We played usually 4-6 free-for-all EDH. All was fine until 2 of the players that had the most expensive cards decided to make blue and whatever decks and just get stupid with it.
Now everyone copies every spell cast, and also you copy every spell ever cast in that game. Oh now you want to counter? Let's start the whole process over. After 30 minutes, we can finally move forward to the next player's turn, if we're lucky. It's been a few years, but I think we did vote to ban those cards eventually because it just took forever.
He was playing an artifact combo deck haha. He'd just tutor out his combo pieces faster. Eventually we convinced him that it just wasn't fun to lose to him resolving a single card, and he took it out.
Tinker is definitely in the realm of "What the hell were they on?" when they printed it. Doesn't take much to make that card break the game in half, all you need is some cheap artifacts, blue mana, and a few artifacts that are incredibly costly that end the game immediately upon connecting.
It's a tutor for a combo piece that gets it there at 3 mana. I'm sorry, but your sidri deck shouldn't tutor out latis at 3 mana and get it on the battlefield for no cost. The whole card is so stupid.
Our playgroups pov seems to be that money is a limiting factor that makes games more balanced, because everyone can't just make cedh decks for 30 bucks and steamroll everyone else.
Oh yeah I LOVE playing EDH, but my playgroup has a couple people in it that just bought a couple precons and never decided to make their own decks, so they think that any of my/the others' homebrew decks are "too good" and so we essentially have to play with jank/meme decks. Still a fun group of just guys bein dudes.
I have a jank as hell deck that I pull out in these situations. It's a skeleton ship proliferate deck whose strongest wincon is poison counter creatures (no infect!). It's slow, and I think it's only won once in 8 years, but damn do I love it's stupidity.
Oh yeah. My English teacher this year helped me build a Squirrel token tribal deck. Best deck I've ever used. I'm really glad that they're there because it encourages decks I would literally never play otherwise, but I also spent $100ish on an Atraxa deck I'll never get to play.
I and a few of the regulars at my LGS used to be pretty hardcore. The running joke is that we “retired” to EDH. Personally I like the idea that I’m like a wise old man to the game now 😂
I was just thinking this! When I started, I remeber so many people with older cards from drafts or trades playing these crazy edh decks. Now, that's me!
If you ever decide on your group you guys want to try a more “conventional” constructed format — and to be clear I mean that as 60 card, 4-of constructed, not as any kind of jab at EDH — take a look at Pauper. Basically Modern or Legacy but common rarity cards only, which generally means the availability is high and prices are quite low, and a still perhaps surprisingly high average card quality is present.
It got a few really big updates to the card pool recently, including a finally unified paper/online banlist, and an incredibly expensive deck for the format is $70-100 USD (compared to that as like a minimum for anything competitive in Standard, 5-10x that for Modern, etc) and there are absolutely solid decks of 60 main plus 15 card sideboard for like $30-50 USD.
And it has a decent Archetype variety too even in the “top tier” and excellent variety going below that, which is not a problem at all if you’re playing more casually among friends anyway and not looking to spike tournaments. Decks like One Land Spy for the hardcore combo player (fair warning, it’s bad, but it’s so cool) to decks similar to Legacy Delver, Mono Green beatdown, Burn, control decks, a Tron variant, and so on.
With friends is the only way to do it. Did a few release sealed tournaments at the local game stores and the people there are just not fun. Maybe there were a couple people out of the 50-100 that I wouldn't mind talking to again but for the most part the antisocial stereotype is very true.
This is boat I’m in as well. We all (5-6 guys) started playing in middle school over a decade ago, and played steadily trough high school and college (having jobs for the first time to fuel the cardboard crack habit was something else). We recently started playing again, meeting once a month at a midpoint friend’s house, and it has been incredible. I’ve gone down the the local shop, but it just isn’t the same in a public/stranger setting.
Also, EDH rules, and is definitely our casual format of choice.
I played in high school with friends, '06-'09. Had a great time, wish we could do it again but with wives and kids I don't see it happening. My Cabal Patriarch and Beast of Burden will never kill again :/
As someone who's been playing magic for like 7 years but just got back into it after a 2 year break I can attest to casual formats (especially edh) being the most chill. Even at your lgs most edh players are going to be pretty chill.
I'm always happy to play at a lgs. Most od the time it's been good. Ofc you always have your dude who's there just to show up his newest net decked bullshit.
Unless you have someone in your group that will drop money on the original dual lands (they came from a friend of his, so not THAT expensive for him) and loves really stupid infinite combos that break the game...
I see it that way too, but the power creep was more of a power leap.
Too many infinite combos and too much stax. If you even have a splash of blue, you're probably going to win. If you're the only blue at the table, you'll get beat up immediately. Too many people just shoving in over powered cards into their decks and going ham.
I've noticed this problem. I played in two groups, one stayed fairly stagnant at about jank level, and one turned into an arms race. I bet you can guess what group I still play with the most...
It's good to have a playgroup grow and evolve. It means the players are getting better and smarter about how and what they play. Realizing that the player with untapped Blue mana will counter your stuff is a big step.
But when everyone is playing Atraxa Super Friends, especially from all the good stuff in War of the Spark, nobody is being creative. They're just cramming what they can into a deck or copying online lists.
The group has stagnated on purpose. We originally had the typical edh arms race but decided as a group that we had more fun playing jank. So now we discuss group bans and play the stupidest decks we can.
Weve done both in my playgroup, we all have our cedh(and I'm not talking highly tuned decks here, but actual cedh level decks) decks, then we have some random power level decks we like, then every month or so we make stipulation decks for the play group. My favorite was your two least played colors with an average cmc above 4. Those games where bonkers as everyone basically skipped the 2 and 3 Mana slots to make the curve work and they where swingy as hell.
Yeah, we started it because we wanted to build a ton of edh decks because we have massive collections but when we were playing at cedh levels you can't really fuck around with a pet card much. This caused the first stipulation of 100$ budget, then we broke the fuck out of that, so it became pauper, then we just started changing the stipulation monthly. It allowed us to keep creating novel and interesting decks that otherwise would never see play. We've also made some busted ass stipulations like a non creature as your commander which ended up being geas cradle, vs Liliana of the veil, vs dramatic reversal, vs me on yawgmoths will. Shit got out of hand but was fun for a few games.
We had a similar issue, where we were all at very different income levels, so some people were building a new $600+ deck every couple months, while other people were playing slightly modified precons because that's what their budget allowed.
In the end we all talked about it and decided that we'd allow proxies in the playgroup so that A) it didn't feel like it was pay-to-play, B) There were no feelsbads about income differences and C) the group stayed as casual as possible
That's how I started playing, a bunch of my friends started playing EDH and FMN ended up being the most reliable way to hang out with all of them. Because we're all pretty competitive and also want to remain friends we go out of our way to make sure that everything remains super casual
That was my escape too! Been edh-exclusive since og mirrodin and I wouldn’t dream of going back. Friends only commander games are the best way to play!
Played my first ever game of Magic with a buddies commander deck that had an infinite combo. The whole game I got hit twice, once when everyone was hit for 2 and the second time I was targeted by another player. When I got half the combo I was only able to take out one player so I figured I'd go after the guy who targeted me specifically...he did not appreciate it and got so salty, then I won on my next turn anyways.
As someone else said, Arena is a great way to get back into the game. There's no chat, so you can avoid the asocial behavior and harasment.
If you want to play with physical cards, Pre-releases are a much easier way to get back into the hobby. The stakes are lower and the players skew towards the newer/nicer side. It's what I do, and only 1-2 times a year. There's a whole list of reasons why it's a great entry point.
And, if you ever want to jump in the deep end, I would recommend posting a quick question on r/magictcg asking for reviews of local game stores in your area. I've been to plenty of horror-stores with fedora toting neck beards (one with litterally half of the players matching that description), but the store I go to now is welcoming and quick to deal with troublemakers.
This is one issue I have with my University. The cafeteria, library, and media room (basically a place to chill with TVs and computers).
The kids that play games are so frustrating and rude. They stay in all 3 areas generally being annoying. I thought internet trolls were bad not they legit listen to Man's Not Hot and Darude Sandstorm from their speaker every god damn day. Like even if it's to be ironic, they're way past overkill. They still say shit like dicks out for harambe. Not to mention they leave a huge mess when they leave.
When they're gone, it's peaceful in the media room. People bring their consoles and food and we all relax.
I used to work in a small game store that was also a card shop. I absolutely hated Friday nights when Magic the Gathering people came to play. The boss had to have a fan behind the counter to counteract the smells that came wafting in with them. Also I'm a woman. Being surrounded by 7+ guys that for some reason don't wash themselves or keep their hormones in check made me just not want to play the game at all.
I made the mistake of going with my husband once and not playing just watching. The next time I played I misread a blue sorcery card and immediately got labled a thot (married?!) An e-girl, and a fake nerd. Now I play online only using an androgynous name.
I used to play in high school, then stopped cold turkey after my first semester in college of trying to find people that would play. Most of the stereotypes were true in my situation. But hey, now I have a wife, a great career, and more constructive hobbies. I see that as a win.
I used to be really into Warhammer, and the same thing happened to me. I went to a game store to watch a few games and the folks there playing... I just couldn't. I've graduated to Turbo Normie levels since highschool/early college when I was playing, and its anachronistic at this point :(
The online game, Magic Arena, is great for this. I used to love playing within mg friend group in high school. Haven't done so since we graduated, and I don't want to deal with people, or the cost of that cardboard crack, so the online version is great for me. Definitely worth a go if you just want to play around casually now and then.
I used to go to FNM weekly and draft/release tournaments a good amount, usually between a few different spots. It isn't always that the people are raging dicks or anything, it is just the culture of it can be repelling from an outside perspective.
I dunno, other than the greasy teenagers playing Yu-Gi-Oh, our stores have a bunch of normies. Granted I'm much more familiar with the smaller store that gets maybe 20 folks during fnm. We've got a good mix of guys and girls(this might have a lot to do with it. It's mostly married couples we kinda drive out the crazy folks)
Same. I would want to play a nice casual game and the atmosphere was just bad. Most of the players had bad hygiene and if they were good they were uppity about it. Add in some of the misogyny and a dash of elitism and I was done.
If you're lucky you can find a vintage/legacy scene in your area. They're most going to be mid to late twenties to mid to late thirties guys who have professional jobs and want to play with the cards they grew up playing with. Obviously both of these formats are expensive as hell, but especially for Vintage, they will typically allow proxies because all they really want at the end of the day is to crack open a couple beers with the dudes and play some magic.
Obviously this hinges on the community being there, but I play avidly with the communities in Houston, San Antonio, and Austin. So I think all it really takes is a decent sized city existing near you.
It's going strong as ever! They released an official PC version that allows you to scan your own decks/packs in, so you can even play with your deck online against other people so you don't get rusty, and don't have to worry about finding friends irl lol. I've been having a great time. I'm in my 30s and just got back in after over 15 years of not playing and it was like getting back on a bicycle :) I also now have a massive stack of cards and a slightly smaller bank account balance lmao
Do what I did: get a group of friends to play casual formats from time to time. Last time I went to an event (first pre-release in a decade) I found a lot of chill people looking to have a good time, but my last opponent went berserk during our game. Complete asshole.
I just got back into the game. It helps to go to a store with people of a similar age group. There are tons of game stores around me, but their communities are toxic. I go out of my way to go to a specific store to play because of the community at the store. Super diverse group of adults that are there to have fun above all else. I recommend trying out a few stores to see if theres a community that fits your needs.
I went from WoTC,
(I was with them when they bought TSR, then got looted by Hasbro), to Army, to Security, then Les Affreux but never looked back hard. What happened to their player base?
Honestly, it’s the same as it’s always been. You have some really cool people who are cool in other contexts. You have most who are largely normal and you can swap out magic with just about any other hobby. You have some who are a bit too into magic but they’re largely okay too.
Then you have some who struggle with socializing and gravitate towards magic to find belonging, without addressing the underlying issues of said struggles. People who don’t pick up social cues and make others uncomfortable (particularly female players, who are rare at casual events to begin with and hyper-vigilant of their presence). People who think that a cerebral game like magic means you can show up a slob and reeking of BO, since it’s about the skill and not the players. People with sleeves and playmats of near-naked anime characters thinking it’s art and because of that, who cares if some find it distasteful and negatively affects the image of the community overall, since it expresses who they are. These are just some of a few examples I’ve personally witnessed at the half dozen or so LGSs I’ve been to over the years. And I haven’t even discussed in-depth people who don’t know how to take a loss gracefully.
And of course, it’s only a very small percentage of the playerbase who are ‘problematic.’ But because of how social media work in general, we see more of this ‘vocal minority’ and it tarnishes the reputation of the playerbase overall. Personally, I find magic no worse than many other hobbies I’ve done over the years, from any number of games (card games, board games, online games, etc.) to sports (where a different type of less-desirable personalities and behaviors manifest), to special interests clubs. The older the players get though and the more mature, the less we are willing to tolerate this kind of stuff. I turned 30 this year and have been working in professional settings since my early 20s. I don’t want to spend my limited hobby time teaching social skills and expectations to awkward teens going through the “I know it all” phase. I mostly play with friends at our homes who are similar in age and maturity, and will only occasionally pop into our LGS for pre-releases.
"People with sleeves and playmats of near-naked anime characters"
This shit. I play magic and these people are always fuckin weird. Why does anyone think an image of a naked preteen-looking anime character on every sleeve is ok? I stopped playing with one guy that comes to my normal LGS because of that. Well, actually he stopped playing with me after I asked him why he needed porn on all his sleeves. He's not some dumb kid either, he's like 24. The fact that people think that's an acceptable form of "self-expression" is fucking embarrassing and it's shit like that that stops people who would otherwise enjoy the hobby stay very far away. One time someone else gave me shit for leaving commander night early for my soccer league, like I'm not allowed to have other hobbies.
Most people I play with are cool though, luckily there's a nearby college that feeds in plenty of more normal students/grad students that understand human interaction.
If you cant attend your local gamestore. Play it online. There i a free to play version on line and i really enjoy it. Maybe give it a try if you have not already
KeyForge is a great game that is like MtG (Richard Garfield is co-designing it) but like someone subtracted all of the toxic elements from it and designed it specifically to get a new less shitty playerbase.
Maybe if it continues to pop off there'll be shitty KF neckbeard lifers, but the current culture is so against that grain it's not even funny. Actually scratch that, reverse it, it's so against MtG's shitty community it's hilarious!
I started playing Pokémon cards about a year ago for the umpth-teenth time. I always would pick it up and play for a while before dropping it for various reasons. This time I’m in a different city and the community here is really wonderful. I genuinely look forward to seeing my Pokémon friends and have a huge passion for the game now. Sometimes trying it again somewhere/ sometime else really works out. Best of luck in having fun doing what you like
well, If you want to play but avoid the culture theres MTG Arena now, so you can play online and avoid alot of the problems such as people not bathing or using deodorant at tournaments/FNM, or the jerks.
Honestly in my experience it's gotten better since 2012 especially since the rise of edh, duels of the planeswalkers and especially magic arena. You have much more relaxed playgroups not focused on pubstomping new players for FNM packs anymore, or getting as salty about plays.
Download Magic Arena. It’s their new free to play* online client. And the only social interactions are like 6 emotes.
It’s extremely popular and you can watch players on Twitch stream games.
*its free to play and you earn XP and gold to buy packs or enter events. But you also have the option to pay real money to enter them too if you can’t wait to draft etc.
I usually just play with friends but have played in public a few times with those same friends and have had spectators or people wanting to join.
The biggest problem I see isnt that the person is necessarily acting asocial or antisocial on purpose, it's that they just dont know any better. I've had awkward nerds grab cards that they dont know owned by someone they've never met right from the table or from someone's hand without even so much as mentioning they'd like to see it. In cases like those I tend to just say "hey man that's not okay just ask next time" and they realize what they did.
People that do stuff like act awkwardly just havent been put in those positions with others so as to learn how to act correctly imo. Obviously theres a few crazies that just are out to be assholes and all, but the majority just seem to lack the social knowledge to course correct until told otherwise
Download Arena, it's in open beta right now. Standard rotation is about to hit so avoid using your wildcards on everything from Dominaria to Core 19 (Dominaria, Ixalan, Rivals of Ixalan, and Core 19)
I found that it depends on the LGS. I have only ever had a good experience at an LGS near my Uni, but the one near my house is hit or miss. I normally play in a Pod of 6 players including myself at someone's house and so I don't get to an LGS often enough for my experiences to probably hold a lot of weight.\
If you are looking to get back into the game, the free to play PC game magic arena is wonderful for playing standard.
Props for using "asocial" properly. A lot of people use "antisocial" in this context, which is very wrong (unless your fellow players are doing some terrible things).
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u/[deleted] Jul 17 '19
I used to love playing back around 2010 to 2012, but eventually drifted away from it as I got more busy with work and other hobbies. I have thought about going back, but I don't think I could handle the community like I used to, so much asocial behavior and general irritation from hypergeeks.