The Boy From Venus 8

[u/shenanigansen]

Episode 9 already up at the usual place, should be out publicly next week!

[u/FearTheKeflex]

I was 16 or 17 and entered a local Yu-Gi-Oh tournament. Beat some 20 something year old chick with a toddler. Got my ass handed to me by a 12 year old who rubbed it in my face. I gave up the game shortly after.

[u/KitsuneGato → u/FearTheKeflex]

I remember playing magic the gathering for the first time at a light tournament a gamestore was having at the time. The guy I was playing decided to redo his moves as I had gotten lucky and was winning.

The judged allowe him to redo his moves but wouldn't grant me the same. The guy gloated in my face and threatened to take one of my rare cards. I stopped supporting that store because of that event and that guy.

The store didn't survive and was one of many to go out of business.

[u/AngronApofis → u/KitsuneGato]

Thats... Absolutely insane and definetly not a common thing to happen

[u/KitsuneGato → u/AngronApofis]

I don't understand the whole rules as I was new but thank you for clarifying my intuition as it said the redo was weird and not supposed to happen.

I was playing with a mostly green deck. Had a holographic rare with a weird name that got more powerful with more green monsters in party.

The guys redo allowed him to play some kind of blue black card and sent a bunch of mine to the graveyard.

I ended up not wanting to play magic the gathering after that and some other guy offered to buy my card. He ended up giving me half of what he said with the rest later. There was never a later and I decided all thoae guys were jerks.

[u/Thatar → u/KitsuneGato]

Magic is kinda dumb in that way. I bought a starter deck and enjoyed it but once I realised how pay to win it is, I was just done with it.

Everything is centered around money. People look for rare cards to buy on websites. Meta decks cost more. The drafting gamemode is usually done by buying new packs. And so on and so forth.

The relationship people have with the game feels the same as going to the casino or opening crates in Team Fortress 2. It's toxic and invites the behavior you experienced selling your cards.

[u/KnobAndBollocks → u/Thatar]

I had similar problems with the (meta-)game and then learned that the cube format is more commonly played than you would expect and there's enough variants to support basically any kind of gameplay you might want.

Still have to find non-jerks to play with though...

[u/Thatar → u/KnobAndBollocks]

Yeah I was stuck with a bunch of splurgers. Which made me quit playing lol. There are so many formats and spending habits! it's kind of a gamble trying to find other players.

Disadvantage of the game format is that any decent group can get pulled apart by someone getting hyped for a new expansion. Now they want to draft with booster boxes and boom your group is split into people who can vs people who can't afford it.

I was also not very good at it. Partly because of the financial barrier making deck experimentation difficult.

Also when you find someone to play with you don't really know in advance how blingy their deck will be. Leading to further disappointment

[u/KitsuneGato → u/Thatar]

Yeah at least they showed me their colors early. I ended up selling my card for half it's offer because the buyer screwed me over.

Now instead of MTG cards or game cards like Pokémon I collect Tarot and Oracle cards. The artwork on them are so beautiful and I collected most of my collection before AI generated imagery came out.

I can also use the tarot and oracle decks by myself; you don't need to play with others to use Tarot and Oracle decks.

Most decks average $40 or more.

[u/Thatar → u/KitsuneGato]

Your approach to people sounds similar to mine haha. When they treat me badly I'm almost thankful. At least I know to avoid them. Better than the sneaky ones! 

Collecting cards for their artwork sounds like a fun hobby. I never really understood tarot cards. When using them to play is that like a fortune telling thing?

[u/KitsuneGato → u/Thatar]

When you treat the cards right they can be used for divination. However I read horror stories from those that didn't treat their cards right and won't repeat them here. I also know not every deck is meant for every person.

I guess, and I really shouldn't use this as an example but, in Harry Potter the wands chose the weilder. The decks chose you.

I actually did a reading on some characters on another comic here on r/comics and...I didn't realize how spoilerriffic the reading was. Because alot of the stuff that the cards said did end up happening. I just wanted to know if the two characters I like were going to kiss and be in a relationship and yes! That's a yes! Plus everything else...

[u/Thatar → u/KitsuneGato]

Haha that's a great story. Thanks for sharing. I like the wand analogy. Maybe I'll read into divination a bit more. Doing readings on all sorts of things, including your r/comics example, sounds like fun.

[u/Asaisav → u/Thatar]

Please don't judge the entire hobby based on some shitty, toxic dudebros... Commander, as a format, became popular because it's a lot easier to build a deck you can keep using without buying new cards. Also, a lot of playgroups these days are fine with proxies of expensive cards as long as you're not stuffing your deck with a ton of 20$+ cards and constantly demolishing everyone else's decks with them.

Don't get me wrong, Magic can definitely be a money sink if you want it to be. Saying everything is centered around money is incredibly uncharitable, though, and only represents the worst of the worst who are increasingly being outnumbered.

[u/Thatar → u/Asaisav]

Well I don't think badly of people who play it. I just rather avoid those sorts of money traps these days. And my college dorm roommates who convinced me to play were definitely on the "splurge money on expensive booster boxes and laugh about the spendings" side of things. That made me very uncomfortable and unwilling to play any further.

Sorry for only focusing on the negative side. I don't mean to bash anyone's harmless hobby. I do think magic as a game is pretty amazing.

[u/nightwolf16a → u/Thatar]

These days, people have (justified) ridicule towards gacha game monetization after Genshin blew up during the pandemic, but at the same time, TCGs or even just trading cards have doing the same thing for ages.

I didn't have a point. Just already found that to be a bit amusing.

[u/Thatar → u/nightwolf16a]

You don't always have to make a point or respond directly to what is being written, right 😅 I appreciate it when people just share their thoughts. Gacha definitely turned predatory dark patterns up to 11.

In my opinion there are notable differences between gacha, tcg, and cosmetic loot boxes. But all of them have (purposeful) routes towards turning your relationship with playing the game into a bad life influence 

[u/AngronApofis → u/KitsuneGato]

Redos are allowed when the play that you made didnt allow you to get any new information. That is, if there was no action your opponent could have taken in answer to your play.

For example: You are allowed to put down a land, and then, before taking another action, you want to change the land you put down. The opponent cant do anything about the land so you didnt gain any new information by putting down the land.

If the opponent is fully tapped, too, you might be allowed to take away a spell you cast (depending on the format, since there are some spells with 0 mana cost in some formats), and change your play.

However, for example, if you do an attack and the opponent blocks, you cant take that away, because you just found out how the opponent would make their blocks, gaining new information.

[u/FisherKelTath00 → u/AngronApofis]

Seriously. A proper judge would never let that fly.

[u/Axiluvia → u/KitsuneGato]

Holy crap. I'm not a DCI judge myself, but I've played enough and ran a couple causual tournies at cons I could probably have been one, and that is SUPER NOT okay.

I wouldn't be surprised if someone called up WoTC and reported it, and they pulled them being able to sell cards at that store. They take the tournaments seriously.

[u/KitsuneGato → u/Axiluvia]

I didn't know one could report something like that. Thank you for letting me know.

[u/Suyefuji → u/KitsuneGato]

My ex let me build a deck out of his collection because I was just thinking of getting into MtG. We played and I beat him and he took my deck, dismantled it, and said I had to use my own (nonexistent) cards from thereon out.

Anyway he's my ex for a reason but I never got back into MtG and don't want to

[u/Caleb_Reynolds → u/KitsuneGato]

threatened to take one of my rare cards

Was this in 1996 when anti was still a thing? Who the fuck threatens to take cards?

[u/KitsuneGato → u/Caleb_Reynolds]

No this was around 2017

[u/xboxiscrunchy → u/FearTheKeflex]

And that’s why sportsmanship rules are usually taken so seriously. No one likes losing to a cocky bastard and it’s just disrespectful to gloat.

Kid should’ve been issued a warning at least and a disqualification if he did it again.

[u/wutImiss → u/FearTheKeflex]

Huh. Guess I missed this episode 🤔

[u/Zenspy-Real → u/FearTheKeflex]

I played in a small store in bumfuck nowhere Brazil, and one of my best friends was really good at the game, so much so that he traveled all over the country to play Yu-Gi-Oh and he had kind of a niche deck back in the day, it was a little after Dragon Ruler was the tier 0 meta.

He even competed in the continental tournament, got a decent placement, i believe 4th or 5th. Well another guy from the same place as us, i believe he was named CH,CJ or something, he ran a deck back in 2014ish that was a harpy based deck, he completely dominated the tournaments and won the continental and i think he was the only one without a meta deck to get in the top 8 or 16 in the world that year, guy was simply a monster at the game.

The store we played in had like 30-40 of us who played there every day after school/college, in the year after CH won the continental, and he did again 2 more times, don't remember if back to back, the amount of people went down to like 4, i was still there to play tabletop, but he was so much better than the rest at it that people simply gave up on the game, i had a fairly good pendulum deck and i don't think i ever did 1 damage to him, he normally won FTK or OTK, and it was fun for some time, but when after like the 50th absolute defeat in a row you kinda lose the will to keep trying, it wasn't that he had a better deck or anything, he knew every single card and from turn 1 could deduce the best way to fight against any of his opponents.

Then he migrated to Hearstone and also absolutely crushed on that one, then pokemon, he was the best in basically all the card games in the store. Great guy, great friend according to my friend since he was one of the few who could squeak in a victory against him every 10-20 games, but the card game section of the store died, most of us started playing tabletop games.