Episode 31: Magic: The Gathering Tutorial

Topic: Magic: The Gathering

This week, we’re diving in to our first real game that we’ve ever talked about on the show.  We plan on talking about other games, notably Fortnite/PUBG, Warcraft, and sometime in November, I want to do a buyer’s guide for nerds.  But this week we’re talking about Magic: The Gathering, a long running collectable card game with lots of history in the nerd world.

Tutorial

History
Original concept and idea created by Richard Garfield.  

Worked as an Adjunct Professor at Whitman College in 1991, while working his doctorate in mathematics as University of Pennsylvania.  

He approached Wizards of the Coast about producing a different game, but was asked to make a game that was portable to play.  This developed in to Magic: The Gathering.

Originally known for testing purposes as “Magic”, but after trademarking “Mana Clash”, people continued to call it magic.  It was rebranded as “Magic: The Gathering”, in order to copyright and secure the name.

Released in 1993, it was an immediate success and started a collectable card game craze that found additional games like Pokemon, Star Wars, and many others trying to capital off the success.  

Multiple expansions have come out, and over a billion cards were sold within a 2 year span.

1996 – Pro Tour established

1999 – Hasbro purchased 

Between 2008- 2016: Approximately – 20 billion cards sold

Story:
While no initial story, various expansions have developed a rich narrative over multiple years.

Initial concept is two wizards fighting against one another.

There are infinite ‘Planes’, acting as various multiverses where anything can be or happen on them.  Some rare special beings can jump between various Planes, known as ‘Planeswalkers’.  The various Planes are intended to allow various type of magic, technology, locations, and themes to be used.  Such as location settings like Egyptian, Middle-Eastern, Japanese/Chinese, and traditional European Fantasy settings.

The story is told over an expansion, namely through the cards’ flavor text and supplemental material.

Story told from various planeswalkers on the planeswalking ship Weatherlight to fight various enemies.  Stories initially centered on character, but shifted toward world based events and the characters wrapped up within them.  

With each expansion saw new planes to travel to, with later years revisiting older planes that hadn’t been visited in over a decade. 

Gameplay:
Games can include multiple players, though more players take more time.  Typical games are one on one.  

While some format have differing rules regarding how many and what types of cards you can use or have, the typical game format includes a deck of 60 cards of various card types, also known as your “Library”.  A major theme in magic is card color, which helps denote the types of spells, creatures, abilities, and play style a player will have access to.  Most decks will focus on one color, with two colors giving greater play options, but more difficult to use.  The colors include:

• White (Plains) These cards are consider righteous creatures and characters.  They often have low level creatures, offer protection and power-ups, along with healing.  White denotes making things fair and disabling abilities in order to overcome their enemies.

• Blue (Islands) These cards are consider water or air in theme, but include essence of knowledge/wisdom.  The often help with drawing cards, controlling other creatures, negating spells, and controlling the battlefield through abilities.  Creatures tend to be weaker, but more ability focused as a trade off, causing them to be physically weaker.

• Black (Swamps) These cards represent sacrifice, corruption, power, and general evil, but also reflects Necromancy, demons, vampires, and other horror creatures.  Their cards often include instant kill abilities, stealing life, and even bring creature back from the grave.  Unlike other colors, black tries to win at any cost, often meaning you might sacrifice other things to get ahead.

• Red (Mountains) These are cards that represent Fire and raw power as a hole.  Their cards are often direct damage, destroying anything in its path, and temporary boosts in power.  Red’s creatures are lower level, but offer high power with low defense, leading to a glass cannon situation.  So they’re great in the beginning but suffer in the end game.

• Green (Forests) These are cards that represent evolution, life, and overall nature.  Their cards are often strong power for low cost, offering survivability and regeneration, and focus on creatures more than spells.  Their spells tend to focus on enhancing their creatures and creating smaller creatures, but lack many ways to counter abilities or spells from other colors.

• Multi-Color - These are rarer cards that rely on multiple color mana, usually two, to be cast.  They’re typically cards that represent both types of mana in some way and are often more powerful than single color cards.  

• Colorless - These are cards, that like their name sake, do not required any color mana.They’re useful as they can pull abilities from some other colors, but aren’t as effective.  An Example, as where green doesn’t have a lot of good spell cards, colorless cards can help make for it by offering some mechanics or spells that Green doesn’t have access to.

Cards in your hand can only be played via Mana, which you get from lands associated with your color of cards.  IE, White card require white mana.  Some cards require only a certain amount of colored mana, and then can use any other type of mana, which leads to great uses of other color mana.  IE, a white card might require 1 white mana and 1 colorless mana, so you could use a black mana instead of white to play it.  

A basic concept in Magic is Tapping and Untapping.  Essentially, anything that would stay on the battle field becomes tapped upon use.  Tapped creatures, lands, or abilities can’t be used again once tapped.  It can’t be untapped until the start of your turn, or by some special effect cards that allow you to untap it.  The act of tapping a card is by placing it sideways on the battle field.

One of the major features of Magic the Gathering is keywords.  While some cards have unique mechanics, these Keywords are common mechanics that can also be found on other cards, in order to not have to repeat it constantly.  Some might include:

• Flying – which can only be attacked by spells and other flying creatures
• Reach – which means you can attack flying creatures
• Trample – any extra damage done over the health of a creature is done to the player instead
• Lifelink – when you do damage, you gain life equal to that damage.
• Menace – Means two cards have to block it

These mechanics are introduced in new expansions frequently, but some are also taken out during this period.  Some are retired all together based on the current rules or expansion.

Over the years, Magic the Gathering has created several different types of formats for its card game.  While play is traditionally always the same set of turns being taken, different formats include different ways you create your Libraries or what you can have in them.  Some formats include how many players can play and in certain ways.  Some formats include:

• Constructed – The most basic format where you build a deck based off current rules and allowed cards.
• Limited – Similar to constructed, but you are limited to what you have on hand rather than all available cards.  Limited includes two popular formats:
• Sealed – Where you are limited to only 6 booster decks that you receive and must make a deck  out of them.
• Draft – Where 8 people take turns picking cards from a booster pack and pass it along to the      next.  A very popular format between friends and small tournaments.
• Two Header Giant – A 2 on 2 match where each teams shares life totals.
• Casual – These are less strict formats that offer a more wide way to play.  Popular in this format is   Commander, where you have a semi-permanent card that you can have on the battlefield at all times.

Why Fun?
Beyond playing for the sake of playing, a lot of magic is played because it offers challenges related to strategy and tactics.  While no card is perfect, it forces people to plan ahead of time and focus on different strategies in their games. Do they go for a quick win, a game where they stop anything from happening, maybe they force their enemy to over draw cards, or perhaps it’s about getting bit creatures out to do big damage.  Forcing you to plan can help open up ways of learning and make you smarter overall.

The game itself is a very social game, as there is very few ways to enjoy the game outside of interacting with others.  A wide variety of formats allows lots of different types of play and complexity, giving players plenty of choices in how to enjoy their content.

Magic the Gathering has an amazing community too. Beyond the company’s major Tournaments and MagicFest conventions, they support a wide collection of smaller stores throughout the world with product and promotions.  A majority of cards purchased can be found in comicbook or gaming stores, with many holding their own smaller tournaments and events.  Friday Nights is a campaign by Wizards of the Coast to support local game store by offering magic tournaments and gathering on Friday Nights.

The community has a very active secondary market as well, with local game shops buying and selling individual cards, along with accessories.  Online has seen a big boost to players trying to find certain cards for their decks.  A huge market of accessories, collectables, books, and more have been created over the years, so it’s guaranteed that most people will rarely see a second of anything in the wild.  Art for Magic the Gathering are all individually painted and created, leading to hundreds of artists over the years painting works of art for the game.  Prints of card’s art can be quite collector’s items alone.  

The community has also a great collection of online personality, who namely create content in the form of playing and even discussing the game.  There are even communities of creators that make parody of the game, leading to their own online success over the years.

With advent of Magic the Gathering Arena, a free online game version of the card game, it allows all sorts of people to give the game a try. The game spent nearly ten years of algorithms and testing before it could create NPC(Non-player Character) or BOT that could play against people legitimately, factoring in tactics, strategy, and cards drawn.  The game is great because it allows people who can’t visit game stores, or don’t have one in their area, it allows them the chance to play against real people online.  New features are being added all the time, so custom game types may one day be allowed on there, or atleast Draft might come about.

Recently announced, a Netflix series will be created based on the popular card game.

Recommended Videos:

A light hearted take on Magic: The Gathering, an over exaggeration of the community, but still somewhat indicative of what to expect.  Plus they can be funny.

Friday Nights

A link for the Magic Online Game, for those who want to experience it.  

Magic: The Gathering Arena

Episode 30: Post Japan - Tips, Tricks, & Experiences

Ep 30: Post Japan - Tips, Tricks, & Experiences
Topic: Post Japan – Tips and Tricks

Okay, finally, we finished talking about what it was that we did on this two week vacation, now we get to share our knowledge and what we learned for anyone else traveling.  We really do hope this is useful to someone traveling to Japan, as we think this is some of the most useful information we can immediately think of outside of the language.  Next week we’re planning something else, but we felt this was important things that could help make Japan much easier to navigate.

 

Tips and Tricks:

Wifi Router / Sim Card
We highly recommend getting a Wifi Router while in Japan.  You can make arrangements prior to arriving to Japan to get a Wifi Router for multiple devices.  In our case, I made arrangements to pick it up at the Airport when we arrive and then drop off at the Airport before we left.  It’s amazingly useful to look up maps, information, or just to stay in touch, as we purposefully turned off our mobile data plans while in Japan so we could avoid roaming charges.

In Our case, because I wasn’t sure how much or little we were going to use, I got an unlimited plan that ran 900yen a day.  So we had unlimited data, but if we went over 3g ever day, it would start slowing down.  By the end of the trip, we probably only used 7-8g of data.  Use your best judgment when picking a plan, but definitely consider making arrangements before you arrive, so you’ll definitely want one.

Travel Around Japan
There’s probably two major ways to travel in Japan. 
Trains:

·         JR Railway

If you’re traveling AROUND Japan, this is a must have.  JR Railway represents Japan owned railways, which are train managed by the Japanese Railway company.  They’re all throughout Japan and most stations associated with them are usually bigger stations.  Most Prefectures and towns will have atleast One or Two JR Railways in them.

If you plan on traveling from different prefectures or in different parts of Major Parts of Japan, this is a very useful tool to have.  There are two versions, each available for either 7, 14, or 21 days: you have Standard Pass and Green Pass.  Green Pass helps for longer trips, where you are on trains you need to make reservations for, as Green will always get you a guaranteed seat in the Green Car on most long distance Trains and bullet trains.  Think of the Green Car as a Fancy business class car.

Once you pick up your JR Pass at the Airport, visit a JR Station and go to the Station Gate office, which is a small office that every Station has just by the entrance/exit to the Station’s platform entrance; they’re usually to the far right or left of the gate entrance/exit.  You’ll need to visit these Station Gate Offices every time you get on or off the JR Station. Just show your JR Rail Pass to the Officer at the Office, and he’ll let you through.

·         Local Rail/Trains

While JR Railway Trains are plentiful, most major prefectures will have their own independent lines that run in between the various parts of their prefecture.  Tokyo has about a dozen different trains it independently runs all throughout the Prefecture outside of the JR Railway Trains.

Because at some point, you’ll need to get on one, we recommend getting an IC Card.  They come in a variety of different names, like Suica, Pasmo, Icoca, or etc, but they’re basically reloadable Credit Cards you can use on the train at any time.  When you get one, you buy one at 2000yen, and it comes with 1500yen of funds on it.  You reload it as necessary, and there is always a place to reload by the gates entering and exiting the station.

To use an IC Card, you go to the gate entrance, pass it over an RFD reader, and it will make a good noise when you pass it over.  If not, it will have little gates stopping your progress, and you can check with a Railway Staff to see the problem.  Once you travel to your destination and go to leave the station, you pass by a similar gate and pass your IC card over the RFD Reader once again. Your fee is based off how far you traveled, so it will show you what the total cost was and the remaining balance. 

IC are great to have, because they work in other places, like some mini-mart and vending machines too, as an easy way to purchase stuff if you’re in a hurry.  We found that if you put about 10,000yen, you should be good for about 14 days, as I think we went through that amount, and only used it for trains and buses.  

Roads:

·         Buses

They use IC Cards too.  They’re sometimes like regular buses in the states, where you pay when you get on, or I some cases, you pay when you get off.  In most cases, we found most buses were a one time fee to get on or off, about 230 yen, but some might charge you based on how far you went like on a train.

·         Taxi

Taxi and some variations on Uber exist in Japan, but we don’t recommend them, unless you’re going somewhere very specific.  We never needed to rely on them while traveling.

Stations
The more trains that pass through them, the Bigger they’re going to be.  Most stations always have a Mini-mart attached to the station or just outside the station.  Some stations might have dining and shopping attached to the station, as in the case of Kyoto, Shinjuku, and Nagoya, they had full on department stores and hotels attached.  In Osaka, it had a full grocery store; butchers, fruits and veggies, pastry, the whole full on store.  

Money
The currency in Japan is the Japanese Yen, which at the time this writing is approximately 93yen to one $1.00usd.  For simplicity, it’s safe to assume that 100yen is roughly a $1.00US dollar.  While we could split the difference, by the time you paid taxes it would be roughly equal. 

If it’s under 1000yen, expect to get coins.  In Japan they have:
1yen – Very light weight, feels like plastic
5yen – No markings, bronze with a hole
10yen – Silver but smaller than 100yen.
50yen – Silver with a hole, mom liked these for earrings.
100yen – very popular coin, felt like a quarter in weight
500yen – bigger, bronze, kinda like a half dollar in Us currency.
Their Bill money is made of both paper and plastic. Bring a coin purse for the coins, because you’ll be collecting.

Japan is a very much a cash based country.  We often had multiple problems using credit cards in some places because they simply don’t take credit cards all that often.  We believe they didn’t pay for the service or let it lapse, but we were also only using Visa as our preferred card, never an AMEX or Mastercard, so it could be different.  In any case, unless you’re in a high end place, assume you won’t be able to use your credit card. 

That being said, ATMs are plentiful.  For Money, Mom used her bank to order money ahead of time, as where I pulled out money when we arrived.  Fees were included ofcourse, but it was reasonable, nothing outlandish.  In the end, Mom took out 250,000yen($2,325usd), as where I took out 150,000yen($1,400usd).  For me, about 10,000yen a day, and mom, close to 20,000yen a day. Almost all of our hotels were paid ahead of time, so less worry there about that, but in all, when you consider all the stuff we saw and did, transportation on trains, souvenirs, and food, we spent nearly all that money.  And might have been able to spend more, but we were always talking each other out of stuff.

While in Japan, and especially in areas with lots of shopping, we found that you can get Tax Free status if you spent over 5,000yen.  Most of the times this was while we were shopping for others, but it was pretty easy to spend over 5,000yen easily when shopping for others, and in some cases, ourselves.  They do need your Passport to do this, which they’ll fill up with additional paperwork.  Many stores are very open and public about them offering tax free as an incentive to purchase from them, so if you need to buy stuff for others, it’s easy to do.


Ryokans Vs Hotels
While in Japan, Mom and me wanted the traditional experience.  That meant sleeping on tatami mats and futons.  There are western style hotels, but Ryokans, along with being traditional, are also less expensive.  I love the design/construction of them, and Mom loved the notion of being in traditional as much as possible.

That said, we love Capsule hotels.  I’d do it again if it was just me, but for a few days where we were only in one place each day, it’s totally reasonable as an alternative to a Ryokan.

We both love the public baths as well.  Very efficient and convenient.


Food
While in Japan, we expected to eat a lot more fish than before.  But in reality, we ate probably more pork, chicken, and beef than we ever did rice on some days.  While I wanted to, we never got to partake in Japanese fast food like McDonalds.  We did see a few, but most of the places we went to looked like holes in the wall.  Maybe 400 to 500 square feet, and half of that was the kitchen, so that meant only a bar for us to sit at.  Most are small, run by two or three people, and usually have a small and limited menu.  Some have you even order via a ticket machine, then the waitress will take those tickets to the chef.

And they were plentiful: for consideration, they say that for every 266 people in Japan, there is a restaurant. It’s the highest in the world, and the US is second with one restaurant for every 547 people.  What’s that mean, they’re 474,048 restaurants in Japan, that’s atleast three restaurants ever square mile, vs US where they have roughly 600,000 restaurants, but that’s only one restaurant for every 6.25 square miles.  When you consider the size of Japan vs US, that’s a lot of restaurants.

Other thing Japan has, Minimarts like Seven-Eleven, Family Mart, Lawsons, and others.  Japan has roughly 50,000 stores; again for comparison, US has 145,000 stores. For comparison, that one minimart for every 3 square miles for Japan and one minimart for every 26 square miles.  Minimarts are plentiful and awesome!  Most are small, near train stations and other high traffic areas or corners, but they have everything drinks and snacks, medicine, and even full meals you can purchase and get heated up.  We only got a chance once to eat convenience store meals, but we picked up breakfast the night before in the form of chilled coffee, juice, pastries, sandwiches.  My favorite were the tall boys of soda for only a buck, along with the smaller size Monster energy drinks.  Every morning, we could purchase a 2 liter of cold water for about a 100yen, which was amazing as we traveled around Japan.

Vending machines were also plentiful in Japan.  While I won’t run the numbers, there’s over 5 million in the country, that serve everything from drinks, snacks, alcohol, and even more.  While I never really found any, some have food options that will serve full meals or even fresh fruit/veggies, some that have underwear if you really needed it.  Some of our favorites were trying to find the names on machines, like we found our siblings and cousins a few times as the names of drinks, but it where we found Peach Water.  If you ever visit Japan, first thing you Need to buy is Peach Water.  If you find a Asian market near you, see if they have Peach Water, an absolutely Must in Japan.

Luggage
While we had heard that Japanese people don’t like roller bags, we quickly learned that wasn’t the case.  While I brought a large travel/backpackers bag and mom brought a smaller sling pack, we quickly found a lot of Japanese people traveling with roller bags everywhere.  Some were huge travel cases, while others were smaller day travel size.  The custom you use when you use them is different: in America you see people often pulling them behind them, but in Japan, you roll them beside you.  Mom couldn’t stand her bag as it was heavy and uncomfortable for her, but we were able to get a hard case roller bag for about 6,000yen, which isn’t a bad deal at the end of the day.  It came in real handy as we put a lot of my souvenirs in there.

Episode 29: Post Japan Trip Part 2

Episode 29: Post Japan Trip Part 2
Topic: Post Japan Trip Part 2

We're back with again with our tales from Japan.  This week we discuss Mount Fuji, Capsule Hotels, and all the various stuff we did in Tokyo.  We had such a great conversation, that next week, we're doing a special on what we learned while in Japan.

Day 7

Noritake Porcelain Factory

Capsule Hotel

Day 8
Travel to Mt. Fuji
Fujisan Onsen Hotel Kaneyamaen

Day 9
Walking around Lake Yamanaka
Travel to Tokyo
Tokyo Metropolitan Government Building
Shibuya Crossing

Day 10
Sumo Practice
Old Tokyo District
Zuiryo-no-Matsu Shrine
Toro-San Museum
Akihabara
Maid Café

Day 11
Tokyo Disney Sea
Odaiba / Gundam Statue

 

Day 12
Asakusa Shrine/Temple
Shopping
Robot Restaurant

 


Day 13

Traveling Home

Next time were doing our Tips and Tricks for Japan, along with our Experiences, and especially what we learned in order to help you plan your trip to Japan.  Please send us questions if you have any.