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