Like many people, I like playing games. I’m especially fond of video games, even if that mostly means Team Fortress 2 these days. Can’t get enough of that finely aged classic, as long as you’re not thrown into a game with bots, cheaters, and/or the worst side of the community. That’s a tale for another time, however, and debating Valve’s decisive action (or general lack thereof) for over five years now. It’s not pretty, and while the game has certainly fallen from grace, the amount of silly fun I’ve had with it even now is something quite unique.
This doesn’t mean that I can’t appreciate an old fashioned analog game, though. Which goes without saying, given prior posts. I’ve played my fair share of boardgames in my time, and I think I should play more, honestly. There are so many of them these days, such that you might say that we’ve hit a bit of a renaissance. Good way to have killed time with friends and family during the height of the pandemic as well, if nothing else.
My greater interest has always been card games, I’d say. It’s truly amazing how varied they are, which isn’t reflected much in the US. We have our Bicycle style fifty-two card decks, but there are several other kinds. Differences in the number of cards in a deck, the graphics on them, cultures they’re associated with, and even the shape of the cards themselves. To say nothing of the games played with them throughout history, and this is all before we even touch modern proprietary card games.
This is, once again, one of those topics that, while it might seem mundane, has an almost endless amount of depth. Like any human creation, our games have evolved alongside us, chronicling their own rich history. You can apply this to everything us humans have touched, molded, formed with our own hands, in an infinitely complex web of connection. An endless cycle of relation, opposition, and resolution.
Should anyone have any interest in card games, then I urge you to check out Pagat. It’s a truly wonderful resource, and has been going since the late 90’s. Not only can you learn about card games from across the planet- in multiple languages- but play them as well. They even catalog proprietary ones, and domino games, but cards remain the primary focus. I really need to sit down and learn some of the games they have on there myself, and share them with friends.
Of particular note in the proprietary space are trading card games (TCGs), which are much newer than you’d think. Their ubiquity nowadays is a testament to their longevity, and many have come and gone over the years. I shouldn’t even have to name the most popular ones, as most people can think of at least a few. As for me, my TCG of choice is the original itself, Magic: The Gathering (MTG).
What I like the most about Magic is the sheer variety you’re given, and the freedom to make use of it. Though I find it almost a bit too much sometimes- gotta maintain that relevancy, I guess- I am still allowed to make the kind of decks I like. That is, entirely ditching consistency in favor of a puzzlebox, and letting chaos reign. My decks follow a general theme instead of a singular strategy, favoring a variety of cards that can be mixed and matched as the situation applies. This makes them more complex to use and prone to getting bricked, but the advantage is that they’re much harder to counter. This is further aided by my preference of using vampires, which are extremely diverse, if a bit slow to get going.
Once they do, however, they are very hard to put down.
My introduction to Magic was anything but normal. To make a long story short, I got stood up by a pathological liar at a card shop, and the owner of the place took pity and gave me a starter deck to pass the time. Certainly one of the stranger ways to start playing, but I can’t argue with the results. If nothing else, the shop owner got a new customer. Many of my friends picked up Magic not long after I started playing as well, and it became a regular passtime for us for years.
The casual side of the game, then, was always my focus. I was never interested in competitive play, and my style of deck building runs counter to it, even. You want consistency, and to optimize for it to ensure victory. The longer a game goes on, the more time your opponent has to also get the upper hand. Having a reliable strategy and the ability to set it up quickly are paramount, so you don’t have to rely purely on luck or praying to whatever deities you believe in. I, instead, maintain that variety is the spice of life, and opt for my brand of organized chaos.
To each their own, and I’m glad that Magic enables both schools of thought.
In any case, though, my friends and I have played it for years, getting up to all sorts of silliness. Testing out new decks, trying new cards, trading, and just generally having a great time while doing it. Sometimes we’d swap decks, or introduce strange house rules or variants of standard play. We’d also play against other people, to see what they had created. The genesis of my first vampire deck came from one such person, who sold theirs to me for a real steal. Well, a steal for me in how much I paid, and likely a more literal steal in this guy’s case, as I’d eventually learn.
Funny enough, not the only person I’ve met that stole cards.
You might ask why someone would do such a thing, referencing the title of the post. Firstly, there’s obviously the associated price of specific cards. Some can go for hundreds or more, which may seem insane for a chunk of cardboard. Consider, though, collectors of any kind. There are virtual hats- there’s another TF2 reference- worth thousands of dollars, so don’t underestimate the ends that people will go to obtain such things. Personal glory, greed, hoarding tendencies and poor spending habits, what have you.
One might further argue that the inherent randomness of card booster packs encourages poor behavior. It’s gambling, if we’re being entirely honest, and that does stuff to people. Never anything good, particularly when children are exposed to it early on. The point is that some people are crazy about rare and/or valuable cards, and I’ve met a few that committed theft to get them. I do not condone it in any way, let’s be clear, but it does happen, and not just with trading cards. It’s only one part of an overarching issue, and I ended up making my own, unknowing mistake in purchasing that deck.
Live and learn.
Still, Magic brought out a lot of weird stuff in people, most notable at the height of my playing. What began as a friendly activity could devolve into unnecessary competition or drama. Especially when pride and ego involve themselves, and begin to muddle everything. Yeah, it sucks to lose a good match, but there’s no point in getting genuinely mad over it. Or cheating, for that matter, to salvage your fragile ego. I’m sure a lot of people have experienced just such a phenomenon.
As an example, a past friend cheated during basically every game of Magic they ever played back in the day. Took me years to realize it, since they were that good at hiding it. Stacked their deck so they got the exact same strategy every time, and for what? Petty superiority in a card game? I’d say that it leaves a sour taste in my mouth and that I hold the moral high ground, but that’d be a pretty bold lie. I was nowhere near as prolific as them, but I have cheated a few times in all the years I’ve played. Nobody’s perfect, or immune to taking it all too seriously.
Really, that just might be a life lesson there.
There’s actually a funny story about me cheating in Magic. Three of us were playing, and we agreed that cheating was allowed for this one game. Nothing overt, and we’d call each other out if caught. Simple in theory. Well, my two friends got into a spat of accusations, which I then capitalized on. I grabbed a bright white binder full of cards, rifled through it, pulled one out, and put it into my deck.
Right in front of them.
They never noticed, and only found out about my fiendish master plan because I told them after the game was over. Say what you will, but I look back fondly on that one.
For all of the fun we did have, Magic is pretty rare for us nowadays. Availability is a big factor, which is just part of being an adult. Scheduling anything is a nightmare when everyone’s is different, and you take whatever you can get. I’m sure the tabletop RPG community would back me up on that one. My enthusiasm for the game, in addition, has fallen to the wayside, and usually I prefer to just chat now, or do something else. Easier to catch up when you’re not also trying to play a card game with as many moving parts as Magic can have. Online play by way of MTG Arena seems to be a potential option so long as it plays nice with my choice of OS, but I’ve yet to try that out.
Ah, the things I put up with for you, Linux.
Not all of my friends play Magic, either. A few play Yu-Gi-Oh!, which I’ve always spent more time watching the anime and abridged series of than spending money on the TCG. In fact, I watched all of 5Ds in the past few years, and, sidenote, go watch it. It’s way better than it has any right to be, and that’s not a joke. Anyway, one of my friends said I should give Master Duel a try. Took me way too long to actually get around to it, but I did. More than that, I played it on and off for several months.
I think, if anything, the greatest advantage of a digital card game is accessibility. Card packs can be bought with in-game currency earned through playing, and singular cards can be also be created. Furthermore, Master Duel is cross platform, supporting PC, consoles, and smartphones, fantastic for a free-to-play game. This has allowed my friend and I to duel multiple times and make decks without the hassle of shelling out for cards. Of course, the option to use actual money to buy the in-game currency exists, if you can’t bear to wait. You also get bits of personalization, if that’s the sort of thing you like. Profile pics and borders, deck boxes, card sleeves, dueling fields, so on and so forth.
Getting into the swing of things took me a while, honestly, as Yu-Gi-Oh! is a very different game to Magic. My earlier time was more spent trying to read the novel’s worth of text on cards than actually playing, and I truly struggled with that for quite a while. I still don’t like how overly verbose most cards are, but with enough experience, I’ve memorized what’s in my decks so I don’t have to bog myself down deciphering them. Mostly. Magic does that better, in my opinion, going so far as to, in recent years, use the playerbase’s term for discarding cards- milling- in card descriptions now. That’s pretty cool, not that there aren’t cards which can get a bit wordy in the game.
To the matter of actual gameplay, Yu-Gi-Oh! further sets itself apart from Magic. Unlike its counterpart, it has no unifying limiting factor like the mana system, so as long as conditions are met, you can just play whatever you draw, more or less. Coming from my background, this is pretty bizarre, as in Magic, most cards require mana, which is typically given by land cards. You need not only ample supply- in the correct colors, no less- but to carefully manage it each turn. This adds an extra level of strategy, as you have to weigh your actions, lest you be left in a situation where you could have done something, but you used up your mana for the turn. You can skirt around it, sure, but in general play, you can’t just wipe the field on the second turn like you can in Yu-Gi-Oh!, heart of the cards willing.
Even after all my months of playing, I’m really not too sure what to make of this. Maybe I’m making some unfair comparisons, as Yu-Gi-Oh! does employ some methods to limit your actions and strategy. The most prominent among these is the game’s use of archetypes, or themed groups of cards that selectively work together, unified by a unique set of mechanics, monster types, and art style. So, say, the classic Elemental Heroes, based on superhero comics, which have cards and abilities that combo together, require one another, and do not mesh with other archetypes. Admittedly, this isn’t a great example because they’re a subset of a now much larger HERO archetype, but it’s a recognizable one. The majority of cards are made to work within the scope of their archetype only, though you often have a good selection, and you can pull in pieces from others to compliment your deck.
I’ve grown to really like this idea over time- Magic is generally looser on this- but with so many archetypes being created over the years, some are way better than others, to the point that Konami’s favoritism is pretty blatant. Annoyingly so, even.
Thus, purely for the sake of being different, I prefer to find lesser known/used archetypes and give those a try. Some of them are actually really good, and entirely viable in general play. My absolute favorites are Ancient Gear and Kozmo, both of which I can count on one hand how many times I’ve seen other players using them. A lot of these archetypes won’t stack up to Master Duel’s meta, but really, where’s the fun in that? Freedom of expression and experimentation are worth a hell of a lot more than using the same meta decks just to win. Talk about boring, man. I’ve kept running into the same junk so often that I created an anti-meta deck purely for competitive. Casual is a thing now, but I still want to earn in-game currency without having to do the singleplayer or paying cash.
I really can’t win with this stuff, and, much like Magic, I’ve also fallen off of playing Yu-Gi-Oh!. Not for the exact same reasons, but reasons enough that I rarely pick it up anymore. Playing it in person would likely fix a lot of the issues I had in Master Duel, but I already spent enough money on Magic cards. I much prefer to fuel my stationary cravings, such as buying a pair of very poor looking vintage pens only because it looked like they had solid gold nibs. Surely, money well spent. Which it technically was since I was correct, but that’s a story for another time. If we have to have some lesson at the end of the day here, I guess it’s that you should never forget that the primary objective of playing games is to have fun, and not to take them so seriously. Or steal things. Or gamble.
I dunno.
Until next time.