Does anybody still play paper magic?

[gmzombie]

I'm just curious as i restarted playing around the time Return to Ravnica came out and all i have to say is damn there are some powerful as cards out of this block.When you can 3rd turn put out a desecration demon or a loxodon smiter it is great. The new shock lands are awesome and even those other duals are great. This game now has been my deck tester and i cant wait till gatecrash is released on here . Garg always does a great job with this and i just hope someday i can get back into learning C and ASM so i can help code. If you do play FNM what is your favorite colors right now? Mine i would have to say is Rakdos red and black or dimir black and blue.

[CirothUngol]

Does anybody still play paper magic?

Nope.

Just speaking for myself, of course. I started playing before Arabian Nights was released, and stopped after Urza's Saga. It freaks me out how powerful some of the new cards are.
Perhaps "over-powered" is too strong a term in their own block, but outside of it they can be devastating.

[Zeek]

I played with real cards from about Tempest to the end of the Mirrodin block. I do have friends who play with real cards though. Apparently it still happens.

Because I've been playing on here mostly, I've lost a lot of sense of sets. Admittedly, I would have a very difficult time putting a constructed format deck together that isn't vintage/legacy because I have no idea what's been printed/reprinted when. Even now, I'm looking over some of the banned lists for newer formats and I have no idea how or why certain cards made the list. XD

[Gargaroz]

Well, I begun to play Magic with black-bordered italian Revised, dropped at Masques, restarted with Apocalypse, take an "hiatus" with Zendikar block (Rise of Eldrazi was a shameful expansions, IMHO), and then restating with M11 and I'm still playing.
Although some "smart" moves of WotC really pissed me off (the introduction of Mythic rares, the shenanigans with the big Extended rotation and the introduction of Modern), I think I'll keep playing paper magic for a long time

[porphyre]

Although some "smart" moves of WotC really pissed me off (the introduction of Mythic rares, the shenanigans with the big Extended rotation and the introduction of Modern), I think I'll keep playing paper magic for a long time

I get the Mythic Rares (if I played paper, it'd infuriate me too) but what about Extended and Modern? It sounds like you were around for the first big extended rotation. Think it was around Kamigawa or Ravnica... where they rotated out like, revised up to Invasion or something? I remember putting my dual-lands away was a very sad time.

This second Extended thing (which I know nothing about) was worse?

[gmzombie]

The only thing that makes me mad are the cheap ass mythic rates..they should be at least 5 dollars or more since they are super rare..just saying

[ozks]

i never played magic on paper. I don't have this kind of friends to play, my friends are of alcohol and girls... that kind of stuff
I learned to play in this game (the original with his 200 cards, year ago)

[stassy]

ozks> You should see at least one play IRL or just maybe a youtubed match of competitive play, it can be something very different from the video games

[Aquillion]

I started playing around Revised and lost interest around the time of the Weatherlight Saga (when I realized they intended to keep printing sets tied into its ridiculous metaplot) -- part of what brought me to the game originally was the rich background and the way the cards used poetry and the like to evoke a specific moods; I liked the diversity of strange spells and artifacts and the like from different parts of the setting. Even Antiquates was themed on telling the story of the Brother's War from a point long after it was over, rather than giving a specific blow-by-blow.

Whereas in the Weatherlight Saga they apparently decided to dump most that in order to focus attention on pedantically following every footstep of a set of genericly boring NPC characters on their utterly uninteresting adventure, with nearly all the flavor text revolving around their specific story. It felt like it was merchandise driven or something -- like the company had suddenly been bought by someone who was primarily interested in selling Gerrard figurines.

I'm glad that they seem to have at least realized what a mistake that was, even if they started to slip into the same territory with the plainswalker cards (and the constant forced references to them) now and then -- when they do things like that, it feels like they care more about establishing copyrightable brands rather than making an evocative setting. It doesn't help that all the plainswalkers are, without exception, the most generic two-dimensional caricature of their colors imaginable -- an always-angry red-headed fire witch with a hair-trigger temper? A savage barbarian green guy? An aloof psychic-themed blue mentalist? Careful you don't lose us with all these complicated and original characters, guys.

But basically I was more interested in imposing my own story on the game as I played, rather than having it dictated to me so severely by the cards... I think that that's why Weatherlight drove me away. Maybe I was also outgrowing it a bit, since the story and characters felt so childish, but I don't honestly think so -- I mean, I got back into the game now, and I still feel that Weatherlight's story was embarrassingly Saturday-morning-cartoon childish and that both earlier and later stories were better.

(A lot of the rest of that they do is still gold, which is what brought me back. Ravnica is cool.)

[porphyre]

Funny, you got turned off by the stories, I got turned off by the mechanics... it's a game after all, not a book.

It seems like around Invasion or so, they just started pushing block mechanics soooo hard. Type 2 was like "Block+". You'd take block decks and add 3 or 4 good cards from the other block currently in rotation and kinda go from there. You had to do that because the decks were just so weak if they didn't have a solid synergistic core based around a block.

Frankly, what I'm saying is that your deck didn't work unless you were following the framework given to you by WotC R&D.

[Aquillion]

Hrm. I think that it varies from block to block, but I sort of like block mechanics. They give each era a distinct flavor, and I don't find them quite that restrictive in most blocks -- for example, proliferate certainly works well with Infect and a lot of other cards from its block; but there's tons of other cards from earlier and later blocks that work well with it, too. (It works particularly well with creatures that enter play with one or more +1/+1 counters, and the entire block has none of those.)

Threshold and Madness are special cases because they give you a mechanic that encourages you to build your deck with a ton of cards of the appropriate ability; but even then, you can vary things a lot based on the method you use to fill your graveyard or discard cards (there's a lot of cards for each in other sets), and they both work well with graveyard / discard strategies found in other blocks. For example, Squee, Goblin Nabob is useful in almost any Madness deck, because those decks tend to have ways to discard cards for benefits.

There's also a few cards that are actually stronger outside their block, like Guardian of the Guildpact (or any of Ravnica's other monocolor hate), attackers with shadow, etc.

[Gargaroz]

This afternoon I did a Modern Masters draft : lots of fun, you should try, it's a bit expansive (25 Euros for 3 boosters), but it's worth : found Pact of Negation, Countryside Crusher, Cold-Eyed Selkie and someone passed me a FOIL Doubling Season (!!!) and an Oona, Queen of the Fae. Plus all the valuable commons / uncommons. Played UW and finished second, won another pack and cracked Vedalken Shackles. Not bad, I say

[gmzombie]

yea ive been into standard since i came back but i think im going to do a MM draft too. i like drafting. the last time i drafted i pulled a boros reckoner when it iwas hot still and and sphinx revelation. i was happy with that lol.

[magict01]

i started to play just before the ice age block, did a lots of tournaments (regional, national and GP) and stopped at kamigawa set cause the spirit of the original game was poorest at each new block ;

Remember necro/donate, recurring of the fittest, aluren - cavern harpy etc... and compare with actual decks; no more combo decks only aggro, in best case aggro with some semblance of control.

Hasbro killed this game, taking players for cash machine, destroying the metagame again and again. Look at the price of cards in a new set, everything is around 4 to 10 dollars with maybe ten cards at 50 dollars or much and without these you can't play tournaments and hope have a chance to win... Built a competitive deck in 1998 wasn't easy, but it's a way far from now.
(just my opinion, not saying i'm the holy thruth)

i'm really sad this game looks like this now cause that was my main passion.