[ExI] Magic the Gathering

[Adrian Tymes]

I used to play, back in the '90s.

I was given a deck.  Played enough to amass around 200 cards, favoring a
red-green combo centered around Mana Flare, Stream of Life, and direct
damage (such as Fireball and Lightning).  Lost all but my active deck to
someone making a five-finger discount.  Passed along that deck to someone
else.

Haven't played much since.  The game's gotten a lot more complicated, with
enough special-case rules that you can't reasonably make a pro-grade deck
without serious amounts of study to even learn of them all*, and as a
result less appealing to me.  That they have explicitly banned Mana Flare
(and a few other cards I favored) from modern-format tournaments didn't
help.  Whatever degree of pay to win it was back then, it's more so now.

* The volume of rules about planeswalkers is a particular symbol of the
added complexity.  If you disagree with this objection, I suspect you don't
understand what I'm actually objecting to.  Don't try to explain the rules,
but instead take note of how long the complete list of planeswalker rules
is, including everything specific to planeswalkers - which includes
everything to do with loyalty counters, that being one of their core
mechanics.  Arguably this also includes all rules about the Legendary
type, as all planeswalkers are now Legendary (but one has to know this in
order to play optimally, in case one encounters - in one's own hand or
someone else's - an older-but-still-legal planeswalker card - such as
certain prints of Nicol Bolas, Planeswalker or Liliana of the Veil - that
doesn't say "Legendary").  Compare how long this list is to, say, the rules
about untapping, which have not changed appreciably from when I played.

On Sun, Jun 21, 2020 at 11:56 AM Will Steinberg via extropy-chat <
extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:

> Ok how many of you play Magic the Gathering?  Very good game.  I think
> Spike would like it a lot if he doesn't already play
> _______________________________________________
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