Jake summons his minions to lay waste to Hannah’s troops
For some reason, after about a five year hiatus, Jake suddenly went digging through our never-unpacked boxes of stuff from New Zealand for his Magic The Gathering cards.
He and I used to play and collect a long time ago and he’s got the bug again. Fortunately, we’d hung onto them.
We have thousands. I’m not exaggerating either. Thousands. Which is just as well, because half the fun is assembling the decks. You stack your deck with combinations of creatures and spells that you think will work together well in a particular strategic way to crush your opponent. And when it all goes wrong, you go back to the drawing board and re-tweak your deck, adding and removing cards.
Like contract bridge with goblins
It’s a good game. Yes, it’s really geeky – but no, it’s not a puerile kids game like those Top Trumps and Yu-Gi-Oh cards you see around. This has been going for a couple of decades now, is extremely strategic and rather addictive. In terms of complexity and skill, it’s been compared to Bridge.
As a result, Jake’s quite good at it.
I can still beat him from time to time (which is more than I can say for chess), but he does tend to plan more moves ahead than I can consider, and builds his deck in a holistic and strategic manner, rather than the more haphazard ‘Ooh – Lava Axe!’ approach I take.
I met a world champion of Magic once. It was at a party, and he may have been drinking a little. He’s pretty much retired from the game, but when he played the international competition money was pretty good. $100,000 prize pools and so on. He’d won a couple of pro tours, but it was hardly a reliable income.
No magic in this town
Sadly, Birmingham’s not too good for MTG. There seem to be very few places to hang out and play, no good specialist shops and hardly anyone playing.
Fortunately, Jake’s girlfriend Hannah was willing to learn the ropes, and claims to enjoy playing it late into the evening every night for the past week. Hopefully, a few more of Jake’s friends will pick it up so there’s a bunch of them playing. That’s always more fun – and it means they can have tournament days on the weekend from time to time.
I may even join in. I have a killer green and red deck featuring a Silvos, Rogue Elemental, a Metamorphic Wurm and no fewer than FOUR Lava Axes.
Right now:
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2 Comments
“Sadly, Birmingham’s not too good for MTG.”
Are you sure? Perhaps your problem is that it is.
I remember playing M:tG when I first went to college in Colorado Springs. One time, I borrowed an all-green deck, and managed to put Aspect of the Wolf on a Craw Worm with 9 forests out, which effectively made an 11/9 creature that couldn’t be killed.
I won that round.