Casual Magicking

December 30, 2020

nettlesome – adjective : causing annoyance or difficulty

“Hate the deck, not the player.”

Perfectly reasonable statement, right? Aside from using the word “hate”, which I think is an ugly word tossed around far too facetiously, I understand the sentiment.

If you dislike playing against strategy X (where X = discard, land destruction, draw/go, Stax, etc.) then rail against the deck, not the person playing it.

Except…it’s not that simple.

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On the surface, sure – it is that simple. Heavy resource denial, often referred to as Stax, is one of the most reviled strategies you can play. If you sit down with a stranger at your LGS for some casual games, and they play a Stax deck, you shouldn’t get mad at the player, right? It’s the deck you are frustrated with. Point your exasperation thereabouts. Players should be able to play whatever deck they enjoy, whether their opponent enjoys playing against it or not.

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(This is where the “but” comes. You knew there’d be one.)

But…

Magic works differently than most other games. If you sit down with someone else and play poker, or chess, or Monopoly, your actions have a very limited ability to affect the other player’s enjoyment of the same game. A chess player may be able to choose a strategy you don’t want to play against, but that strategy doesn’t affect your ability to move your pieces or play your own strategy. It’s impossible to alter how the pieces move or prevent a player from making a legal move they wish to make.

Similarly, a Monopoly opponent can’t employ a strategy that prevents you from collecting your $200 when passing Go, and they can’t limit how many houses you can build on a property you own.

Magic, on the other hand, allows the participants to warp the rules of the game in a way few other games do. Magic allows a player to choose a strategy that can totally nullify what the opponent is trying to do. Heavy discard can often prevent your opponent from playing all but the card they topdeck each turn; land destruction can destroy the resources the opponent needs to cast their spells; Stax (in its various forms) can make it all but impossible for the opponent to advance their gameplan.

The common thread here is that Magic allows, and sometimes even encourages, strategies that can stop one of the players from playing the game in a meaningful (and therefore enjoyable) way.

The vast majority of players who build and play decks that utilize these strategies are well aware that their plan is to prevent the opponent from playing the game, and that what they are trying to do is quite unpopular with Magic players overall. They know most of their opponents will not enjoy the game, and they’re fine with that, because they are “not responsible for the opponent’s fun.”

This can also beget arguments that playing unpopular strategies is not against the rules, and they have the right to play whatever deck they find fun. All true.

(Here’s another “but”…)

But…

If you’ve chosen a deck that most players will find a miserable slog to play against, that reflects on you and how you choose to engage with the game. How you choose to play Magic affects, in a way almost no other games allow, how your opponent can then engage with that same game. In all but tournament or highly competitive matches, all players having a good time is (or at least should be) desirable. While you aren’t responsible for most of what your opponent does, what you choose to play does bear some responsibility on how the game plays out.

Obviously if your opponent doesn’t draw the right cards, or makes mistakes playing the ones they do, or just has a weaker deck or one that matches up poorly against yours, that’s on them – or just down to rotten luck. Bad matchups are inevitable, but both players having an opportunity to try and execute their deck’s gameplan goes a long way to making the match tolerable for the loser.

Playing a Stax deck built around Winter Orb – where your opponent untaps one land a turn but you get to untap all of yours – is almost sure to lead to a bad experience for the opponent. And they’ll surely hate your deck. But if you believe there should be no hard feelings – “hate the deck, not the player” – you are advocating for the notion that you are not responsible for intentionally choosing a deck designed to ruin the average opponent’s experience. You know that if your deck works properly, your opponent will be left unable to do much of anything. You know they are highly unlikely to enjoy the game. You know you are utilizing a strategy most players have zero interest in facing outside of ultra-competitive settings. It’s a “feels-bad” strategy to the very core.

You are, of course, perfectly within your rights – and the rules of the game – to play decks that utilize strategies that nearly always ruin someone else’s experience. But don’t be surprised if your opponent hates the deck…AND YOU…for choosing to play it.

12/17/20

tank – verb : fail completely, especially at great financial cost

Anyone who follows baseball knows that if a guy hits .450 for the first month of the season, there’s still no chance he finishes the season with a batting average over .400. No one’s hit over .400 since Ted Williams did it…in 1941. It’s unlikely anyone will ever do it again.

I was hitting about .600 in the first 9 packs of my Magic advent calendar. If all of my boosters were from a single booster box, I’d assuredly expect to get a whole lot of diddly over squat for the remainder of my packs. But these are all packs from different sets, chosen randomly by a random person and thrown in one of dozens of random boxes and shipped to me. There was a chance I’d continue to open good(ish) stuff. I had reason to entertain a little optimism, right?

Wrong.

My hopefulness didn’t account for the fact that a lot of my remaining packs were from sets with notoriously bad play and financial value. Shadows over Innistrad. Fate Reforged. Dragons of Tarkir. There’s a reason people don’t speak those names in hushed tones of reverence and bewildered awe. In fact, most people don’t talk about these sets at all, forgettable as they are.

Considering how universally awful the rares in Core Set 2019 are – the set garnered a reputation of “mythic or bust” shortly after release – my 10th advent pack coughing up this dude was quite fortuitous:

Though worth $3.90 – less than the retail price of a pack – Sai is still the second most valuable rare in M19, behind Goreclaw, Terror of Qal Sisma (worth a healthy 5 cents more than Sai.) That an uncommon in M19, Stitcher’s Supplier, is more valuable than every single rare in that set, is pathetic.

So yeah…Sai was a perfectly cromulent pull.

Since then, things have gone…poorly.

Six packs, and only one card I’d consider playable:

Like Sai, Crux of Fate is the second most valuable rare in its set – at $1.55. And also like M19, Fate Reforged is a set in which an uncommon is more valuable than every rare you can open. Shockingly, that uncommon, Temur Sabertooth, is worth more than every card in the set, save three mythic rares.

If you’re opening a booster and rooting for an uncommon over most of the set’s mythics, something went terribly awry in the development of that set. Players love to moan about power creep in recent years, but look at the alternative!

Just to prolong my pity party, here’s a few other wondrous pulls from recent days:

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A blob? Really? Who is ever happy to open a card depicting a blob?

You know what? “Blob” is so much fun to say, I’ll forgive that one.

For that matter, is ooze tribal a thing in Commander? Because my glorious extended art Biowaste Blob – in foil! – from Commander Legends is begging to be played. Somehow, in a matter of a few days, I opened copies of the only two Magic cards with the word “blob” in them.

(Every time I type “blob” I say the word in my head, and chuckle. What am I, 5 years old?)

What’s that? I brought up Commander Legends, after mentioning last post about having CMR collector boosters I couldn’t bring myself to open?

Why, yes, I’ve been opening my Commander Legends collector boosters. Like my advent packs, I’m opening one a day until Christmas. And also like the advent packs, a strong opening act has given way to vast despondency. But…BUT…there are eight more CMR collector boosters to go. Surely it’s only a matter of days before I open that inexorable pack with my foil extended art Jeweled Lotus. Because…2020. Seriously…2020 owes all of us foil extended art Loti.

Next time – Commander plans start to blossom. Or Kaldheim hype. Or more grousing about 30-cent rares. I have no idea.

December 10, 2020

headspace – noun : the volume above a liquid or solid in a closed container

In my late teens and early 20s I would make near-weekly sojourns to the record store. My son wouldn’t even understand that concept, as there aren’t many of those still in existence and I haven’t been in one in years. But before Napster and iTunes and Spotify (or whatever other lit/dope/sick app the youngins spin these days for bumping eargasms) you bought music physically.

I would return home with 3-4 CDs after most trips, as I was consuming music at a frantic pace in those years. And whichever disc I wanted to listen to most was the one I played last.

I told myself that this strange behavior was born from how I ate meals: one food at a time, with the favorite saved for last. Even if that meant my Mom’s vomitous salmon loaf had to go down first so I could choke my way through the less gag-inducing three bean nightmare…

In the present day, I can see that that analogy was just how I explained away odd conduct I didn’t really understand.

And while I outgrew eating my food one item at a time, or saving the best part for last (when it’s cold?) I still have a tendency to want to delay gratification for suspect reasons.

So my booster pack advent calendar has been a psychologically revealing experiment. While – in theory – I want every pack to contain something awesome, I know most of them will cough up bobo rares. And as I pull each day’s random pack from my decorated shoebox, I find myself secretly hoping to pull out the packs from sets that are largely devoid of value.

Hour of Devastation. Journey into Nyx. Oath of the Gatewatch. Fate Reforged.

The odds of getting anything solid from any of those sets is staggeringly and depressingly remote.

Seriously…have you looked at what you can open from Born of the Gods? There’s only 1 rare in the entire set worth more than $1.90, and only 5 of the set’s 35 rares are worth more than $1. I’d like to get this pack out of the way early, please!

Even the oldest pack in group of 24 that began this weird holiday adventure, Dark Ascension, has a slim chance of containing something useful (financially or for gameplay.) And that was the pack I yanked on day 2. Not surprisingly, it contained a bobo rare:

To be fair, it looked like a fun and interesting card on first glance. But then I realized it lacks the key rider tacked on to similar cards in recent years: “you may spend mana as though it were mana of any color to cast that spell.”

Without that language present…a definite bobo. The 20-cent pricetag and lack of deck representation on EDHREC confirmed this just isn’t useful outside of limited play.

So anyway…not only am I quietly rooting for my early packs to be salmon loaf – those almost guaranteed to be busts – when I do reveal a pack with potential – such as Core 2020 – I’m half-heartedly wishing for something iffy. As if that will magically guarantee later packs will be stuffed with foil mythics and chase rares.

This is – obviously – not logical or healthy behavior. And it’s exactly the kind of mindset that this advent calendar experiment was meant to help me confront (and start to overcome.)

Nine days in and I’m clearly still having difficulty breaking my lousy pack-cracking outlook. But you know what else I’m having?

Fun.

Opening packs has been FUN!

Even when I open shoulder-shruggers like Silent Gravestone and Precinct Captain.

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But…and this is a big but (no rapping allowed!)…I’ve done quite well so far. In nine packs I’ve already opened four mythics. As mentioned in my last post, Avacyn, Angel of Hope kicked off the jolly holiday season, and has been followed by these solid finds:

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Add two foil rares, one of which is actually playable:

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After 8 days – the first of which started with one of my three Masters packs – I moved to the middle third of my advent calendar, and happened to select another Masters pack. Inside was this very grey (but great) gem:

As this horrific year drunkenly staggers to a merciful end I’ve resolved to build my first Commander deck at the dawn of the new year. And this feels like a perfect inclusion to just about any deck I might build.

Oh, and it’s a $35 card.

All told, the rares and mythics in my first 9 packs have netted me over $75 in value. There’s no way I average better than $8 a pack from the remaining 15, but even if they’re littered with bobos, I’ll have opened more mythics than can usually be expected from 24 packs, and added a number of truly excellent, and undeniably playable, cards to the collection.

Now if only I could convince myself to crack some of the Commander Legends collector boosters I’m sitting on…

December 1, 2020

blitz – noun : a sudden, energetic, and concerted effort, typically on a specific task

The following is (sadly) a true story.

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Cast:
Obnoxious Man (OM): clad in a red Emirates soccer (sorry, football) jersey and speaking in a rapid, highly animated tone that suggests his mental state is chemically altered

King Bobo (KB): our (confused) protagonist out shopping

Target Employee #1 (TE1): 16-17 year old male with unkempt hair, wearing wrinkled khakis and employer-required red collared shirt; appears to be attempting to be helpful but mostly seems bemused

Target Employee #2 (TE2): bespectacled, tattooed woman with a pixie haircut in her early 20s

Scene:
Back wall of the local Target store, in front of a large display of trading cards and Funko Pop figures.

(King Bobo approaches the trading card display, hoping for a re-stock of any Pokemon Champion’s Path products, which his son wants for Christmas. Obnoxious Man and Target Employee #1 are standing in front of the display conversing.)

OM (to KB): who’s in charge of this stuff?

KB: (puzzled) I don’t know. I don’t work here.

OM: Right? Who’s in charge of this stuff? You know?

KB: … (looks at OM quizzically.)

(OM begins to take various Pokemon products – packs, decks, and boxes – and places them in his shopping cart.)

OM (to no one in particular): It’s free money! Free money! (To KB): Do you want some free money?

KB: Huh? What’s free money?

OM: All of it! (Gestures at mostly empty Pokemon racks. He then takes a Pokemon deck off the rack and shows it to TE1.)

OM (to TE1): Is there money in this?

TE1: Uh, yeah, maybe.

OM: Free money!

(OM picks up a Pokemon mini-binder that can hold a handful of cards. He holds it out to TE1.)

OM: Is there money in this?

TE1: I don’t think so. It doesn’t have any cards in it.

OM: (Pauses for a moment.) Who cares? I’ll get it anyway. Free money!

(OM continues to pile Pokemon products into his cart, as KB attempts to look at remaining stock. OM picks up a Magic planeswalker deck – Basri, from Core Set 2021.)

OM: Ma-gic. Magic. (To TE1): What’s this? What’s Magic?

TE1: It’s a card game. Like Pokemon. Only ten times nerdier. It’s what all the biggest nerds play.

OM: Is there money in this?

TE1: I don’t think so.

OM: Magic. Is it good? Is there money in it? (To KB): Who plays this? Magic? I don’t know if there’s money in this.

KB (only in his head): There’s no money in that, but Magic is the greatest game ever created. It’s a wonderful combination of chess and poker, with a fantasy aesthetic, deep gameplay, endless customization, dozens of ways to play, and a large fanbase. It’s a lot more engaging and skill-intensive than Pokem…

OM tosses the Magic deck onto the shelf instead of replacing it on the display rack.

OM (to TE1): Do you play Magic?

TE1: Um, no.

OM: Do you believe in Magic?

TE1: Do I believe in Magic? Um…well…

OM: Magic. You know. You believe in it?

TE1: Um…well…I’m not really sure…

(Target Employee #2 approaches. She is smiling nervously.)

TE2 (to TE1): Hey, can you help me with something over here?

(Both employees quickly walk away towards the electronics desk. OM finishes placing all available Pokemon products into his shopping cart.)

OM (to KB): you should get some, man. Free money!

(KB reviews the Magic stock and sees nothing of interest. He begins to walk away.)

OM: Oh, hey, did you want some of the free money? I didn’t have to take it all. You can have some.

KB: No, I’m good.

OM: Free money, man! Free money!

KB wanders through the Christmas section, looking for stocking stuffers. He settles on a package of Baby Yoda fruit snacks for his wife, and then walks towards the front of the store to check out. He passes the electronics department, where OM is standing at a register manned by TE2.

OM: Do you play cards?

TE2: I used to play Magic.

OM (laughing): Magic? That guy said that was for supernerds. You’re a supernerd?

TE2: (Annoyed) No. (She scans several Pokemon items and puts them into plastic shopping bags.)

OM: Do you believe in Magic?

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Today was the first day of my “Magic advent calendar.” I don’t have a traditional festive display with little numbered windows or pouches, so I cut a rectangular hole in the top of a shoe box, put my 24 different Magic packs into it, and wrapped it in Christmas-themed wrapping paper. The plan is to reach in and grab a random pack each day until Christmas. Twenty-one of the packs are from sets I’ve opened before and are from the last 5 or 6 years. The remaining three are from Masters sets I’ve never owned or opened: Iconic Masters, Masters 25, and Ultimate Masters.

Today’s random pack grab was Iconic Masters, which was both exciting and disappointing. I had hoped the Masters packs would come later in the month, seeing as how they have the highest probability of something saucy. But I was also jazzed to start my pack-opening experiment with a “premium” pack.

Despite the set having a plethora of solid uncommons, that section of the pack has nothing but chaff: Bubbling Cauldron, Coordinated Assault, and Staggershock.

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And the foil was the lackluster common Student of Ojutai.

The rare slot, however? This beauty:

Avacyn, Angel of Hope! A card I never expected to own due to its too-rich-for-my-blood price tag ($25).

I fear this is all but guaranteed to be the highlight of the entire 24 packs, but still – a fantabulous start to the season! May it not be my only highlight…

November 27, 2020

trammel – noun : a restriction or impediment to someone’s freedom of action

Have I mentioned that I rarely open boosters? I feel like I have – maybe even a few times – but I don’t have the wherewithal to read through the archives to see if I’ve actually done so.

So.

I rarely open boosters.

Outside of those opened to play with my son, I suspect I haven’t opened more than 4 or 5 booster packs this year “just to see what’s inside.” Maybe that’s a good thing. Cracking packs for the joy of it can end up a pretty joyless task once you know enough about Magic to surmise the monetary value of the cards you just opened. Understanding the financial side of Magic – something I really never did for the first 20 years I played it – is a double-edged sword.

It seems preposterous to claim I didn’t understand the financial side of Magic for so long. For much of that time I knew which cards were chase cards and which were bobos, even if I wasn’t able to rattle off their approximate prices. I knew reserve list cards fetched crazy prices ($30 for a single card? Who has that kind of disposable income?) And I knew, deep in the recesses of my brain, that cracking packs was not a financially sound practice. But it was just so fun to buy a booster box and open the entire thing in one sitting.

When I returned to Magic in 2017 I got much of my collection logged into a tracking program, and was astonished to see the “value.” I put that word in quotes because I’m well aware that I could never hope to get the listed amount were I to sell my whole collection. But that number – that “value” – was the catalyst to get me to dig deeper into the financial side of the game.

And, sadly, “value” has also convinced me to (mostly) stop opening packs unless they’re going to be put to some use.

Actually, that’s not entirely true. There’s more to my aversion to opening packs, despite having a pretty substantial amount of them. My plan is to write about the reasons for that reluctance around New Year’s, as I reflect on my year’s journey to rediscover the joy in Magic.

Despite my hesitation to do so, I will be opening some boosters before year’s end. I purchased a package that came with 24 boosters, all from different sets (several of which I’ve never opened before), which I’ll be treating as an advent calendar. For years my son has had an advent calendar for the holidays, and last year my wife got herself one. So this year I’ll have one of my own (though without festive the packaging or little doors to crack open.)

The purpose of this experiment is two-fold:

1. Treat myself to a little something for the holidays
2. Push myself to engage in an activity that I should be able to enjoy – that I used to enjoy – but have struggled with recently

I’ll try to blog about this little experiment, as well as more about WHY I’m doing it, as the season unfolds and concludes. Will I be inundated with bobo rares, or will 2020 give something back? This year owes us – ALL OF US – a little year-end goodwill.

November 11, 2020

ditto – noun : the same thing again

I will make not excuse for my extended dearth of posting except to say that election (and post-election) anxiety is a brutal taskmaster. I’m feeling much better now. Almost hopeful!

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With the banning of Omnath, Lucky Clover, and Escape to the Wilds in the not-too-distant past, the Standard metagame was blown wide open. Or so I read. I stick to the Play queue, and while it’s infested with pubstomping tryhards blitzing through chumps like me to farm daily wins, it does tend to feature a much wider swath of competition than the competitive ladder. Honestly, I only faced a handful of Omnath decks before he was relegated to the dustbin, so things haven’t looked all that different to me in the last few weeks. Far, far too many rogues, some mono-red and Gruul aggro, green stompy, mill, scads of Yorion and Lurrus decks (both of which irritate me to an unreasonable degree), and all kinds of random stuff: clerics and warriors, landfall of various stripes, even the odd party deck.

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And I’ve been wiped by Ugin played from decks of pretty much every color combination. Even a mono-red aggro deck that I got under control dropped one on me when they somehow hit 8 mana. That was demoralizing.

Despite the somewhat diverse opponents in the Play queue, I do still try and keep up with what’s being heavily played on the ladder, since it all filters down eventually. Even if I have no chance of handling a strategy, I do like to have some idea of what it’s going to do to me.

It was during this sort of scouting that I saw Esper Doom Foretold decks have apparently made a bit of a comeback. I built an Esper Doom deck after Throne of Eldraine came out, and while it could be fun to play, it felt…icky. Playing the mirror against decks that had been better optimized than mine, it was clear to me that I didn’t want to put anyone else through even my second-rate build of Esper Doom. So while my heart fluttered a little to see Doom Foretold being played again, I knew I couldn’t possibly build the Esper (and usually Yorion-based) versions that were having some success.

But what about Mardu colors – Mardoom, as I call it? I was sure that favorite build of mine was nigh-unviable after it lost so many key pieces in the Standard rotation. Gone were recurrable threat and card-draw ninja God-Eternal Bontu, cost-reducer and backup threat Starfield Mystic, and underrated all-star Oath of Kaya.

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What would slot into the deck in place of those losses?

Skyclave Shade was the first piece I settled on. It’s a downgrade from Bontu, but it can be recurred several turns in a row if lands are available, and it could be used as repeatable sacrifice fodder for Doom Foretold (in truth it rarely serves that purpose, but it’s on the table.)

My previous Mardoom deck didn’t play Golden Egg, a staple of Esper Doom decks, but I knew I could add it to Mardoom. Or I could trot out Spare Supplies, which can’t provide a life boost but can dig you a card further when stuck. I’ve experimented with both artifacts, and have settled on the Supplies for now. After losing more than a few games to excessive Treacherous Blessing pings…that may not be the wisest decision.

Elspeth Conquers Death is another staple of Esper versions that I had eschewed previously, but I figured it might be time to slot it in as well. It might be among the first cuts I’d make now, as there are so, SO many cheap threats running roughshod currently that the saga can’t handle.

And since rogues and mill in general are ubiquitous at the moment, Kroxa, Titan of Death’s Hunger feels like a strong win condition. Playing Uro’s evil second cousin feels wrong, but the deck has to win somehow, and relying entirely on the Shade or Outlaws’ Merriment would be pure folly.

The deck just felt off when I first started playing it. As the ugly losses mounted, some things were immediately clear: the lack of shocklands made the manabase a sloppy mess, and I didn’t have enough early plays to try and match or disrupt the opponent.

Since sagas make for decent sacrificial lambs to Doom Foretold, I also added some copies of Birth of Meletis (to help a bit with mana) and Elspeth’s Nightmare, the latter of which feels like it is perfectly suited to discombobulate a number of popular decks.

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More matches, more losing. Too many decks were playing out multiple threats, and trying to pick them off one at a time, or whittle them down via Doom Foretold, was hopeless. So in came Shatter the Sky and a couple copies of old standby The Akroan War, which I had left out of early builds due to no space and a lack of confidence it would be useful.

Those additions really solidified the deck, and it feels a lot more fun, and moderately viable, now. I’ve played it in its current incarnation off and on for about a week now, and it feels like…well, not home. It feels a bit like traveling to a favorite remote vacation spot and discovering you forgot your toothbrush and don’t have enough pairs of underwear to last the whole trip. Yes, you can gut it out and have fun, but something is going to smell towards the end.

I know the deck isn’t right yet. The loss of Oath of Kaya is, by far, the biggest blow to the deck’s strategy. Treacherous Blessing is still a key component to the deck, so some life gain is often helpful when the Doom Foretolds hide in the latter half of the deck and every spell you play is a rabbit punch. Gone, however, is Bontu, who provided another way of trashing the Blessing. The lifegain off of Oath was a huge boon, and while Birth of Meletis can help, it’s often too little and too late, since it takes 3 turns to gain the 2 life.

Really, the deck seems out of balance. Doom Foretold is now the only way to sacrifice a Blessing, there’s no longer any potentially explosive card draw, and the inability of the Skyclave Shade to block can just sabotage an otherwise solid gamestate. As much as I love seeing people spend (waste?) removal on a Shade while I have 2 or more lands in hand, it’s still a fairly easily removed threat with no evasion.

Perhaps Archon of Sun’s Grace should return, though I’m not sure where it slots in. There are so many good removal spells available (and played) all across Standard that I don’t feel like it’s a good option.

Elspeth Conquers Death could perhaps go, as it doesn’t always have a card in the graveyard to bring back. Skyclave Apparition is tempting over Banishing Light, except leaving behind a token instead of a permanent is problematic for a deck based around Doom Foretold.

Mardoom 2.0 isn’t the medium-rare tenderloin I had grown to love pre-rotation, but it’s it’s still a nicely seasoned strip steak. Whether I’ll continue to tweak it to try and find the perfect rub, or turn off the grill and return to decks that taste more like bowls of oatmeal mush.

October 27, 2020

set – verb : be restored to its normal condition by knitting together again after being broken

Every time a new Standard set is released my son and I play some sealed deck with packs from draft booster boxes I buy. Sometimes it’s weeks after the box has arrived, but eventually the kid is interested enough, or bored enough, to want to open packs and even play some (2-3) games. That’s about all I can get out of him per set, but it’s not nothing.

For Zendikar Rising, however, I didn’t buy a draft booster box. Why would I, in a world with set boosters?

To play sealed deck is why. Duh. To think I have to tell myself these things.

So…no draft booster box this time. Except – hey! – I preordered a ZNR bundle with my set booster box, and that contains 10 of the 12 draft boosters the kid and I would need to play sealed.

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Full and fair disclosure: it never actually occurred to me that buying a set booster box would foul up this particular ritual of ours.

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Due to Wizards’ production delays thanks for COVID, ZNR bundles were delayed and mine hadn’t arrived with the set booster box, so I figured the kid and I would try sealed with set boosters. Except set boosters have only 11 playable Magic cards in them, vs. 14 in a draft booster. That’s 18 fewer playables in a 6-pack sealed pool. Which is a LOT.

Various solutions presented themselves: open 7 set boosters each; stick to 6 and make do with a much smaller cardpool; wait until the bundle arrived. I chose…none of those. Instead I bought 4 draft boosters and we did a weird hybrid sealed pool: 2 draft boosters and 4 set boosters each.

Woof.

Look, I’m not going to disparage set boosters. I think they’re awesome, and even after opening just a few, I think they’re a much, much, MUCH more interesting experience than opening a draft booster. But…

The section for “connected” commons and uncommons, while a theoretically interesting idea, is not working in practice. None of my 4 set boosters had a discernible theme throughout all 6 cards, and though I didn’t see my son’s packs, he didn’t see any patterns either. Oh, I opened, for example, a pack with 4 blue commons all related to kicker. But the 2 uncommons that followed had absolutely nothing to do with kicker.

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End result: weirdly chaotic cardpools. I ended up with 8 white cards. My son had 5. Five white cards from 6 packs! But I had 24 green cards. Unless I wanted my deck to be rubbish, green HAD to be one of my colors, just by virtue of needing enough playables in a color. And whether due to rotten luck or just the vagaries of the “connected” cards in set boosters, my entire cardpool had only a couple removal spells. My final deck, a green/black concoction that appeared to have some kicker and party synergies but played out as though it had neither, used all of the removal available in those two colors: 1 card – Hagra Mauling.

A rare no less! That was the only removal card I opened across 2 colors in 6 packs. Beyond that, I opened a Kabira Takedown in white and a Synchronized Spellcraft in red, and…that’s it. Out of 72 cards, 3 were removal (one of which is highly conditional.)

Yeah. Woof.

I understand this is how sealed goes sometimes, and that’s a reason a decent number of players will only play limited if it’s draft. But the kid and I make do with that we have.

For Kaldheim, though…we won’t do this again. Building a deck with what you’re given is a fun challenge, but the peculiarities of sealed deck are greatly amplified when using set boosters. They aren’t MADE for limited play, of course, so using them for that purpose was undoubtedly a specious decision. But I still didn’t anticipate just how wonky our cardpools could end up.

For what it’s worth (squat, I suppose) the games were still fun. The kid beat me 2 of 3 games, with Nighthawk Scavanger being instrumental to both his wins. Turns out that if you can’t remove a flying, lifelinking threat that grows larger as the turns progress and your efforts to deal with it fail, you lose.

And in an update to my quest to shed my “king of bobo rares” crown, we have the expedition box topper from the set booster box:

How you might feel about this card will likely depend on whether you play Commander (I currently don’t but hope to some day), enjoy the Azorius color combination (I mostly despise it in constructed play), and whether you want your boxtoppers to come out of the wrapper in mint condition – mine had a slight crimp along the top edge. I’m not sure it’s worth the effort to report this admittedly rather minor flaw to Wizards, and I’m mostly sure it’s not worth the effort to ship the thing to Seattle to get a replacement (assuming that’s even possible.)

Sea of Clouds isn’t a bobo, of course. A mint copy sells for $11-12. But it’s still among the lower tier of Zendikar Rising expeditions, I can’t currently use the thing in any meaningful way, and getting a less-than-mint copy straight out of the package was hugely disappointing.

I hate to pile onto the avalanche of “2020 Sucks” negativity, but…well…

Boo.

To counterbalance that, however, I will tease that my next post will be a more positive one. It’s…

The Return of Mardoom!

October 13, 2020

cleave – verb : split or sever (something), especially along a natural line or grain

I miss baseball.

Oh, I know MLB is deep into the playoffs of its COVID-abbreviated 2020 season. But I’m not watching, nor do I care who’s playing or who wins.

I want to care. I just don’t.

Baseball was a massive part of my life for the better part of 40 years. I played it as a kid, and was pretty good at it. I lived in Houston for 5 years, until I was 7, and was an Astros fan. I have very, VERY few memories of my time in Houston, but the most vivid (and happiest) memory I have of those years is this:

Rain was pouring down that night in 1979, and a large puddle had spawned in our backyard. My brother and I, along with our best friend who lived in the house directly behind ours, all took turns taking baseball slides through that muddy pit of water. And as we ran across the yard for each squishy plunge, we would yell out the name of a Houston Astros baseball player.

“César Cedeño!”

“Enos Cabell!”

“Jose Cruz!”

“Terry Puhl!”

Future hall-of-famers these were not, and the internet tells me the 1979 Astros finished 89-73, in second place and out of the playoffs. Still, I adored the game and my team even as a young child.

(Magic content is coming, I promise.)

My family moved to Colorado that fall, and for the next 11 years I made do with a few yearly trips to Mile High Stadium to see the minor league Denver Bears. We did catch a major league exhibition game that was played in Denver one spring in the mid or late 80s. It was at that game that I caught my first (and so far only) foul ball, off the bat of a player that hit 2 home runs that day. As we drove home from the game, I turned that ball over and over in my hands, determined to follow that hitter’s career for as long as he played baseball.

When I woke up the next day I couldn’t remember his name.

That memory is so important to me, though, that I’ve spent hours scouring the internet as an adult trying to find details about that exhibition game, in hopes of finding out who hit that foul ball. As deep as the internet goes, however, I’ve never been able to find even a single mention of that game.

In 1993 Denver finally got Major League Baseball, and the Colorado Rockies supplanted the Astros as my favorite team. My investment in baseball waxed and waned over the subsequent years, peaking in 2007 when the Rockies swept their way through the playoffs, only to get swept by the Red Sox in the World Series.

(Still not quite at the Magic content portion – sorry!)

Around 2008 or 2009 I discovered fantasy baseball, and played it for years with more passion than success. I even ran my own fantasy league for a few years.

And then in 2018, my interest in baseball cratered. The Rockies actually made the playoffs that year, but I had already checked out of the season before then, something I had started doing every fall for several years.

Some reasons seem obvious: the Rockies have never figured out how to maintain success playing baseball a mile high, and the June Swoon (when strong starts turned into horrific nosedives) had become a yearly Rockies tradition. Team ownership and management have long been utterly incompetent, and I’m now convinced they aren’t willing or able to build a team capable of winning a World Series. And though the Rockies have traditionally played better at home than any other team in baseball, year after year it seemed me and the family would attend the games where the Rockies starter got shelled by the 3rd inning and any hope of a victory had evaporated, leaving us to endure inning after inning of hopelessly bad baseball with only $6 nachos to make it bearable.

But the Rockies have been poorly run since their inception. Even in their worst years I still followed the game, finding secondary teams to root for. That didn’t explain my failing interest. As dopey as it sounds, I think the game had just turned into something I didn’t recognize: too many strikeouts, too many home runs, infield shifts and excessive pitching changes, players making ever-escalating salaries that boggled the mind.

Despite the nagging feeling that baseball had passed me by, last year I was determined to reignite my interest in baseball. I failed. Before the season even started the Astros sign-stealing scandal snowballed, and my second favorite team supplanted the New York Yankees as the most hated team in baseball. And as the games began, it became instantly obvious the Rockies were pitiful and hopeless. I quickly tuned out, and had no regrets about doing so.

The Rockies finished 2019 with a putrid 71-91 record, and then proceeded to do NOTHING to improve the team going into 2020. And yet the team’s owner predicted a 94-win season in 2020, which would have been a franchise record. Shockingly, the Rockies started the shortened 2020 season 11-3 (best record in baseball at the time) before losing over 2/3 of their remaining games to finish with an abysmal 26-34 record, missing the playoffs in a year when they were expanded to include over half the teams in the MLB. Pathetic doesn’t even begin to cover it.

What does ANY of this have to do with Magic?

(Finally, Magic content. Probably too little, too late.)

The Magic doomsayers are loudly baying across the internet, declaring the imminent demise of the game. For, like, the 73rd time since the game’s inception. Only it’s definitely true this time! Wizards has really gone and messed up one too many times!

That people are predicting Magic’s death is not new or newsworthy. But this time around I am seeing a pretty significant number of players that have admitted (if they can be taken at their word) to getting out – selling their entire collections, moving on to other games or hobbies. And yet, here they are still popping up in online threads about the state of the game to bemoan Magic’s predicament and trumpet their decision to cut and run. I’m paraphrasing, but I keep seeing comments like these:

“Sold everything months ago and don’t regret it for a second.”

“So happy I got out.”

“Haven’t played in ages and don’t miss it.”

“Uninstalled Arena earlier this year, and no interest in trying it again.”

So then what the HELL are they doing on a Magic subreddit after all this time, posting in threads about the state of the game?

Cards or no cards, these people are still caught in Magic’s web. Are they lurking for the sole purpose of reading grim news that reaffirms their decision to stop playing/buying/engaging? Does finding out that Standard is still a disaster or that Wizards is still making questionable decisions bring them joy? Are they watching from the sidelines, hopeful to witness the game’s inevitable and impending demise to help justify their own decision to bail before the coming implosion?

I don’t get it. These players hate Hasbro/Wizards, they hate the state of the game and/or where they see the game heading, they don’t miss playing, they’re thrilled to have sold off all their cards, and yet here they are, commenting almost giddily about not being involved with Magic anymore. It’s…nonsensical.

And yet…

I kind of get it.

I will load up ESPN.com throughout the baseball offseason to see what moves (if any) the Rockies make. Next spring, I may even convince myself that I’ll get back into baseball – watch more games, check out daily boxscores and standings and stats each morning, try to learn which players are on which teams now. It won’t work, but for a few brief weeks in April I might think otherwise.

The baseball I grew up with is not what I see in 2020, much like the Magic so many players have loved over the years isn’t what they see in 2020. I don’t really get it – I still love Magic and think it has a long, healthy life to live – but I also kind of do.

Come next spring, will I finally be able to sever the stretched and fraying thread that binds me to baseball? Or am I caught in the game’s clutches, unable to truly leave it behind?

October 6, 2020

Newton’s Third Law of Motion – scientific principle : For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction

This is going to be an uncomfortable post to write. So be it. What’s the idiom? “Get comfortable with being uncomfortable”? Let’s do that.

A lot of Magic players have an unhealthy relationship with the game.

On the surface, it really is that simple. A lot of people genuinely love the game of Magic, while simultaneously harboring an equally intense hatred of the company that makes it.

That is not healthy. And it is NOT the game’s fault.

Some may be inclined to lay the blame, therefore, at the feet of Wizards of the Coast and/or Hasbro. I think that’s shortsighted and deflects responsibility.

Let’s look at all of this through the lens of the Secret Lair: The Walking Dead announcement. For anyone not familiar, WotC is releasing mechanically unique, black bordered cards you can only get during a one-week Secret Lair drop, and those cards are representations of characters from The Walking Dead TV show. The player backlash was swift and intense, and has not abated.

To summarize the reasons for player discontent with the TWD Secret Lair:

1. Wizards has previously promised not to release mechanically unique cards in black border, that aren’t available from booster packs. Though rarely cited, Wizards broke this promise years ago by creating new cards for Commander precons. If you dismiss those (which most people appear to), there’s no denying this promise was broken when new card Firesong and Sunspeaker was announced as a buy-a-box promo for Dominaria. Every Standard-legal set released after that, up until Zendikar Rising has had new cards as buy-a-box promos. Prior to the release of ZNR, WotC announced that due to negative player feedback, they would stop this practice.
2. They could have made The Walking Dead cards silver-border. This is the treatment given other non-Magic IP cards such as the Ponies: The Galloping and the Transformer/D&D/Nerf promos from Hascon. Alternately, they could have reskinned existing Magic cards with The Walking Dead art, and given the cards the same treatments used for Ikoria’s Godzilla cards. Instead, they chose to make these black border, ensuring they would be legal in eternal formats and Commander.
3. Despite its inclusion of zombies (“walkers” in TWD parlance), the universe of The Walking Dead is not particularly analogous to that of Magic. Crossing over with an outside IP is never going to be popular with a sizeable portion of Magic’s audience.

There are other reasons people hated the whole concept and its execution, but the above is plenty of fuel for the bonfire.

On October 1st, Wizards hosted a Twitch stream featuring Aaron Forsythe, Magic’s Direct of R&D, and Mark Heggen, Princial Product Designer, in which they attempted to explain and defend the decisions they made surrounding the TWD Secret Lair. I’ve linked the video here:

I attended the stream, and glanced at the Twitch channel chat from time to time. Though flying by at breakneck speed, the sentiments were pretty uniform: WotC were liars that were gaslighting the audience in an attempt to snatch ever larger sums of money from players. Such statements were rampant before a single word by Forsythe or Heggen had even been uttered.

After the stream, reaction was swift and negative: WotC were liars that were gaslighting the audience in an attempt to snatch ever larger sums of money from players.

I won’t sugarcoat this: I think the vast majority of the people who attended the stream, and who commented on it online afterwards, were not acting in good faith.

Before I explain and defend that statement, I will first say that I felt the arguments the WotC employees made during the Twitch stream were largely reasonable. I still don’t agree with them, but I can largely understand WHY they made the decisions they did. I say that as someone who attended the stream with an open mind – I was genuinely interested in hearing what WotC had to say.

I don’t believe the same can be said for most of the other attendees.

Here’s what I think these people wanted: to be told the drop was cancelled, or that is was being modified to be silver-bordered or given the Godzilla treatment. Anything short of those actions was going to be unacceptable. And to a point, that sort of expectation might be…reasonable, I suppose? But the vitriol that was then dumped online about Wizards being greedy liars gaslighting players in their quest to expand profits was stunning.

If Wizards can’t be trusted in any fashion, then why attend the stream to begin with (other than to spew anger into the Twitch chat)? If none of their arguments about why they made the decisions they did can be taken in good faith or trusted, then why spend a single second listening to their justifications that you were always going to dismiss?

These are the people I was referencing at the beginning of this post: people who love this game too much to hate the company that makes it as much as they do.

A lot of players don’t fully trust Wizards of the Coast, and none of us agree with all the decisions they make. But if you hate the company so much that you are unwilling to, in good faith, listen to what they have to say about decisions you don’t like, then you seriously need to take a break from the game. To dismiss anything they have to say as lies and spin and distortions meant only to maintain the financial bottom line is not healthy (even if true.)

It’s a bit of a meme at this point, but that’s a toxic relationship that needs to end. Wizards isn’t going to stop making Magic cards anytime soon (no, the game is not dying, and I don’t believe that the TWD Secret Lair is the beginning of the end) and they assuredly aren’t done making decisions you disagree with.

To be fair, quite a few players have made it clear that this Secret Lair is over the line for them, and/or the last straw after a litany of issues in recent months or years. They’re done with Magic, some determined to sell their collections and pursue other games or interests. That’s a healthy way to handle a relationship that isn’t working: end it. I wouldn’t advise anyone to sell their cards unless they need the money – I see too many people that admit to selling their cards and then regretting it years later when they return to the game. But no amount of love for the game should keep you around if you are so consumed with hatred of Wizards and their business practices that you refuse to even consider that WotC might mean something they say or might be capable of learning a lesson.

Perhaps I’m naive. I don’t deny that Wizards has broken promises or made unpopular decisions that are about financial gain over player goodwill. But I don’t believe the entire company is riddled with liars that care only about making vast sums of money at the expense of everything else. If I did believe that, I’d like to think that no amount of love of the game would keep me buying packs, playing regularly, or angrily dumping my hatred on the internet.

Magic makes us emotional. We celebrate improbable victories or lucky booster pulls, we curse mana flood and lousy topdecks, and we despair of unbalanced formats or overpriced products. But if your love of the game is eclipsed only by the rage you feel when Wizards screws up, something has gone vastly awry with your perception of the game, and you need to take a step back (or turn around and sprint.) If the game is becoming something you can no longer support or enjoy, then step away and try life without it – including raging on Reddit about how glad you are you don’t play anymore.

Time won’t heal all wounds, but it’ll soothe most. In a month, or a year, or a decade, you may find the game is different, or you’re different, and you can enjoy Magic without also hating it or the company that makes it.

October 1, 2020

fine – verb : clarify (beer or wine) by causing the precipitation of sediment during production

Magic can be a silly game.

Within just a few days of Zendikar Rising releasing on Arena, there were a number of players reporting boardstates like the following…on turn 4:

During ZNR spoiler season the general consensus seemed to be that the set wasn’t particularly powerful. And it’s quite possible that’s mostly true. But Lotus Cobra and the new Omnath, Locus of Creation have enabled some truly ridiculous shenanigans, at least by Standard’s standards.

• 

• 

In less than a week after release, and 3 days before ZNR released in paper, Wizards of the Coast announced they were “closing monitoring developments in Standard” and that an announcement was coming soon.

And Monday, only Uro ate the banhammer. Standard players seem genuinely enraged, with most cynically claiming that WotC didn’t ban the Cobra or Omnath in order to preserve short-term sales of Zendikar Rising. I’m not convinced that was WotC’s reasoning, or that banning either card would stop the vast majority of players from buying packs to avoid opening a banned card. But I absolutely understand the vitriol being spewed: there’s simply no way the loss of Uro significantly slows down these decks. More bans are assured, but in the interim, Standard players are left to wallow in the quagmire.

Anywayhow…

My “middle class Magic” take on ZNR thus far is pretty simple: it’s…fine.

Bold statement, I know. Really putting myself out there.

No, really, the set seems (mostly) fine. I preordered prerelease kits from my LGS and the kid and I battled with them about a week ago. We both got showcase mythics: him a Moraug, Fury of Akoum and me a Nissa of Shadowed Boughs (in foil!)

• 

• 

Strangely, neither of our prerelease promos were date-stamped, which is one of those niggling little details that shouldn’t have bothered me, but did. I’ve been attending prereleases (off an on) since Tempest in 1997, and the date-stamped promos are wonderful rectangles of cardboard nostalgia that I treasure. My Skyclave Relic (yawn) looks like every other foil Skyclave Relic that’ll be released. Lame. I wrote WotC to voice my disappointment and was offered 2 draft boosters – one for each unstamped promo – as compensation. The documentation required to submit the request is excessive, but I feel like they OWE me (or at least the kid) so I’ll probably cave and do it when I feel like mostly wasting 30 minutes of my time.

Beyond that…the actual games with our sealed decks were a lot of fun. In our second game the kid used a turn-one Akoum Hellhound that he then equipped with Skyclave Pick-Axe, Scavenged Blade, and Cliffhaven Kitesail to obliterate me in just a few turns thanks to Landfall triggers. My sealed pool was painfully lacking in removal, and my opening-hand Nissa of Shadowed Boughs was useless to stop the assault. I had no way to block a 6/5 flyer and I was dead on turn 5. The other games were closer: I took game one, and my splashed Phylath, World Sculptor was too hard for him to overcome game 3. As the winner of the match, I got first pick from the ZNR Set Booster we got for preordering our kits.

I raved (a bit hyperbolically) about set boosters in a previous post, and this was my chance to open one and rate the experience. I was not disappointed (much.)

The pack had a foil full-art swamp and two rares: Orah, Skyclave Hierophant and Scute Swarm. I knew the kid would want the green rare, so I took Orah with the first pick and let the kid snarf the bug.

• 

• 

The pack also had a showcase Makindi Ox, a card I will never play but love dearly. What a chunk!

My only whine about the Set booster is one I’ve seen echoed frequently: the “connected” commons and uncommons had zero discernible connection. While an admittedly trifling issue, I thought connected cards would encourage some janky deckbuilding whims, especially if I decide to try playing sealed deck with Set boosters. I’ll admit that I didn’t spend a lot of time trying to decipher the connective tissue among the cards, but they didn’t share colors, mechanics, themes, or tribes. Lame.

Faith was nominally restored when our prize packs were satisfactorily solid: the kid picked the two sealed boosters he was convinced had the good stuff, and got a foil in each pack (as a kid, he likes these more than your average player) and a Grakmaw, Skyclave Ravager (ok, this is a bobo, but it looks fun). I was even more fortunate, getting a showcase Kazandu Mammoth MDFC (modal double-faced card) and a Sea Gate Stormcaller.

My experience with ZNR on Arena has been a bit different, but still…mostly fine. I’ll give the set, and the new Standard, a few more weeks to evolve before weighing in further.

In the meantime, I will wait for my preordered ZNR products to arrive. They shipped Friday the 26th with an estimated arrival date of Tuesday (two days ago.) When I checked their whereabouts this morning, they’ve been sitting in the same USPS distribution center for the last 5 days without any movement or update. Thankfully they’re only Magic cards and not something critical like medicine. Or a ballot.

And that’s all I will say about that.