Leroy is confused and happy...and many other things as well.

[Leroy Muggins]

I am somewhat new to the game and am of course completely new to this forum. The purpose of this message is to introduce myself and let all of you nice people know what kind of person I am and how I think magic should be played. This way you can know me and choose to ignore my opinions if you wish. That way there is no adolescent bickering, no childish name calling , and any other undesirable communications from people whose opinions I find either irrelevant or unworthy of my attention.With this boilerplate disclaimer out of the way, I will share my rules for magic not for the game itself but how i approach it and how anyone I would remotely enjoy playing with approaches the game.

RULE NUMBER ONE: Bringing some monster tourney deck fresh from the internet to a free Friday night magic or a $2 buy-in Wednesday night event not only makes you a total d-bag, It shows your complete lack of understanding of what magic is about. Unless you conceived and built the deck yourself from the ground up, YOU DID NOT WIN. The pro tourney player who designed the deck won. If you do this you are lame...Screw you, bite me, end of report, next case.

RULE NUMBER TWO: You're a pro. You play like its a competition. You like the game to end before ten turns. I'm fine with that. I don't dislike you as a person, I don't even know you. But since i couldn't care less about the pro tour or anything outside of the weekly free tournament and the occasional pre-release event. Done expect me to care about your opinion. I am not interested in playing magic your way, and never will be.

RULE NUMBER THREE: Planeswalker cards are absolutely broken. end of story. You can argue with me till you're blue in the face and you would NEVER change my mind on the subject. I dont want to hear about card X that counters planeswalker Y or how if i use strategy A instead of strategy B i wouldn't have trouble. It's all nonsense. If your so damn good then prove it by not abusing these stupidly overpowered cards. But if you wont feel free to keep buying them beccause i sell or trade them whenever I pull them.

Ill share more later. I hope to find like minded people here. and hope we can all be the friendliest of friends.

Your friend in nerdy hobbies,
Leroy Muggins

 

[Mooseman]

Welcome.

 

[TomB]

lol...Welcome!

 

[Spiderman]

Welcome!

 

[turgy22]

Welcome, Mr. Muggins!

Sounds like you are new to the game, as your first two rules are pretty typical reactions for when a person starts jumping into games against strangers. Everyone comes into the game differently and those that start playing casually tend to have a much different outlook than those who are introduced to the game from a friend who is already a pretty serious player. My only advice is to remember the games you enjoyed playing and keep playing against those same people casually. If you ever enter any type of constructed tournament (even if it's free or cheap to enter), expect your opponents to play the most powerful decks. Some people just like winning and as long as they're playing / building within the rules of the competition, there's not much you can do.

 

[rokapoke]

Welcome, Leroy!

And just so you know, you don't have to keep it bottled up around here -- tell us how you really feel!

 

[Leroy Muggins]

unfortunately turgy, i know there is nothing one man, even a man as dashing as myself can do to get people to prefer having fun and playing with style and creativity, rather than abusing some ridiculous deck they looked up on the internet. The best I can do to contain my disgust at such sad, small minded people is laugh in their face and encourage them to try being social with the game as opposed to playing out some kind of adolescent fantasy of being the supreme mortal kombat warrior of magic the gathering. The responsibility for making this happen rests squarely on the shoulders of WoTC themselves. The game obviously has balance issues when a mere handful of strategies dominate a game where the possibilities are supposed to be endless.

 

[rokapoke]

The game obviously has balance issues when a mere handful of strategies dominate a game where the possibilities are supposed to be endless.

I agree (to a certain extent). In block tournaments, one should expect to see a few dominant archetypes, as those are naturally defined by the cards in the block. In any other type of tournament, however, there should be significantly more variety.

That said, I haven't done any tournamenting (yes, I said it) in many moons, so I can't speak to what's out there. But I like my "I'm not paying a dime to play right now" plan, so that probably won't change, since I don't have a power deck to speak of.

 

[Spiderman]

It depends on what format you're playing. Most formats have a wide range of tourney deck types so obviously, there's plenty of foils. If you're going into a card shop for "a game", you should be savvy enough to set the parameters of the game such as format and not blindly play someone.

 

[Oversoul]

Unless you conceived and built the deck yourself from the ground up, YOU DID NOT WIN. The pro tourney player who designed the deck won.

This is an interesting misconception that I never paid much attention to for a long time. Disdain for net-decking is about as old as, well, as old as netdecking and you're in good company, but I still say there's something about this that's a bit—off. And because you were the first person to bring this up since I've been thinking about it, I'm hijacking this thread. Partially, anyway. I do that sometimes...

I used to have playgroups. Most of them were not particularly tournament-oriented, but that wasn't always the case. When in playgroups that did have some tournament format focus, I noticed that everyone had different strengths and weaknesses. In my case, once I got used to playing a deck, I developed a good intuition for how to play that deck. So I might have seemed to be the strongest player (although I doubt that this was actually the case and if I'd been forced to play with a greater variety of decks, that might have been apparent). But I was the worst deckbuilder. Oh, I'd make minor adjustments to an already functioning deck after goldfishing a few hundred games or whatever, but I was always a bit envious of some of my friends that could come up with weird deck ideas I'd never have thought to be viable and actually make those things work. So I was something of a workhorse playtester and left the main deckbuilding duties to others. And I think because of that, I didn't have much of a stake in the whole netdecking issue. As recently as last year, even though I didn't play in any tournaments, I had one other person who was "our" primary deckbuilder while I was "our" primary playtester.

So lately, I've been sort of on my own in trying to build decks, and I've made very little progress, but my point is, and I suppose that this isn't news to most people on this site but whatever, for most tournament formats, net-decking isn't really even a thing anymore. The term made sense back in the mid-90's when tournament play wasn't so refined, but these days, every tournament format has its pool of cards and in that pool the tournament staples are all very well-identified. For example, one of the decks I've been wanting to build for Legacy is Belcher. If I look at decklists that other people have been using in Legacy tournaments, I'll see the same cards come up over and over. But it's not because these people are stealing from each other or all stealing from some genius pro player that invented the deck in the first place. It's that everyone who is familiar with the archetype or even with the format in general has some sense of what needs to be in a Belcher deck. There need to be four copies of Goblin Charbelcher to ensure that one will draw it. Since the deck is seeking to activate Goblin Charbelcher for lethal damage, having lands in the library is bad. Four copies of Land Grant can ensure that the one or two lands that are in the library won't be a problem, but that means that the lands have to be forests, so dual lands are a natural choice, and that's six more slots. Lion's Eye Diamond and Lotus Petal are free mana, so they have to go in, and that's eight more slots. Elvish Spirit Guide and Simian Spirit guide are also one free mana each, so that's eight more slots. The deck needs mana acceleration to play spells quickly, so that's Dark Ritual at four more slots. That's already like half the deck already determined just by nature of what the deck is trying to do, and in reality it's even more than that.

But even if you have nothing to do with tournaments, building a deck "from the ground up" is probably not as common as you think. I've lost track of the number of decks I made up, never having heard of my deck as an archetype, only to discover that someone else had already done it. And a few times, as I refined one of my decks into something that was closer to an existing deck, maybe even a lot closer. In one case way back, I built a deck based on a classic archetype and, as I edited the deck over years, built it into a second archetype very similar to a tournament deck the existence of which I was not even aware of, simply because the cards that I noticed were good were the same ones that everyone else realized were good. There are people out there mindlessly copying decklists off the internet, but even if the deck is so powerful that it wins some casual games against unprepared opponents, that has nothing to do with real tournament play: in a real tournament, the idiot who plays a deck without understanding it will lose.

I forget where I was even going with this. But I guess my point is that while originality is good and is an important part of the game, the nature of the game can mean that many deckbuilding paths all lead to the same destination, or at least to very similar ones. This might not be as true for casual play as it is for tournament play, but it's still a factor.

 

[Oversoul]

So yesterday while I was in the process of writing my previous post in this thread, I actually cracked the screen on my computer because of some stupid unrelated thing I was doing, and got a bit distracted, but didn't want to redo it, so somewhere around the fourth paragraph, I just wrapped things up. I don't like my previous post, although I do think it's generally accurate...

I had wanted to say that there is definitely an appeal to playing the game less as a quasi-optimizable strategy game, and more as a trading card game, which is what it is. If one is building a deck with tournament play in mind, knowing the format and having a grasp of such things as metagames, the weaknesses of the first and second tier archetypes, etc., is necessary to be successful. And there's the matter of actually owning the cards to build all those powerhouse decks, some of which can be pricey. Just working with what cards you have and throwing some cards together because a certain idea for a deck looks like fun is a very different way to play the game and definitely has its advantages. In fact, it's something I'd like to focus on a lot more myself. I suppose it looks like I disagree with your first "rule" in my overly long previous post, but I actually like the spirit of your first two rules. It was just that one line about the pro-tourney player having built someone's deck that brought out the pedant in me. Anyway, the only two tournament formats I've been paying any attention to for a while now have been Vintage and Legacy, and I've become increasingly disgruntled with both. There's a lot more range for deckbuilding, a lot more possibility, in casual magic, and I'd now like to do what everyone else is doing an welcome you to that, rather than blathering on about competitive formats.

Oh, one more thing, though. After you've been playing the game for a while, I'd be interested to see you revisit planeswalkers. I wonder if you'll still come to the same conclusion. I think you'll find that planeswalkers are not actually that powerful, except in a few individual cases (Jace, Tezzeret, Elspeth). And really, that's true for all types of cards.

 

[Killer Joe]

@Mr. Muggins,
I agree that there are too many pimply-face assholes at FNM who are pro-tour wanna-bes and condescending brats. That said, if I had the kind of rules that you listed for myself I'd get out of the game now, it's a future of heartache and dissapointment in that perspective.

I no longer play in competetive magic for purposes of winning at all costs but ti does keep me fresh. Beat me with your turn two kill deck and I'm okay with that so long as you explain to me exactly what it is you're doing and how you're doing it (I need to know how I'm being killed and don't assume I SHOULD know how broken card A and mystic mystic rare card B works together).

On the point of net-decking; I will never build a deck that hasn't been thought of before. If I use 10 Island in my deck then I am most assured that it's been used before so I'm copy-cating? I don't think so. I DO, however, use the "flavor" of a net deck in my old days here because I like ideas and then expanding on them with my own 'flair'. My one and only truely (and God aweful at that) original deck is my Blue-Green Erratic-Spikes deck (well, my Red-Green-White Seifeld deck is original too but annoying).

Welcome!

 

[boogiepop]

Welcome to the forums!

I guess you know what you're looking for, so I hope you find it here! I try to remind myself that everyone has a different definition of fun and approach things from that perspective. You never know... you may find that the person who just beat you with his tounament deck will, after realizing that you were looking for a casual game, break out his 200+ red deck. You might also want to just stop playing at the tourneys altogether. I've never been to one and have never once felt as though I were missing out.

For myself, I've had a lot of fun trying to build decks within very strict parameters so as to arrive at something a little different (because card X is definitely worse than card Y, yet I use it anyway.) I don't expect anyone to follow the same rules, but if they're willing to pilot one of my decks, I'd be very happy for it.

Anyway, see you around the forums! Jump in for a precon or 2hg game sometime!