I have seen this asked on another forum and thought it was a good question. A lot of people never go to a FNM so.... What stops you going?
That particular thread / forum seems to get no replies, this is what I said..
"I have not attended any event as yet, I only know one other person who plays casually (I got him started - Before that we had only played DotP on steam)I really would like to go to an event but I just think I would be out of place, not sure why. Having to know the ins and outs of the game scares me a little and also a bit confused about standard legals and what cards I could use. As far as I know a lot of my cards would not be standard legal as of early next month.
I am lucky in the fact there is a meeting place for magic players literally down the road from me. I have actually contacted the owner and he invited me to pop down and also take my trade in game code for DotP booster!
Maybe I will purchase a Return to Ravnica event deck and give it a go soon!
I think most magic players have reservations about going to an event. I bet there are a lot of new players because of DotP that would never have imagined playing Magic before playing virtually. I'll be honest I had never even heard of magic before!
I love the game though, I try to explain to people who play other generic (boring) card games like poker how much fun magic is!! They just give me strange looks
Anyway... I feel like it's time to take that next step soon and actually go to a FNM."
For a long time, I didn't go because I didn't even know that existed. Furthermore, I didn't want to enter tournaments because I was a major case of having bad decks. I started around the age of 13. The only time I had gone to a FNM was to be beaten horribly by Affinity with my pile of junk that may or may not have included Summoning Station (but it makes token every turn!).
Then when I started playing again, my wife was in it too and she didn't like Constructed. Since we both liked drafts, we only drafted for a long time.
Finally, I started reading in the Standard Forums and my head got going. Then I had the will to go to FNMs and Game Days and try to win some games.
That's the story. Note that there are no big store in our city, so most events are about 8-12 people only. Prerelease sometimes go up to 25ish people, but that's about it.
Yeah... Until next game, where it'll be right back.
Seriously, there's no way to deal with Rancor in any format. It should be banned, except Gleemax is a lobbyist for the Rancor party, so that'll never happen.
You can't ban rancor, it just returns to your deck.
You might want to actually talk to the Flavor & Storyline Board people... since, you know, our whole reason for playing Magic is the flavor. I'm willing to bet you'll get a lot more interest there than in General.
Indeed, both posters down there would be thrilled.
When talks about banning Jace first started, I was thinking that I would see him banned come June 20th. But as I think more about it, I don't really think that Jace is the problem anymore. Sure his power level leaves very little to the imagination (opening Jace is like opening a refrigerator box with a naked girl on the inside), and sure his price does have a strong impact on what players choose to play (playing Jace is like being intimate with a woman and she doesn't charge you in the morning), but it is not the source of all the problems in Standard.
How do people think saving room to print more abilities on cards is dumbing down the game?
Do you really think, say, Akroma would ever be printed if she said, "Akroma can block by creatures with this ability and cannot be blocked by creatures without this ability. If a creature without this ability would deal combat damage by Akroma would be destroyed, prevent all combat damage that creature would deal to Akroma this combat. Attacking does not cause Akroma to tap. If Akroma is blocked and deals lethal damage, it deals the remainder of its damage to the defending player. Akroma may attack and use abilities that require tapping in the casting cost the turn it enters the battlefield. Akroma cannot be damaged, enchanted, equipped, blocked or targeted by black or red sources" rather than her "dumbed down" wording she has? No freaking way. Keywording and shorthand allows them to make complicated cards easy to play with, allowing them to be printed in the first place.
1. cast frankie peanuts 2. ask opponent "will you concede the game this turn"? if they say yes, you win; if they say no, play a staying power 3. subsequently ask "will you attack this turn"? and "will you cast a spell this turn"? (using a Teferi, Mage of Zhalfir for the second question if necessary) to ensure they can't disrupt the combo 4. donate them a platinum angel 5. play a mox lotus and braingeyser them for every card in their library. play an opalescence and donate them a glorious anthem and a blacker lotus , then play enchanted evening . play and activate a mindslaver and then donate them a fastbond and the mox lotus (returning one of the donates to your hand with eternal witness or whatever) 6. during their turn, play every permanent in their hand (playing lands with fastbond) then (as yourself) cast mirrorweave on the blacker lotus, so every permanent becomes a copy of it. proceed to tear up every card they control, and hopefully do it before they notice that they aren't bound by staying power's ability anymore and can concede
Dark Ritual being overpowered is determined more by what is done with it than the card itself.
True, but the fact that it enables so many ridiculous things is pretty telling. It's like, sure I can use a shotgun as a bludgeoning instrument, but that doesn't make it not a shotgun.
Shortly before Serra died, she transferred her spark into an angel whose full name was Asha Avacyn Bolas. Her dragon father groomed her for her positions in Alara and Innistrad, and she's also been getting help from her uncle Ugin in the form of Urza, who was resurrected as Marit Lage to be the avatar as which she projects herself into material realms. Grieslbrand is a split personality who sometimes wanders the planes disguised as a human woman named Liliana Vess.
Everyone's life would be easier if players would, instead of coming to the 'net for help with a deck, just netdeck and be done with it. And I'm not talking about some Top 8 lists, for the Casualists, too, can benefit from netdecking. I've netdecked plenty of decks from the Casual Play forums from users such as Mown, Raedien, Floopfoot, and a few others. I snatched straight the heck out of my web browser. Yes, people, your original idea fell victim to a savage netdecker. You have been assimiliated.
Suppose I wanted a Zombie deck. Why on earth would I spend time searching Gatherer for a decent list of Zombie cards when Raedien already did it for me? Taking time to be creative or waiting on people on the forums to tell you why your deck sucks or 'go to Casual forums' is a disasterous waste of time (to me).
That being said, Magic was ruined back in Alpha when they added all that rules and cards [Debutantes avert your eyes]. My friends and I still like playing it the "pure" way (Basically we go into the woods and hit eachother with wiffle bats while shouting made up obscenities. You know, the way Garfield wanted it to be played).
Don't worry about it. I've come up with a list of changes to fix EDH.
-First off, there's no commander. -The minimum deck size is 60 cards, and each deck can have up to four of each card, save basic lands and relentless rats. Also decks have no color identity. -Starting life total is 20.
Here's a clever play you can try yourself: -Convince friend to run relentless rats.dec in legacy tournament -Get a deck with lots of mill, yixlid jailer, and humility -Drop humility and jailer, wait for him to dump his hand, mill him out -All his rats now have no abilities. Call a judge because he's playing an illegal deck with more than 4 of a single card. -Get him/her banned from competitive magic play
L, is for the leather gloves you weaaaar. O, is for the organs that guy could spaaaare. V, is very very, extraordinay. E, is for every vagrant i butchered in a wine cellar befooooore.
The outer layer of the Magic: the Gathering box, the carton, or crust, is fairly thin and light, and contains largely aluminosilcates.
Within that lies the middle layer, consisting of the familiar booster pack. Although solid, the booster packs' high temperatures allow them to acutally move around within the booster box. This flow, sometimes called convection, is cited by frustrated box mappers as one of WOTC's most genious uses of thermodynamics since the Ravnica block.
No one knows what lies at the core of the booster box, but scientists theorize that it must be especially dense in order to make up for the large amount of fluff distributed amongst the booster packs.
I imagine [Ajani 3's] second ability involves him hurling the creature at your opponent Brion Stoutarm style, then the guy is just like "Okay, that may have worked, but don't- GOD DAMN IT!" as he does it again because cats don't give a **** :33.
Its like that one time Elves broke out in a field of Jund. Elves became a resurgent hit, then died off again once Jund adapted to the rest of the field of G/W that it required mass removal that inherently pooped on Elves too.
Submit to the menace. Delver can, and will blot out the sun.
"I remember my days as a youth at Tolarian Academy ." "Wow, small multiverse, I actually went there too." "WAIT, DON'T- Well ****, there's $200,000 in student loans well spent."
And flavor goes out the window when you cast a second copy of a planeswalker right after the first one dies, so...
"Hey Nissa, I need a favor." "You just asked me for a 'favor' like thirty seconds ago, and it turned out to be having Sarkhan Transmogrify my only follower into a dragon like 5 times -which dickery aside also violates some laws of causality - and then you let me get beaten over the head by that hedron crab." "...I'll give you " "...Well all right then."
GM, I don't think Dill is better than you. I KNOW it. Even if he wakes up every morning, clubs a baby seal, steals all the TV remotes from within a block's radius of his house and then robs hungry orphans of their food he'd be better than you, for the simple reason that he learns from his mistakes.
What would they have to fight about? Like, all I can think of now is Gideon going "Hey, long-ears! I'm gathering a group of 'Walkers together to fight some tentacle monsters.....you want in?" and Tamiyo going "Ew! Hentai no bakka Gideon-desu desu!" and flying away.
I open 4 packs just to be on the safe side. Not only do I get more cards than everyone else, but I also get to spend the rest of the night off. Win Win.
MaRo has a thing for people opening boosters with bad cards. But since he can only get so many bad cards printed in each set, he has found a devious way of getting more bad cards into circulation: He makes entire print sheets with just bad rares, then puts them onto the assembly line. He proceeds to wring his hands and twirl his evil mustache that he grew for twirling purposes as a lightning bolt strikes in the background. Afterwards, he goes to make sure that the good cards are only opened by everyone's friends, and that we all only get to open bad cards. He does this by memorising each booster, than switching them around accordingly. Whenever someone complains about a card, he immediately jumps out from behind a chair to yell "WELL, IT'S NOT FOR YOU!" before merging back into the shadows in order to devise new ways in which he can screw over players, then claim that he has valid reasons for doing so.
Mark Rosewater is sitting in a seemingly innocuous cable TV van, outside of Bankaimastery's house. Sitting nearby are two hardened criminal hackers, fresh out of prison, and filled with resentment at their lack of physical fitness. "Have you managed to hack his brainwaves yet? The set deadline's coming up fast." "We're almost through. It should be coming up on the screen any second." The hacker presses a button, and Kevin's thoughts flash onto the screen. Mark and the hackers stare in amazement at the sheer beauty, the elegance, and the raw truth of what they see. It's like the ending to 2001: A Space Odyssey. Brilliant light shines across the screen, the truth of existence is made clear to them, and they despair at their own foolishness, their own ignorance, their own inadequacy. And then they steal his ideas. As they return back to R&D, Mark sneers at a haggard old man chained to a cast-iron sphere. The man looks up from his laborious task of breaking rocks in the dungeon of Wizards of the Coast headquarters, and asks a question: "Kevin, my greatest student. He - he's all right, isn't he? You didn't hurt him?" Mark deals him a weighty blow with his boot. "Know your place, Richard. Get back to work."
I'm only opposed to it because it bears so little relation to how people actually play the game. The example of Miracles is actually a much better one then the Clone example I was trying to use.
From the game's perspective, the card can move instantly from face down in the library to revealed in the hand and that's fine for the rules. But in real life, we can't actually do that, so the card spends a good bit of time in locations that are neither where that player's library is nor where that player's hand is. And that's fine for real life. What I don't want is the disconnect to be explicitly codified. Along the lines of
183664.697 A game of Magic as laid out by these rules exists only as a pure Platonic ideal, utterly unrealizable by fallible mortals limited by the confines of physicality and the ravages of evil and sin.
183664.698 The cake is a lie, too.
I know it's true, but I don't want the rules to actually straight-up tell me that.
Pfft this cant be serious can it? If it is please delete your account OP. Its not even close to ban worthy, considering what JTMS and stoneforge had to accomplish to get banned i see the WotC selling magic to aquire Pokemon before that ever happens.
I'm trying to imagine sorin markov as a gym leader in one of those pokemon games which you have to beat him to get his badge... somehow I imagine that he would stab you in the chest with his sword before giving you the badge, even if you beat his pokemon....
Personally, I'd be fine with tea time but then I'm not gonna waste the mana summoning Emrakul, the Aeons Torn . He always takes all the sugar, drinks the whole pot of Earl Grey and doesn't even say thank you. SO. RUDE.
Break the Card is a regular thread in the Cards and Combo Forum. Quite simply, the participants are given a Johnnystatic card (e.g. Xenograft ) and are asked to build a deck around it. The winner and honorable mentions are sigged below. Get brewing!
This week's Break the Card was based around Xenograft . Thread : http://community.wizards.com/go/thread/view/75842/27681049/Break_the_card_:_Xenograft?pg=1
Winner : Axterix with his Vampdrazi deck. Finalist : Vektor480 with his Ally/Golem/Plant deck. Honorable mentions : Zammm for the Turntimber Ranger combo and TinGorilla for suggesting Sarkhan the Mad .
Here's the link to the Mindlock Orb contest : http://community.wizards.com/go/thread/view/75842/27697565/Break_the_Card_:_Mindlock_Orb?sdb=1&pg=last#497536269
Here's the link to Break the Card : Bludgeon Brawl : http://community.wizards.com/go/thread/view/75842/27715169/Break_the_Card_:_Bludgeon_Brawl?sdb=1&pg=last#498208797
Winner : Vektor and his Grab the World deck. Finalist : Crandor with his Awesome Aliteration deck. Honorable mentions : RP Jesus with his Wat deck and Zix200 with his Signet Renewal deck.
This week was Followed Footsteps : http://community.wizards.com/go/thread/view/75842/27748677/Break_the_Card_:_Followed_Footsteps?pg=1
Winner : Tevish_Szat with his Exponential Growth deck. Honorable mentions : Zix with his Carbon Copies deck and Escef with his Fungus of Speed and Time deck.
This week's card was Jace's Archivist : http://community.wizards.com/go/thread/view/75842/28063377/Break_the_Card_:_Jaces_Archivist.
Finalists : Jentaru with his "Consecration of the Draw" deck and HereticSmitty with his "ADHD: The deck" deck. Winner : JaxsonBateman with his "The Archives Are Endless!" deck.
Certain environments put me off. Usually it's when cheating is so rampant that players assume it's not only a legitimate play, but how you play legitimately. Those kinds of memes tend to put me off.
I recommend going to FNM and seeing how it goes. If you don't feel welcome, find a new store. FNM is the most casual of tournaments and it's supposed to be fun with a focus on introducing new players into the game at a level that isn't ultradeadlyserious. Players will be happy to answer your rules questions and the prizes on the line are usually fairly small so the individual matches tend to feel less serious.
For me, it's fear of being publicly humiliated. I've returned to the game fairly recently after an extended hiatus; I'm having to relearn the intricacies of the Stack, priority exchanges, etc. My only casual play partner since my return has been my wife, who I routinely dominate easily enough that I feel I honestly cannot learn anything from playing her (except from my own mistakes in the process). I want to play other people, and I love deck building, but I'm scared that I'll show up to FNM and find myself having to routinely mulligan down to five cards, or ending up in some situation where I've made an embarrassing error. While I'm completely confident that several of the decks I've built could stomp all over Event Decks (which, I hear, are fairly common at FNM), my local shop routinely pulls in 50+ people for those events. I'll probably end up eliminated in round one by some guy who netdecked a Pro Tour strategy, while the two guys sitting next to me cracked their RtR Event Decks fifteen minutes ago.
I don't want to go just to get my ass kicked before I can even have fun, and I certainly don't want to end up in arguments with other players over technicalities that require judges' involvement. And what if I do have to call the TO over to settle a dispute and he sides against me even though I know I've seen Gatherer text or rules questions here that indicate that he is wrong?
I guess in a nutshell I'm sufficiently afraid of everything that could go wrong to the point of excluding the possibility of things actually going well for me. So day after day I keep playing the same opponent, who only wins when I draw fifteen consecutive land (or none at all), all the while buying new cards to add to a collection that barely gets any use.
:/ I suck at life.
To whom it may concern: it's getting really old, being unable to see the top half of anything autocarded in the first post of each thread. Fixplz,kthx.
Usually either big, burly guys who smell like smoke with sweaty hands or, if it's a smaller event, clueless females who don't know anything about the game and just come there because it has lots of boys.
Plenty of normal people, but I'm not bothered with those, so no complaint about them.
EDIT: Oh, and the idea that you should shake hands after a game. Ugh. So... Ew.
Publicly humiliated? That's rather drastic. FNM is there mainly for newer players and for fun. While there may be some serious players there, they aren't there to publicly humiliate anyone. Hardly anyone will point and laugh at subpar decks because those decks show up at FNM more often than not. People that know they have the best decks aren't there to put anyone to shame.
I don't want to go just to get my ass kicked before I can even have fun
At first, you will be losing, but it's a learning experience. And the Standard format really isn't fast enough for you to lose before you have any fun. Event decks put you on pretty good footing for FNM; they are pretty good against budget versions of Top 8 decks and they steamroll most homebrews.
I would suggest go and keep in mind that you are there to have fun with the game. After all, that's the whole point of playing in the first place. After a while, you'll see that all the bad things that you think can go wrong aren't nearly as bad as they seem.
For me it's quite simple. I find them too competitive. I'm an avid deckbuilder myself, so I construct decks that have great synergy, power and/or mana curve, etc etc etc... BUT I do not spend like 300 bucks for each of my decks, having all the "legacy staples", all the lands and stuff. Heck, even their casual decks have "Force of Will" in them. It's actually quite disappointing to me to find out that the local FNM near me is like that....by going in these forums and reading some comments on gatherer, I was expecting FNM to have at least some casual people in it...."sigh" - So yeah, I tend to stay away from those for the said reason. I'm a kitchen-table player through and through, and I'm sure there are a ton of those around my area, I guess they just don't go to FNM either (perhaps for the same reasons I don't, or perhaps they don't know much of it's existence (I only came to know it because of a friend, and that's after 5 years of playing the game so.....)) - EDIT : Oh and I also have a personal story of my recent FNM experience (which tends to favor my "not going there again" thinking). It's that when we came there at the beginning, people were very welcoming, that's great. My friend happens to know another guy there, he introduced the whole FNM environment to us. The only thing that bothered me is, only because we aren't "regulars" there, they keep treating us like noobs. As in, they keep blabbing about "experience" and stuff. My friend didn't mind much, I didn't bother about it that much either, but it's just that these guys believe so highly of themselves, while it's partially true, it's also true that their "skill" is associated by the fact that their decks cost like 300 bucks. But no no no, all they see is us being "new" and they being "veterans" (which, for the record, my friend and I have been playing for around 10 years already).
I don't want to go just to get my ass kicked before I can even have fun
At first, you will be losing, but it's a learning experience. And the Standard format really isn't fast enough for you to lose before you have any fun. Event decks put you on pretty good footing for FNM; they are pretty good against budget versions of Top 8 decks and they steamroll most homebrews.
I would suggest go and keep in mind that you are there to have fun with the game. After all, that's the whole point of playing in the first place. After a while, you'll see that all the bad things that you think can go wrong aren't nearly as bad as they seem.
Have to agree with most of what is written here (unless you're against RB Zombies, then you can easily lose in the first 5-6 turns, but I digress).
I started playing Standard at FNMs during the dominance of Caw-Blade. I only had a little money at the time because I was just graduating college and still searching for a job, so I would routinely bring $40-$80 decks to battle against Sir Jace and his winged cronies wielding Sword of Feast and Famine .
I lost. A lot. But I met a lot of cool people who share the same passion for the game that I posess. I started getting integrated with the culture. We discuss strategies, deck ideas, changes in the format, and even a slew of non-magic-related topics. Sometimes you just have to throw yourself out there and hope for the best.
The store I play at is in the middle of a big city and hugely competitive. You won't find any Event Decks or too much wacky brewing, it's mostly tried and tested decks that are proving themselves in the format. But I made new friends and slowly acquired more and more cards and am at the point where I generally top-4 twice a month on average.
Get out there, don't worry about losing. Most people are just out there to have fun and I doubt you'll ever be openly ridiculed about losing or choosing a weird deck. Most people are more helpful than you might believe.
: Regenerate.
