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I don't play or buy cards anymore, but I thought I would try my luck today at Walmart. I purchased one of those $2 dollar packs, and best card was Dreg Mangler , powerful but not what I was looking for (I was after some GOOOOOOOLD). Anyways, I went back later and thought I'd double or nothing, then got Phantom General . Interesting in terms of cardomancy, but if this were Vegas, I would be hitchhiking right now.

I also got a Sluiceway Scorpion , I'm on a small path to Golgari heaven (although I'm not a big Golgari fan). I like the color combination (I was a Spiritmonger fan), but I'm not into most of the Golgari characters.

I got really lucky about a year back, I did the same thing and walked away with a Hand of the Praetors and a Steel Overseer . I gave them both away to two lucky Wizards Community members who won the contests I held with those cards as the grand prizes.

Oh hey man,

Wahooney was the winner of the Steel Overseer contest.

Have you put it to any good use?

I've built a deck concept that uses it, maybe you can put it together and give it a whirl.

New Wave Steel

You've only got one? That kind-of sucks. It's lonley to have only one copy. Trade up until you get a playset. That deck I posted is pretty powerful, you should try to build it. Some of the cards are pretty expensive, but can be subbed to much success. Wurmcoil Engine and Isochron Scepter . Scepter itself is sort of lazy, if you wanted a more dynamic worthy win, you could pitch Scepter for another tactical spell (like Argivian Find or Scourglass ). Ethersworn Canonist doesn't seem like it would be as useful, since they'll generally only need to cast one spell anyways (a removal) in order to make an advancing move.

Jan 7, 2013 -- 12:07PM, Grishny wrote:

Even though people say those half booster packs are terrible, both of my local Wal-Marts always tend to sell out of them very, very rapidly.

Well, this is due to two very important facts:
1. Most Magic players are casual Magic players. I don't remember exact numbers, but I'm sure I read somewhere than an estimated 80% of Magic players will never attend a tournament. Certainly only a handful of them ever visit these forums.
2. People are absolutely terrible at mentally calculating the risk/reward of a random chance. Specifically, everybody has a threshold (For most people it's somewhere between $5-$10 if I remember correctly) where they don't even really think of purchases below that level as spending money.

So the end result is that you have a lot of new players buying whatever the cheapest way to get their Magic fix is without worrying too much about specifically getting good cards. This is similar to why Intro Packs continue to be profitable despite costing $15 for $4 or less worth of cards plus a booster. (Or is it two these days?)