Magic: The Gathering (TCG) Catch-all

Yeesh, I think I'm slipping slowly down the rabbit hole. A booster pack here, a booster pack there. Another intro deck just in case I want to introduce another friend to Magic. Recording my decks to MTG Deck Builder. Naah, I'm still doing okay, right?

booster packs are crack. I've stopped and restarted and stopped playing Magic at least 3 or 4 times dating back to 1994... It's been over 10 years since the last time I've played, but every so often I get an itch for that type of gameplay and start buying into something or other (the WoW TCG was the last one) but pull out pretty quickly thereafter realizing how much money I'm spending and how little I actually get to play with the cards. Regardless, opening booster packs is still perhaps one of the most fun things I've ever experienced in gaming.

Maclintok wrote:

Thanks SaintFaucet, very helpful! From the sound of things those Event Decks are sort of failed experiments? I will have to check back at my local game store to see what they have in terms of deck boxes but those Ultra Pro ones look perfect.

The idea. Behind the Event Decks is you can walk into a Standard format Friday Night Magic event, buy one of the two current Event Decks, and do alright for yourself in the tournament. You probably won't win, but you should be competitive enough to have fun. They give you 7 rare cards (usually including 1 dual land), 0 mythic rares, and a bunch of strong uncommons. They're not really meant to stand alone like the Dual Decks are; they're more of a solid base on which to build. As I understand it they do that job fairly well.

Jow wrote:

Regardless, opening booster packs is still perhaps one of the most fun things I've ever experienced in gaming.

My fiancé really enjoys that part, and I definitely get the appeal too. Thats part of why I built my draft cube... Opening an envelope with random cards I already own isn't quite the same, but it's almost as good and a hell of a lot cheaper. She also likes Winston draft because every time you look at a face down pile of cards it's like opening a miniature booster.

f*ck, Internet ate a long post I was writing. Short version:

You have a cube? Awesome!

I've been wanting to try cube for years, don't get out much to play, two small kids.

Now wanting to build own, probably based on limited formats and mechanics I've enjoyed - starting with Morph.

I am building a legendary soldier/samurai deck, does anyone happen to know if there is a card that reduces the cost of samurai similar to Ballyrush Banneret? http://gatherer.wizards.com/pages/ca... (link for Ballyrush Banneret)

I don't recall one. Can you do a Gatherer search for Samurai? I don't think there's all that many of them.

I am really fiending for some Magic. Did a RL 4-man draft last Saturday but haven't been able to play since.

I had done one but sometimes things slip through the cracks and was just wondering if I had missed anything this time. Thanks, and if you were a little closer I'd invite you to have a few games. I've been dying to play some MTG but all the people I played with at college are on break or working.

Fedaykin98 wrote:

f*ck, Internet ate a long post I was writing. Short version:

You have a cube? Awesome!

I've been wanting to try cube for years, don't get out much to play, two small kids.

Now wanting to build own, probably based on limited formats and mechanics I've enjoyed - starting with Morph.

If you've got a decent sized collection you ought to be able to build one, especially if you're going for one that feels like limited. I started with my collection from Revised through Urza's block and bought a couple duel decks to shore up the weaker/shallower colors. The first step was laying out all my favorite cards from a given color and then building a good curve around them. Once it was functional it was just a matter of playing with it and paying attention to what worked and what didn't.

If you use Morph you kind of need to go all-in with it. If there are only a couple Morph cards in the cube then it spoils the surprise.

Yeah, I read that about Morph in a Cube. It's going to be the starting point of my first Cube, and we'll see where it goes from there.

Oh, and funny story:

Tonight my wife and I tried out one of those Booster Battle Packs I've been recommending - in this case, Magic 2013. She's still learning the game, although she's got a lot of the basics.

Anyway, we open our pre-mades, look through them, and then open our boosters to add a few cards. I got a foil Silklash Spider and some less exciting normal rare. I said "Hey, you know how each card has a symbol, and they're different colors?" but of course she wouldn't know that. I said "Commons are black, uncommon are silver, and rares are gold. Out of curiosity, what rare did you pull?"

She immediately looks through the cards she didn't add to her deck. "I don't have a gold one." "Sure you do, ah...well, it's in there somewhere," I say, gesturing at both the unused pile and her deck. She says "We'll, you look." So I sort through the remains of the booster to discover she was right. No gold. Mythic. Planeswalker. Nice job, baby!

Sadly, neither deck was green, so no one played Garruk. Well, a Planeswalker might be too confusing and powerful for this stage anyway.

All in all, I thought the Booster Battle Pack was perfect for learning. 2013 is probably best for beginners, though it can be a little boring. I know they make them for Return to Ravnica as well, but by the time someone's ready for Expert mechanics, I'm not sure they'll be using Booster Battle Packs.

In the throws of desperation, I looked through the list of samurai one more time. Low and behold I found http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Ca... which reduces the cost to the CMC, which is definitely useful. I thought I'd post for anyone who may want to do something similar in the future.

Useful for multi-color decks, definitely.

Have any of you used MTG Deck Builder (http://www.mtgdeckbuilder.net/)? How would you say it compares to some of the tools in the OP?

Maclintok wrote:

Have any of you used MTG Deck Builder (http://www.mtgdeckbuilder.net/)? How would you say it compares to some of the tools in the OP?

Nevermind! Checked out MTG Deck Builder and it's pretty great. It's Flash-based with a very slick interface and card search tool. Includes the usual option to input cards from your entire collection using simple formatting rules and testing out the deck in a mock, no-opponent match.

Also, I splurged during Boxing Day and this happened:
IMAGE(http://sphotos-a.ak.fbcdn.net/hphotos-ak-prn1/23393_10152371875480414_615893847_n.jpg)

I started to greedily rip into the boosters when it occurred to me that saving a few for a Limited Format session with friends might be fun. I checked out the rules on Limited here:
http://www.wizards.com/Magic/tcg/resources.aspx?x=mtg/tcg/resources/formats-sanctioned#limited

3 packs of spells across 8 players? There aren't enough spells for 4 players building decks of 40 cards. Makes more sense for each player to get around 25-26 spells for their decks.

3 packs each means 45 cards each. You take the best 23 spells and add 17 lands, including as many basic lands from your own collection as you want.

Thanks, that makes a lot more sense. 12 packs for a 4-man limited throwdown means I have some more booster wrappers to break all on my own. Huzzah!

Does anyone know of token generators that are any combination of red/white/blue? I don't care what generation or type of token it makes, I just want the tokens.

Has to be a combo? Most tokens are mono-color.

It doesn't have to be a combo, I'm just looking for ways to get several tokens out. I realized I phrased that weirdly. What I meant by the color combination was the card itself that provides the tokens, not the tokens themselves.

How about this?

http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Se...|[R]|[U]|[W]+![G]+![B]

I went to Gatherer and searched on red, white, or blue cards with "token" in the rules text, and not black or green.

You'll have to cut and paste into your browser bar, because the forum link format doesn't like the brackets.

230 cards meet your criteria.

Dr.Incurable wrote:

Does anyone know of token generators that are any combination of red/white/blue? I don't care what generation or type of token it makes, I just want the tokens.

Looks like there are a lot according to gatherer:
http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Se...

Best repeatable ones might be:
Cenn's Enlistment
Commander's Authority
Goblin Assault
Goblin Trenches
Meloku the Clouded Mirror
Mobilization
Sacred Mesa
White Sun's Zenith

Single use:
Captains Call
Conquerer's Pledge
Decree of Justice
Empty the Warrens
Martial Coup
Rise of the Hobgoblins

Siege-gang Commander is a favorite red token maker of mine. Totally awesome card.

Is anyone here knowledgable about sleeves? I need to buy a bunch for a couple Commander decks, and eventually a cube.

I bought some sleeves recently for Izzet vs Golgari, and the textures on the sleeves meant the cards didn't want to stay stacked. Super annoying. Matte finish was slightly more expensive, but if I had known, I would have paid up.

Anyway, I'm looking for brand, style, whatever, as specific as you can get. Ultra-Pro, KMH, Dragon Shields - you tell me. Thanks!

Fedaykin98 wrote:

Is anyone here knowledgable about sleeves? I need to buy a bunch for a couple Commander decks, and eventually a cube.

I bought some sleeves recently for Izzet vs Golgari, and the textures on the sleeves meant the cards didn't want to stay stacked. Super annoying. Matte finish was slightly more expensive, but if I had known, I would have paid up.

Anyway, I'm looking for brand, style, whatever, as specific as you can get. Ultra-Pro, KMH, Dragon Shields - you tell me. Thanks!

I recently bought a case of sleeves so that I never have to buy them again for the forseeable future. I prefer matt, solid colour sleeves, so I went with KMC Super Series Purples.
I picked them up through Potomac Distribution and had them shipped to the UK, as it worked out cheaper than buying them in bulk from here. I had no problem with Potomac, but maybe there is somewhere cheaper that ships just domestic US?

The sleeves themselves are great, holding up well on my double sleeved cube, with only 1 or 2 split sleeves in the past few months.

Thanks TheWalt, Torq, Fedaykin, I'll have to check those out.

How do you guys like to use sleeves? Do you get enough to sleeve a few decks or do you go all out and sleeve your entire collection?

I have enough to sleeve about 20 or so decks. I could use more, but haven't made time lately to actually construct any of my deck ideas, so there's nothing to put in sleeves. The bulk of my collection is in a couple cardboard boxes, and old booster boxes.

I'm pretty much in ahrezmendi's situation. I have way too many cards to sleeve my whole collection.

I found some sleeve discussions on mtgsalvation and decided to try some Ultra Pro Mattes.

I received two Magic gifts for Christmas - the Ajani vs Nicol Bolas Duel Decks, and the Mirror Mastery Commander deck. The new sleeves will be for the Commander deck. Since I haven't gotten around to building one yet, this is my first deck for the format. Not sure when I'll get a chance to play it, but I'm looking forward to it.

My brother and I played several games of Ajani vs Nicol Bolas. These are by far the best of the Duel Decks series that I've played. My brother (playing the Ajani deck) won at least half the games; I won one in particular where I cast Cruel Ultimatum AND used Nicol Bolas's ultimate. You'd think just doing one of those things would win the game...:lol:

Dr.Incurable wrote:

Does anyone know of token generators that are any combination of red/white/blue? I don't care what generation or type of token it makes, I just want the tokens.

White's got a ton one-shot Soldier token generators, red has a bunch of one-shot Goblin token generators, a bunch of artifacts produce colorless tokens of all sorts with either mana activation or sacrifice, and blue has a number duplicate tokenizers (make tokens that are copies of other cards). What kind of effect are you looking for?