A Tradition of Sorts « twincannon.com

15Feb/100

A Tradition of Sorts

I bought my biennial pack of Magic: the Gathering cards yesterday. Somewhere along the line, this became a tradition. Yes, I'm a giant nerd. I haven't played the game for the better part of a decade, nor do I have plans to ever play it again; but I find it entertaining to buy a pack every couple of years to see how the game has progressed. It's amusing that they changed some classic game wordings ("removed from play" is now "being exiled", "put into play" is now "entering the battlefield" haha). And of course they've done a bunch of things in effort to simplify the rules and text - "cannot be the target of spells of abilities" has turned into an ability called "Shroud"; however, this loses it's intended efficiency gain when they are forced to explain said ability on every card: instead of just having "Shroud" printed on the card, it's displayed as "Shroud (this creature cannot be the target of spells or abilities)" - a rather silly design choice, imo.

Funnily enough, as I am opening the foil, Jes claims "there's going to be a vampire card in there and I want it". I laugh and say OK. There has certainly been some vampire-centric stuff in MTG before, but it's not really a common thing to see in the game. In addition, she has never played the game. Sure enough, there's a "Bloodhusk Ritualist" in the pack, a "vampire shaman" creature type which counts as both a shaman and a vampire due to the presence of the words in the text and would thereby be affected by abilities that target either type (told you I was a nerd).

I wonder when MTG will finally die out, and what will become of its players after it does? Every time I indulge in said tradition, I become more and more surprised to find the game still going strong; now that the CCG market is completely flooded with hundreds of games, almost all of them requiring a massive financial investment to play, it's a wonder that the original is still on shelves with that same old "Deckmaster" card backing.