Thursday 13 October 2022

Where I am with Magic the Gathering


The last thing I wrote about MtG was way back in January of 2015, around the release of Fate Reforged, coming up for 8 years ago. In terms of MtG this is effectively ancient history! Back then we were still in the times of the block structure, back before the current era of FIRE design, and back when Commander wasn't the dominant way of playing the game. I dropped out of the game within a year of writing that article, just too busy to keep up, and lacking the money to keep up with the products. I finally decided I would start selling off some of my unused expensive singles in 2021, and so started to put some up for sale.

One of the cards the got sold off

 Predictably, after a short while looking up cards and prices, I started to see cards I thought might be good for my favourite EDH deck, The Gitrog Monster. This quite quickly snowballed from me selling a few cards to starting to buy a few. This very quickly reignited my interest in the game, fuelled further by my son finding the game of interest and wanting to play. Fast forward to now in late 2022 and I would say I am once again fairly enfranchised, although I cannot keep up with the release schedule, nor can I keep up with the explosion of legendary creatures that are released in each set. I once started a series of articles ranking all of the eligible commanders on mtgcasualplay.com, which appears to now be a defunct website, and this was something that was reasonable to attempt back in 2015, if quite ambitious. Now, in 2022 trying to rank all of the eligible commanders seems insane! In the most recent set, Dominaria United, there are 41 legendary creatures that could be used as the commander of a deck, and that doesn't include those from the accompanying Commander products (which is another big change that has happened in the meantime). It is pretty clear how Wizards of the Coast are catering more and more for Commander, and the release schedule for products has also ramped up massively. So I won't be trying to resurrect my old series, even if my views and experiences have changed and grown, meaning I think it would be better written now and contain better insights. In terms of MtG content moving forward I intend to do a mixture of articles about the decks I have built or will build, as well as looking at products and cards as they come out. 

 

For the first time in my life, I find that I have someone to play regular games with: my son is now old enough to enjoy the game and be able to play it without having to require help most of the time. Although EDH is best enjoyed in multiplayer, we also play a fair number of games 1 on 1 and have a blast. I am not ashamed to say he can beat me about as often as I can beat him. I even intend to take him to his first Friday Night Magic this Friday at Asgard Games here in Walsall. He has even taken part in helping construct some EDH decks of his own, and those are pretty good fun to play against, with a similar enough power level to most of mine that they are an even game. You can check out the current roster below (all decks are stored at Moxfield)


My Decks

Billy's Decks

It's quite a long list , and there are a few others that are kicking about that are in various limbo states, as well as a couple I don't actually enjoy but haven't gotten around to deconstructing. No doubt this will be added to and changed as I go along, but this provides a handy snapshot of what things look like as I write in October of 2022.

 

Everything I wanted in my last article on MtG!


As an aside for anyone who read my last MtG article, yes I did indeed pull an Ugin, the Spirit Dragon in Fate Reforged. See if you can spot it in a deck list! 


 

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