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

• Mono-Red Artifacts - Daretti
• Golgari Lands - The Gitrog Monster 
• Dimir Sacrifice/Treasures - Eloise, Nephalia Sleuth
• Orzhov Aristocrats - Liesa, Forgotten Archangel 
•  Mardu Reanimation - Alesha, Who Smiles at Death
• Golgari Elves - Lathril, Blade of the Elves
• Selesnya Vanilla Tribal - Jasmine Boreal of the Seven 
• Esper Lifegain - Oloro, Ageless Ascetic
• Rakdos Goblins - Wort, Boggart Auntie (a development of my very first EDH deck!)
• Naya Pump and Smash - Minsc, Beloved Ranger  
• Grixis Dethrone - Marchesa, the Black Rose
• Mono-White Tokens - Bennie Bracks, Zoologist

Billy's Decks

•  Dimir Zombies - Wilhelt the Rotcleave 
• Mono-Red Goblins - Krenko, Mob Boss
• Five Colour Superfriends - Garth One Eye 

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! 

 

Well, that was some break!

 And just like that, over 7 years have gone by! When I last wrote on this blog it had just started a journey into a new career as a teacher, filled with enthusiasm and hope, looking forward to enjoying a mix of gaming and work. Turns out it didn't quite work like that! However 2 years of global pandemic, some mental health issues, moving house, raising a child and the reality of teaching all came together to rob me of my motivation to write about gaming with any regularity and so the month long break I promised myself before I wrote my next post turned into multiple months and then into years.

The shelves have gotten more full!

Gaming as it stands (mostly) at the moment

 This period of time has also coincided with some serious changes (in multiple stages) in my relationship with gaming. I fell away from Magic the Gathering from about 2016 through to 2021, barely maintaining my decks and paying very little attention to the sets that were released, or how my favoured format of Commander developed. Along with this the landscape of roleplaying games changed considerably with the rise of Dungeons and Dragons 5th edition along with play shows such as Critical Role and TV shows such as Stranger Things making the game (and the hobby as a whole) slightly more mainstream than it had ever been. I however didnt really change along with this, and still play mostly the same games I did back in 2015. It was where and when I played that has changed, with the regularity of games dropping off and then with COVID19 rolling around in 2020, my sometimes online gaming became only online gaming. As I write this in late 2022 the vast majority of games I run (still almost exclusively a GM rather than a player... some things never change!) are still online. My players and I are scattered across the UK so it means that we can still play together despite the challenges life throws in the way.

Enjoying a spot of game planning

The Adventures in the Forgotten Realms prerelease in 2021, the set that got me back to MtG

So why now am I writing this, so long after the last piece on this blog? Well I now sit for the first time in 7 years with the motivation to write about gaming. Truth be told I have often flirted with the idea of writing again, and have had a few short lived projects that fell by the wayside, but none of them have ever quite managed to provide the same level of joy and satisfaction that this blog gave me when I wrote it regularly back in 2014-2015. There have been some changes in my life which mean I am now in a place where I have the motivation to write again and I feel like there are things I want to write about. So here it is, the first post of what I hope will be many. I have a list of content I'd like to cover over the next few weeks and months, and I have the time and the motivation to get my thoughts down too. Hopefully some people will see this and those that do will enjoy what I have to say, or at the very least it will provoke some thoughts and conversations. Over the next few posts I hope to have a mix of Magic the Gathering deck articles, RPG gameplay updates (I have just launched a new Pathfinder 1st edition game) and some things on boardgaming, something that is a big change to me over the past few years.

It's been a while...

Wow, it's been some time since I last posted here! I fully intended to make sure i wrote something at least every two weeks and that has really fallen by the way-side. Looks like the reality of travelling for work and having a young family has taken its toll on me and my spare time. I have even ended up reducing the amount of table top gaming I am doing, with my last campaign (a Vampire: the Masquerade game set in Detroit) playing out slowly over 6 months before grinding to a holt recently. All of this has left me feeling a longing for getting back to writing, which recently I have been able to do, thanks to mtgcasualplay, who have kindly let me publish a series of articles about Commander. I have recently started the mammoth task of giving a short review to every card that is legal to play as your Commander, and the 2nd part of my article series has gone live today.






In other news, I have been able to do something recently that I haven't done for a long time and that is actually play in a a table top RPG game. As a one off a friend wanted to demo the new Star Wars game Age of Rebellion by Fantasy Flight Games, and so got the starter set. I agreed to play to help out the two other players who were brand new to RPGs, acting as the voice of experience (or something like that).  The system was new to me, and involves some custom dice, along with the idea that the players make all the dice rolls, and the GM sets which ones are rolled. I reminded me of a cross between Numenera, and the old Space Crusade board game from the 1990s, but that was no bad thing.

Unusually for me I didn't descend into a raging lunatic at the first opportunity and we all had a blast playing it in a relaxed atmosphere without taking it all to seriously which was really good fun. I think that I have a take away lesson from this session and that is to cut back on the seriousness a bit and remember we are all here for some fun. I want to try my next D&D campaign a bit like this, so less focus on rules minutiae, and more on just making sure everyone has fun.

That is the end of this short update, but hopefully I can get back to updating this more regularly now, especially as I will soon be working much closer to home. This will hopefully mean more gaming time and more time to write.