Tag Archives: magic the gathering

#BlogEveryDay – Luck

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I don’t know if people can be cursed, but I have strong evidence to support the following claim: bad luck exists.  My one friend never rolls a d20 well, he also can’t roll d6s with consistency.  Another friend can never get good Magic cards when he buys a box. My cousin? H can grab 20 dice and get 3 successes against ‘nids in 40k.

Random.org is quite possibly one of the best websites ever dreampt up. According to their schtick, they take a camera, point it at a dark space and analyze the static.  Static is random by nature.  Sure, we can probably guess at where static will appear, but to guess what form it will have would take more processing power than available to humans.

When I open a pack of MtG cards these days, I’m finding myself with better and better cards.  This is fine and dandy since I’m in sell mode, constantly trying to break even.  I fear there will come a day when I actually want to keep… I shouldn’t say that because I may keep these Ral Zareks I got in my booster box, Izzit seems like a fun guild to play.  I have 3 Pyrewilf Shamans that are tricky beasts, having something akin to flashback.  I also noticed, while sorting MtG cards that I have 2 Guttersnips, a neat little trick.

Either way, I must have rolled high Luck when I was born, and I love it.

#BlogEveryDay – Drafting Magic the Gathering

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I’m inconsistent. Not in a Jamie Lee Curtis kind of way, but more in fulfilling obligations.  In an effort to change that, I’m going to #BlogEveryDay.  And yes, those hashtags were necessary.

My high school friends started playing Magic the Gathering (mtg) on a weekly basis again and I’ve decided to join them.  I always knew how to play mtg, I learned when the game first came out because my best friend’s older brother was addicted to it.  Back in ’94-95, mtg and Pokemon were all the rage.

So, every week we gather and put in a few bucks for a booster draft.  Last night we started a new box, Avacyn Restored and I got schooled.  This is actually fairly typical, because while I started playing mtg at a young age, I didn’t keep up with the game until college.  Even then, when I started drafting with this group last month, I hadn’t played a competitive match in almost 3 years.  Needless to say, I’m not rusty, I’m just plain bad (against these guys, who are near pros, might as well be judges).

Unlike Gatecrash, Avacyn Restored has a lot more of a learning curve because there aren’t guilds. Guilds enable you to easily and quickly pick a… well, a guild, a set of cards that go well together and complement each other. So I was at a disadvantage, as usual, not knowing any of the cards or how their abilities resolved.  Thankfully, I managed to win 5 games (overall I went 2-3) and came in 4th of 5 (last place guy went 1-4).  This didn’t help since the rares weren’t that great, but it was better than nothing since I got a foil of this bad boy.

Dual Casting

Enchant creature
Enchanted creature has “1 Red, tap: Copy target spell with new target”

I’m slowly learning strategies, such as block with creature, exile it and return it to the field under my control (a common ability for the blues in this expansion), but I’m still going to be trash for a couple months until I learn A LOT more about this game.