Tag Archives: mtg

#BlogEveryDay – Running on profits

Posted on by
Reply

Business is funny.  The initial investment always hurts.  The good news is that once you start making profits, you can run a business off of profits.  Back when I started selling warhammer bits on ebay, I went about $100 in the hole before I started slowly climbing out.  Eventually, I broke even and starting running off of my profits.  When I hit $0, I had about $70 worth of inventory laying around. I still have quite a bit that I’m going to start selling off, but all-in-all it took me about 2 months to break even.

That’s when I branched off and my friends convinced me to play magic the gathering.  And that’s worked out well for me because I’m able to turn a profit on that, too.  I wrote about luck last week and I’m still seeing plenty of that same luck these days.  Just a few days ago I pulled a Cavern of Souls, a rare land that’s only going to go up in value once Ravnica rotates out.  Same with my Ral Zareks, those didn’t sell at $23/ea., but prices are rebounding around $19/ea. and that’s not bad.

I recently purchased about $80 worth of removal spells for $55, auctions that ended either at 3AM or some other terrible time that not many people are around.  And I’m going to turn around and sell 3 of those cards to turn back those $55, returning myself to $0 on those, despite having 6 cards that are worth a lot of money (relatively speaking).

This is a lot of fun, buying and selling and yeah, it has it’s risks, but if you take every precaution you can, and make every effort to please the customer, you’re going to end up better than you started, and I’m okay with that.

#BlogEveryDay – Dragon’s Maze pre-release event

Posted on by
Reply

After 5 weeks of relearning all the rules to Magic the Gathering, I finally went to my first pre-release event. A Little Shop of Comics is pretty close to my house and was holding tournaments all weekend. Dragon’s Maze is the second expansion of 2013 and its a pretty tricky beast. Basically, two colors are paired together and form a guild. In Ravnica, we were introduced to the basic guilds. Dragon’s Maze now has 10 guilds total and at the event you had to pick a guild and you were given a complimentary guild to try to make a deck.

Sealed deck events are a crapshoot. If you get pumping bombs or fancy tricks, you get easy wins.  If you miss out on unpacking 8 rares, you’re going to have a hard time.  This happened to me on Saturday when I picked Izzit, the red/blue guild.  I managed to go 0-3 that day and made it home just in time to host d&d for 4 hours.  Sunday I performed much better and I owe all my success to Rakdos.  My one friend and I managed to get enough wins by ourselves to get the dlc code for the online achievement on planeswalkerpoints.com, which has no real world benefit other than proudly representing our guild.

You see, Dragon’s Maze refers to a labyrinth of magic that goes through each of the 10 guilds. Each win was worth 2 movement points through the guilds.  10 guilds means your guild only needed 5 wins to get to the end and get the prized online achivement.  I really liked this event because it was so radically different and gave everyone a chance to get to the end (if you played more than 1 day).

So today I managed to go 2-2 using Master of Cruelties.  He’s a great card if you get give him flying and somehow make him unblockable.  I managed to win 5 of my games off this guys back, then finished 2 of those games off with a nice little Stab Wound. Somehow, I managed to get 4 blood rush cards and BOY were those great on my secret guild, Dimir.  I ‘m pretty sure I bloodrushed 14 points of damaged twice using Deathcult Rogue.  In limited play, I love that card and went blue/red/black just for him and while it didn’t pay off as much as I would have liked, I still managed to get my 2 match wins and did Rakdos proud.

Rakbros ftw!

#BlogEveryDay – Drafting Magic the Gathering

Posted on by
Reply

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.