On Magic, and other random musings...

Back when I started fantasy-gaming the Magic the Gathering CCG became hugely popular. It quickly turned out that other people were able to invest a whole lot more money in the game than I was. And the problem with collectible card games is that if you are able to invest more money, you get significantly better cards and thus greatly increase the odds of you winning. So my small collection of cards was doomed to spend the next decade-and-a-half in an old wooden wine bottle box......

My Magic collection never came close to being this size, my miniatures however...

Until some during the last year some of my friends started to play again, largely because of an internetstore opening a venue in town where they organised weekly and monthly small scale tournaments, most significantly boosterdrafts. The concept of a boosterdraft tournament is that at the start ot the game every player gets a couple of boosters, and through clever system of passing the hands of newly acquired cards along the group they are divided amongst the players. This allows you to select which cards you want, but eliminates the possibility of large, preconstructed decks with loads of expensive cards.

For the last couple of months we have been playing  boosterdraft now and again, and it has been a blast! for less than the price of going to the movies, we have a evening worth's of fun, and get to take an newly gained deck of cards home. It was such good fun that it made me look up my old cards, where I discovered that magic had also suffered from the 'power creep' that seems to be associated with GW codexes and armybooks. Most of the (rather mundane) cards I own are nowhere near as good as the current common cards. The acquisition of new cards has had us playing regular games of magic as well, but this has quickly revealed that still those of us who (again) spend the most money on it get the best decks. And not all of us enjoy the multiplayer games that tend to mitigate the power-imbalance somewhat.

Then I stumbled upon a small amount of Shadowfist cards, hidden in the same wooden winebox, which had been a freebee at the spellen-spektakel game show somewhere in the nineties. I remembered it being fun as well as especially suited for multiple player games. It's theme is stolen form the 80's and 90's action flicks: oriental martial artists and triads, mixed with some good old fashioned Godfather-goons and hightech genetically puritan Germans form the future. To my surprise the game has recently been revived through a kickstarter project, so when the cards are on sale maybe I'll try to convince some of my friends to start it as well. But first I have to get them to play Saga, otherwise I'll have a hard time convincing anyone why I really needed those Anglo-Danes/Saxons....