New beginner's luck...
So, I used to play the card/strategy game Magic a long time ago, but I've not played seriously in a great many years (i.e. about ten). If anyone who reads this LJ doesn't know, there are a great many cards that do different things; you put together a deck of 60 cards that you think will get along well, and compete against other people who've done the same thing. It's still an excellent strategy game, combining skill in constructing (what will work together well), skill in play, and dealing with randomness.
My friend mihaiguy in Austin convinced me to play again, but ... trouble is, I don't have any cards here, and certainly nothing recent (which is all that's allowed in tournament-legal decks, which is what most people play). But I don't like playing that way anyway, since 1) you've got to keep up with the newest stuff released, and 2) so many people just copy decks used by the top players, and you wind up playing against the same crap again and again.
The alternative is a format called "draft", where the tournament's broken down into groups of 6-8 players who sit in a circle. Each player has 3 retail packs of 15 cards each. Everyone opens one, drafts (in secret) a card they want, and passes the rest of the stuff left. After everyone's picked 15 cards, you do it twice again, passing right the second time and back left the third time.
There's a huge amount of strategy in this, mostly related to the mechanics of the game: cards are divided into five colors, and you're (usually) going to fail miserably if you wind up trying to play all five. In a draft there's not enough good stuff to play just one color, so most everyone winds up in two or three -- and you try to get your neighbors to not take the colors you're in (by trying to pass them good stuff in the other colors), so you get the good stuff in your colors.
Yesterday I drove to Sierra Vista to play in one of these draft tournaments with about 20 people, after some reading about what the game's like these days. I wound up playing with 19 other guys who all knew each other, with me as the "new guy from Tucson", under the watchful eye of the proprietress of the shop (wearing a black shirt that said "Pussy Rules" in cursive script).
You never really know what you'll wind up playing until you start drafting and see what you get, but I wound up in the colors green, white, and red, with some stuff that wasn't subtle or tricky but was pretty solid. Lots of people in our draft pool wound up in green and red somehow, but I was "upstream" of many of them in packs 1 and 3 and picked off some of the good stuff. It helped that the guy immediately upstream of me (a very good player) wound up in black, red, and blue.
In the three best-two-of-three matches, I played pretty well (one of my tough plays in particular in match 2 turned out to be the right one, and I think saved a game), and wound up winning them all, 2-1, 2-0, 2-0, and won the tournament (!). (I won on tiebreakers against the other two people who won all their matches, since I only lost one game). The last match was against the guy upstream of me playing black/red/blue, with a deck loaded with tricks (as befits blue/black). Said tricks weren't enough, though, and he got flattened by the onslaught of dudes that were bigger than his.
I won't go into the technical details of the matches, other than to share a bit of wisdom:
When all Fortuna gives you are hammers, just smash face.
Now I'm off to go hike at Madera Canyon and probably camp there tonight. Whee!
My friend mihaiguy in Austin convinced me to play again, but ... trouble is, I don't have any cards here, and certainly nothing recent (which is all that's allowed in tournament-legal decks, which is what most people play). But I don't like playing that way anyway, since 1) you've got to keep up with the newest stuff released, and 2) so many people just copy decks used by the top players, and you wind up playing against the same crap again and again.
The alternative is a format called "draft", where the tournament's broken down into groups of 6-8 players who sit in a circle. Each player has 3 retail packs of 15 cards each. Everyone opens one, drafts (in secret) a card they want, and passes the rest of the stuff left. After everyone's picked 15 cards, you do it twice again, passing right the second time and back left the third time.
There's a huge amount of strategy in this, mostly related to the mechanics of the game: cards are divided into five colors, and you're (usually) going to fail miserably if you wind up trying to play all five. In a draft there's not enough good stuff to play just one color, so most everyone winds up in two or three -- and you try to get your neighbors to not take the colors you're in (by trying to pass them good stuff in the other colors), so you get the good stuff in your colors.
Yesterday I drove to Sierra Vista to play in one of these draft tournaments with about 20 people, after some reading about what the game's like these days. I wound up playing with 19 other guys who all knew each other, with me as the "new guy from Tucson", under the watchful eye of the proprietress of the shop (wearing a black shirt that said "Pussy Rules" in cursive script).
You never really know what you'll wind up playing until you start drafting and see what you get, but I wound up in the colors green, white, and red, with some stuff that wasn't subtle or tricky but was pretty solid. Lots of people in our draft pool wound up in green and red somehow, but I was "upstream" of many of them in packs 1 and 3 and picked off some of the good stuff. It helped that the guy immediately upstream of me (a very good player) wound up in black, red, and blue.
In the three best-two-of-three matches, I played pretty well (one of my tough plays in particular in match 2 turned out to be the right one, and I think saved a game), and wound up winning them all, 2-1, 2-0, 2-0, and won the tournament (!). (I won on tiebreakers against the other two people who won all their matches, since I only lost one game). The last match was against the guy upstream of me playing black/red/blue, with a deck loaded with tricks (as befits blue/black). Said tricks weren't enough, though, and he got flattened by the onslaught of dudes that were bigger than his.
I won't go into the technical details of the matches, other than to share a bit of wisdom:
When all Fortuna gives you are hammers, just smash face.
Now I'm off to go hike at Madera Canyon and probably camp there tonight. Whee!