MTG: Just Learning

You use a draw cards from a deck that will allow you to cast spells to reduce your opponents life from 20 to 0. There are several types of spells like creatures, enchantments, sorceries, instants, artifacts, etc. To cast these spells you need mana which you get it from a type of card you put in your deck which is called land. There are five colors of mana and each color plays in a different style. Each color has its strengths as well as its weaknesses so it is good to make a deck that combines them so that they complement each other.

Red - Proactive, plays fast, usually all about early game but has trouble in the late game. It has spells that hit your opponent's face directly as well as dragons and goblins.

White - Its all about building a team and protection. Because of this it supports every other color very well. It has equipment, effects that make all your creatures bigger, life gain, humans and angels.

Green - Go big, period. Green plays the biggest creatures and the other cards it plays are to help it put those big creatures on the table faster (ramping). It has beasts, hydras, and wurms.

Black - Does whatever it takes to win but at a price. You need to draw cards? Okay, you can do it but you need to pay some life. Do you want to kill a creature? Okay, you can but you have to sacrifice one of your own first. It has a lot of kill spells and graveyard shenanigans. Creatures in black are zombies, vampires, and demons.

Blue - The color of control magic. It has a lot of spells that return creatures to the hand, spells that draw cards, counterspells, and creatures that fly. Blue usually will summon a flyer and poke at you each turn while returns everything to your hand and counters every relevant spell you want to play. It is also traditionally overpowered because of all the deck manipulation that the old cards allow it to have, but not so much in recent sets. Blue creatures are merfolk, and sphinxes.

Hi, since you're obviously new here, please refrain from replying to obvious shitposts. It will help the board stay nice for future generations.

Now do you have any specific areas of magic you're struggling with?

>Draw, Untap, Upkeep, Main Phase, Combat, End.
Fug user, it's not funny. I was playing casualy for years with ending my turn with combat

Thanks I come from /x/ and /r9k/ so... I'm used to shitpost. And yes mainly the meanings of words like "Return" on cards.

Thank you for a quick summary. :3

perfect way to spot a casual. I hate it when I have to remind people that I'm doing something after combat right in tge middle of combat.

Return refers to the card existing in a particular area then returning subsequently to that area once it's removed. Return implies that it has already existed or could exist in your hand/on the battlefield and you are changing the zone the card exists in.

>perfect way to spot a casual

Hey guys I am just learning too and have already built a deck. I just looked online at cardkingdom for cards that were powerful and came up with this.

vampire nighthawk x 2
victim of night x 3
hedron archive x 4
bearer of silence x 4
bane of bala ged x 4
dark ritual x 3
spawning bed x 1
shamble back x 1
endless one x 1
crypt ghast x 3
coat with venom x 1
diabolic tutor x 4
warped landscape x 2
crumbling vestige x 3
ulamog the ceaseless hunger x 1
whispersilk cloak x 2
baleful eidolon x 1
argentum armor x 2
nirkana revenant x 1

black mana x 15
wastes x 5

does this deck completely suck? Any reccomendations?

>It has equipment

Uh

>Draw, Untap, Upkeep, Main Phase, Combat, End.

What the fuck am I reading?

It looks pretty bad to me but that's ok. One of the cool things about TCGs as games is their learning curve. There are literally thousands of cards in the game of Magic, and if someone was just given 4 of every card as soon as they started playing, their eyes would slowly glaze over, they'd stumble away, and maybe die due to all the overwhelming choices. The best way to learn and get better at magic is to build decks with the cards you already own, and to build a collection before you start buying singles. You should draft, you go to prereleases, you should buy sealed product until you feel like you've got a big collection. This way, you will organically learn what's good and what's bad, and how to differentiate between the two. You will learn how to build the strongest decks with the cards available to you, and learn all the rules that you currently have to know. Once you get a good grasp on that, THAT is when you start buying singles. You are essentially growing that card pool without actually owning the cards in a way. You will need to learn more rules, but you will have a better idea of what makes for a good deck. You'll waste less money and be less frustrated when you start buying singles online.

jesus christ that was a grammatical car crash. I'm so tired. I hope you understand what I mean though.

But user, every color has equipment

>If you find that you aren't
drawing the cards you want, just go ahead and shuffle your deck.

I know it's a joke post, but goddamn do I hate when new players ask me if they can do this. If your shuffling is so horrendously bad or your mana base is so poorly built that a shuffle would genuinely help you, then you deserve to lose.

I 6-stack shuffle and mash shuffle multiple times between rounds and matches, yet I still end up with 3-5 lands in a row. I usually follow the 20-24 lands per deck idea, only putting land grab spells in if I have a high mana curve.

It's magic, I don't have to explain it.

You can go play Magic Duels.
It's a free game in Steam, it helps you learn from the basics and it teaches you on more obscure subjects when they come up.
All of this while following stories from the lore.
There you can play against the AI or online so you don't need to get real cards or real friends (or waste friends' time) to play a lot and start getting the rules.

Well, it happens sometimes, that's the point of randomness

Let's say we are in a 4-way EDH game and I decide to cast blasphpus act. Someone casts a counterspell and then everyone else decided that this is the perfect time to play all of their (non-counterspell) instants on this stack. If I play a counterspell to counterspell their counterspell at the near-beginning of the stack does that mean it disrupts the stack or some shit?

>playing pretend games
>not playing superior mental chess

>Isochron Scepter comes out.
>Make an entire deck filled with nothing but land and instants with the occasional sorcery spell.
>Use card drawing, scry mechanics, low impact regression spells, and Brain Freeze combined with an artifact that reshuffles my library into my deck.
>Basically sift through my entire deck by turn 5, drop all my stall spells fast as possible, regress lands, creatures, and everything else as often as possible, eventually wind up decking the opponent through stall tactics and brain freezing 12-15 cards a turn.

I always put two cards on top of every land when I'm cleaning up the play area after every game, resulting in card-card-land-card-card-land etc. before I shuffle. I may not have a perfect mana curve every game, but I can't remember the last time I had 6 lands in a row or didn't draw at least four lands by turn 5.

Go to wizards.com and read the basic rules then go play a game.

If you have friends that already play, see if they can help you build a deck. Giving interested new players free decks made of cheap rares and commons/uncommons was pretty common in my playgroups in collge.

If you don't, your options are either netdecking something, getting a deck builder's toolkit and mashing something together, buying an intro pack and some boosters and mashing stuff together, or buying a duel decks set and playing one of those. Almost any form of precon/intro pack should have a rules pamphlet with the basics in it.

You'll suck at first and your deck will probably be bad. It'll be more fun if you have some other noobs to play with or if you have experienced friends willing to build jank decks to play with you/help you build decks.

Once you know the baseline rules, the cards say everything else on them, so you can learn the rest as you go.

no, the last thing put on the stack will resolve first: your counterspell. It's effect will resolve, countering the other counterspell on the stack. Then, the next to last thing will resolve, whatever other instant played right before your counterspell. etc, etc

So you mean a stack to the tune of:
Counter>Spell>Spell>Counter>Spell
With left to right being the order of resolution.
Well your counter goes off, removing their counter from the stack, and then the other spells go off in order.

Something that's easy to miss and has already been joked about is phase order. Actual phase order is thus:
Untap > Upkeep > Draw > 1st Main Phase > Combat > 2nd Main Phase > End
It doesn't matter so much when you're learning, but there are some old timers who can get absurdly touchy about it outside of tournaments.

Buy a premade deck. It'll be cheaper and will have a theme/strategy built in.

That's how you spot a Yu Gi Oh player

No shitpost, completely serious.

Instants >>>>>> Sorceries

Permanents can be used over multiple turns so they make it easier to maintain card advantage, which generally wins the card game.

Understanding when you can cast instants (aka when you can interact with your opponent's decisions) is one of the fundamentals of the game (see combat tricks, counterspells, brainstorm)

Learn how to do this, and you win on a technical level against 90% of all players (bulk of which being casuals)

oops you're forgetting the second untap step after the main phase for any creatures you forgot to untap and want to attack with

Yeah, this basically. "Return to " means "We expect that came from . Move it from the battlefield to there." Optionally, you can have things other than permanents being returned, such as spells. In this case, the effect may or may not specify where to return it from if it helps with clarity, but this basically unnecessary since, whenever a card changes zones, it becomes a new game object and the game doesn't remember its previous state. That sounds needlessly complicated, but what it means is that if you have a card that says "When this creature dies, return it to the battlefield.", and your opponent exiles it before that effect resolves, it won't come back out of exile.

Sort of relevant to that distinction: things on the battlefield aren't cards, but are instead permanents represented by cards. Everywhere else, they are cards. All nonland cards, even creatures, are also spells after you cast them and before they resolve - that is, while they are on the stack. The stack keeps track of the order in which things happen when people respond to each other with Instants and with abilities printed on permanents - when each is used, it goes on the stack, and then whenever nobody wants to or can put anything on the stack anymore, things start resolving from the most recently-added thing to the first. Each time something resolves, you have the opportunity to respond again. Resolving just means "do what the card says". This is how counterspells work - they go on the stack on top of the spell you want to counter, then as they resolve they remove their target from the stack and put it in a the owner's graveyard.

I think that covers it and all the followups I anticipate.

Ooh boy. Um. There are a few places to start with magic, Duels of the Planeswalkers being a decent one, but Veeky Forums is most certainly not.

The basics are just that, basic. You'll pick up keywords in no time, and "the stack" is the last thing you'll have to learn for playing. After that is priority and rule-nuances, but those aren't needed quite so urgently.

I would strongly recommend Duels of the Planeswalkers. It's a slow and steady way of learning that looks and plays half decently.

You idiot.
It's: Untap, Upkeep, Draw, Main 1, Combat, Main 2, End

Hey guys its Fabrizio Antieri

USE SLEEVES

This. Double sleeve the whole deck if any of the cards is worth more than $10.

Don't forget to shuffle.

Hello friend, I would like to recommend to you this handy book for your introduction to Magic:The Gathering.

What the fuck, I can't believe this is real

You have a deck of 60 cards. Another person has a deck of 60 cards. You try to kill each other.

Magic has colors. Picking the right color or two is important for what your deck will do.

White is all community and holy shit. This is the color for Soldiers and Angels and making a lots of the former. Also holier than thou DELET THIS magic. This is really boring and nobody actually likes it.

Blue is all about INT scores and dick waving. This is the color for drawing cards and being a dickbag. No, seriously, Blue just fucking says 'no' when people try to have fun, like the fucking notion is caustic.

Black is all about you and how you can be a fuckbucket. This is the color for Zombies and Vampires and being the biggest possible self centred edgelord you can be, which entails a lot of killing.

Red is all damage and being a retarded. Reds so fucking dumb it doesn't understand that retard strength shouldn't apply to lightning bolts and shit, but it do. Also the fast.

Green is big dumb fatties casting high power/toughness creatures. This is the color of Elves and mo mana. And just big dumb shit, honestly, just big, dumb, shit.

Make a deck out of whatever you like, try to keep it in one or two colors so you don't end up in scenarios like drawing Plains and Forests when all the cards in your hand are Red and Blue.

>4x bane of bala ged

man that's some high curve there. You'd best have some ramp cards

>But I'm playing extended.
I've heard good things about Yveltal-EX in Extended.

Why is there a Caspar David Friedrich painting on the cover of that book?

Your curve is too high and you have very few lands. If you are playing things that cost +6 mana you usually want to be playing ramp spells, which are in green. otherwise you are never going to be able to play them. crypt ghast + dark ritual could work sometimes but is very vulnerable to lots of removal.

I'd play some limited for a while, buy a few booster packs with a few friends and play with six each building 40 card decks with your pools. Shadows Over Innistrad's packs are great for this because there's lots of good cards with some value that are likely to grow in value in Standard as time passes. Its overall a great way to build up your collection.

When you have enough of a pool you can try putting together a couple of kitchen table decks to play with your mates so you get a better feel of the game and what kind of deck you like best. When you are happy with the deck you've built and are looking forward to putting it to the test you can go to you local game store and play at Friday Night Magic. Your homebrews will be should all be playable in the Standard with your starting card pool.

Standard is a format that includes the latest Magic releases. The older sets rotate out as new ones are released. The latest release was Shadows over Innistrad this April and the next Standard-legal set is Eldritch Moon this July. What this means for you is that you'll see a lot of cards you've never seen.

But don't worry, people are usually very helpful when it comes to showing the ropes of the format. Pay attention to their decks and see how they work and when you find one you like you either already have the cards for or can afford, buy the single cards you need through the net (magiccardmarket is a good, relatively easy to use site), then build it. You can also simply keep making better and better homebrews and make your own Standard deck.

After playing Standard for a few rotations you may want to get into Modern. With that you can easily build a Tier 2/1.5 deck just buying a few modern stapples. They are expensive, but just proxy them its an inversion that will pay off in the long run if you plan to keep playing Magic regularly because, unlike Standard, Modern isn't a rotating format, including every set since Mirrodin onwards.

READ THIS
>wizards.com/magic/rules/EN_MTGM11_Rulebook_LR_Web.pdf
READ THIS
>wizards.com/magic/rules/EN_MTGM11_Rulebook_LR_Web.pdf
READ THIS
>wizards.com/magic/rules/EN_MTGM11_Rulebook_LR_Web.pdf
READ THIS

>implying random bans aren't rotations
He should play legacy or EDH.

Regardless of discussions about what format is best you must admit that it isn't a good idea for a beginner to start with Legacy.

EDH can be rather complicated and is much harder to build for a novice than standard and modern since it plays way different. Its also only really fun when you have a stable playgroup.

The precons work well, and this was for once he knew how to play anyway.

I feel like a better order is: limited > pauper > modern > legacy. Pauper optional.

If you only want to play with friends, it depends a bit on what they'll want to play. It'll probably turn into EDH unless they're also competitive.

Like I said, modern rotates in a way, and costs a lot.

>I was playing
Can't you read?

You change your mind and play a better game like Hearthstone

>The Precons work well
Eh. They are a start. They have a lot of trash though and Commander isn't for everyone.

Anyways, if user wanted to get into Commander the most logical thing would be to do so when they already have good enough notions of the game and they have an idea of what sort of deck they want to play. Therefore is best to play some draft first, he could even get some cool cards to put into the precon, like I did.

Go download Magic Duels or Duels of the Planeswalkers 2015/2014. It's probably the best way to learn now.

That's what I said.

you turn lands sideways and do stuff

>modern rotates in a way
Eh, being scared of bans isn't reason enough to stay out of Modern in my opinion. But I will say that if one is so worried about losing value, they should just stick to limited.

not linking the current version >media.wizards.com/2014/docs/EN_M15_QckStrtBklt_LR_Crop.pdf