Have you ever stopped playing for a lengthy period of time?

Have you ever stopped playing for a lengthy period of time?

If so, why did you?

i stopped playing after innistrad block for about 4 years because i just didnt have time to play with my job and other responsibilities. plus the people that i played with also stopped playing

I tried to get into it once. A friend tried to teach me, but then used it as an opportunity for another win and kicked my ass instead of teaching anything. He was weirdly proud of himself.

A few years later another friend tried to get me into it. He built my deck for me, a red deck that had a ton of low damage monsters that you could summon multiple of at once. It was too good I guess, because I beat him and he got pissed off for being beaten by a newbie. Built a deck just to challenge the one he built for me and lost again. Fucked off in anger. Never played since.

Yes.

There wasn't any game store nearby and I couldn't find anyone interested in playing. Even old friends have mostly stopped caring. That said, now that I've moved and have a LGS, I'll probably try to get back into EDH.

I stopped playing for two different periods of time and came back into the game. First time was a little while after combo winter, things were pretty degenerate and standard had lots of bannings. 0/10, would not recommend. Second time was after Timespiral/OG Ravnica rotated, Standard just didn't seem as fun or interesting as that standard environment, I still to this day want to go back and experience it again more than any other standard I played. After a year or so of feeling disinterested in standard and pretty much not playing a friend got me into Legacy and I gave up standard for good.

Yes, I stopped playing because I moved and didn't land amongst gamers. This was over 20 years ago. Decided to start playing again after running across my old cards.

Haven't really played since Lorwynn, outside of a handfull of Limited games and maybe six or seven games of EDH with somebody else's deck.
Casual became an intolerable arms race in my group and when faced with either buying into Legacy or stopping, I stopped. Was interested in Modern, but they banned the archetype I wanted to play off the bat, and I don't like limited. So, no Magic for me for ten years, even though I live two streets away from the biggest card shop in the country.

Affinity was brand new and my Sliver deck didn't stand a chance. I quit and didn't return until 2012.

Yeah, I had to take a shit.

Started on BFZ with a dirt cheap mardu goblins deck and when I started to get the hang of everything MTG (rulings, mana curves, home brewing and all that stuff) , I built myself a good deck, and won the OGW game day, everyone was furious that a newbie won and quit playing, killing the only LGS in town
Started to play exclusively on XMage since then

I stoppped playing really after BFZ
that shit was so awful
Im coming coming back because the gatewatch is gonna be gone hopefully

stopped playing about a year ago when EDH got boring and i realized that standard was total dog shit and any other format is too expensive to get into. i would play pauper but the LGS near me doesnt do pauper events. magic is just to expensive to play anymore

Holy shit, was you store literally nothing but autists?

Played regularly (though mostly in a casual environment, although I did go to a few drafts and shit every now and then) Apocalypse through Theros (roughly late 2000-ish to late 2013). Stopped buying the new sets because I didn't like the direction they were going (commons weren't playable anymore for the most part, too many tokens and counters, I felt less like I was playing a game and more like I was keeping track of a table full of beads)

Still get out my decks and paly with my brother or a friend sometimes but I haven't bought any new cards in forever. Think about getting back sometimes but then remember how expensive shit was.

I've been a casual since I was a kid around when Ice Age dropped. I've kept my collection that started when my cousin gave me about 100 or so cards, and every few years I'll buy a few packs, play casually with friends or get introduce other people to the game.

Anyways, last time I played I went to an FNM two weeks in a row. Between the smell, the bitch fit that one guy threw for me not having sleeves, and the other bitch fit that another guy threw when I 2-0'd him (apparently he was a regular that always placed top 2), and just the overall vibe from this store, it was enough for me and my buddy to walk out and spend the rest of the night at the bar with normal people.

Haven't played in about 2.5 years now. But, like clockwork, the itch is coming back and a few friends on my Discord server are all talking about getting some casual games in soon.

I originally played during onslaught as a kid, but we had no idea how the rules worked and played 20 card decks so that really doesn't count.

I really got started when a friend of mine who plays realized that I was an autistic fuck and would waste my life on the game, so he invited me to play with him. Being a poorfag, I started making penny dreadful type decks to play casually (most of which are now horribly expensive due to modern). My original deck was some cheap hydras, scute mobs, vines of vastwood, spider umbra, and some smaller green stompy creatures. Cost less than $5 to make at the time, got beaten a lot by his extended affinity deck.

Moving forward I got better at the game, but as I did my friends got less and less interested in playing with me. Things like card advantage, board wipes, recursion and spot removal all annoyed them and I ended up not playing for a long time.

Having had enough of the in person salt I moved onto MTGO where I don't feel bad if someone else has a bad time, and am enjoying the game a lot more.

The place where I used to play closed down.
and also it got extremly expensive in my region.
Booster packs cost are like 300% of what they used to cost when I was a kid.

Is 8 months lengthy?
Because doing college with full-time job barely leaves you enough time for sleep, food, and hygiene.

I played very seriously up until stronghold, went to tournaments, even placed in a few, but never won outright.

Then I went to college, and couldn't keep playing at the same intensity; still kind of kept up with the meta, played a few hands against people I knew there, but didn't play seriously.

Then I stopped even that once I graduated. Once every so often I think about getting back into it, but every time I do, I look at the new meta and it just seems so different from the game I loved; it's much more combinitoric and less longer term strategy. Blue was always decently strong, but now with their advantage in deck control, they just seem to be overwhelmingly powerful, as the entire game has devolved into getting your kill combination together faster than the other guy. Plus, the power creep (my God, in my day, people talked about the general decline in power down from Alpha and Beta) has really done a number on my ability to assess a position.

t. way too old for this shit.

Wtf are wrong with some of you guys friends? Getting mad when a new player beats you with your deck? Why cant people have fun instead tryhard in kitchen table.

I quit in '05, so I consider it lengthy.

I started playing because from observation it was "The game that even the lightest-grade geeks played", with the sole exception of those guys who felt having a mario-themed t-shirt and having once played an NES was the nerdiest thing in the world.

It was just after Mirrodin, just during Kamigawa that I got in. That there was finally something other than what I perceived as generic western fantasy tropes. was likely what did it.

...but after getting into it at about the same time as I graduated highschool, I quickly noticed that the only people that played were either in middle school, or balding aspies in their mid-late 30s. The kids were pleasant enough and about fair matchup for someone just getting into CCGs, but it made me feel like a creeper playing against them. As for the 30-somethings, they had an elitist attitude that if you didn't have encyclopedic knowledge of cards going back to 1994, you weren't worth acknowledging.

The whole point of playing it was to have a tabletop game that didn't require electricity (Eastern 2003 blackout was still fresh in my memory), and to easily find opponents anywhere. While it was likely just the local community, one of the two key points for buying in proved to be wrong.

I kept collecting through to Ravnica, bought a booster or two of ice age, and then sold the whole collection for way less than I probably could have sold it for, because I couldn't be arsed to catalogue +200 rares before selling it on e-bay.

I kept about three decks just in case I ran into someone wanting to have a match, but it was a lesson in only buying into games that you're interested in, not just because everyone plays.

I stopped for 4 years because I moved to Cheyenne, Wyoming for 4 years and I don't like Standard.

There you go.

My interest in the game was at an all-time high 3 years ago. I had finally built a modern deck, played at the LGS regularly, and enjoyed playing. But playing at the LGS was my first mistake. Half of the players complained about my deck being a netdeck, (it was Unburial Gifts Tron) and either dropping whenever they'd face me or calling their friends over to harass me the whole round. The other half of the players had $1000+ tier 1 decks full foiled, and would follow me around if they lost to try to explain to me why I should replace Mana Leak and Rune Snag with Reman and Cryptic, and why Countersquall and Negate suck and shouldn't even be sideboarded. With maybe one or two exceptions, every other player at the LGS was either casual elitist or competitive elitist. So I sold my modern deck and quit going. I played EDH with my friends, and heard a new LGS was opening. I decided to check it out, and when I asked someone if they were building aggro, combo, or control, everyone scowled at me. The store owner himself gave a rant about the evils of "named decks" and how "netdecking spikes shouldn't be allowed to play" and how "people under 35 shouldn't be allowed in gaming stores at all" and "EDHRec is the worst place on the internet" and more shit. So I left, and with nowhere to play, and only two friends who play, I sold my more expensive EDH deck to buy into Warhammer (Great decision on my part - the 40K community here is amazing). What pretty much ended Magic for me was when I drove a while out to check out the LGS in another town. The store owner lectured me for hours on entering about how amazing his community is, how terrible, stupid, braindead, strategyless of a game Yugioh is, and how his Magic community are all amazing and anyone who doesn't get along with them is an asshole. He bragged about kicking people out for not knowing their custom banlist.
(Continued next post)

(Continued)
He bragged about getting niche stores shut down. He bragged about running competitors out of business. He mentioned contacting sex offenders and getting them to play Yugioh to ruin the game. He believed that Magic players were inherently superior to everyone else, and I had seen that attitude not just at the LGSes here, but at every LGS I had been to. The nail in the coffin came last week. There was a third LGS in the town I live in. It used to be a cancerous, hectic shithole. The Magic community left because the second one promised that no other card games would be supported, and that's what they care about most. Now, it's the nicest LGS I've ever been to. Everyone is polite and respectful and helpful to each other, all because Magic is gone. That's when I quit playing.

started with Dark
quit at Ice Age
started playing because it was something the group could do while waiting for others before our D&D games, but it became what we did instead of D&D.
quit mostly because I was in college at the time, and was spending more on cards than I did on food or textbooks, and every other player in the group would gloat over every minor victory (up to and including killing my creatures) and whine at any loss (having their creatures killed).
that shit gets REALLY old, really fast.

My EDH group got too competitive and it started becoming a money game. Now my old friends moved and I really don't want to enter a LGS alone. No one in my current friend group had any interest in playing either because money.

Don't blame them, they play exclusively board games so the idea of spending money on packs and singles seems awful to them.

Yes, I usually drop out when standard becomes too expensive and/or boring.

Currently, I can't play magic because I am physically unable to afford both the train ticket to my closest store and the FNM entry fee.

>Currently, I can't play magic because I am physically unable to afford both the train ticket to my closest store and the FNM entry fee.

Goddamn, user, poor as fuck

Personally I've quit playing MtG for the time being. It's a bunch of consumerist trash that only really appeals to people who don't have many other accomplishments under their belt

I might have fun playing it, but I realized that everyone I played against was, well, a loser. Too many of them have made mtg THEIR LIFE. That's all they do is draft, build decks.

It made me sick to my stomach eventually, how addictive it was to these people.

Not played in 15 years.

Moved city as a kid, new friends were all tourney players while I had been playing casual/fun for 8 years. That put a lot of strain on the game for me.

One day they convinced me to go to a prerelease tournament. That killed it for me.

I still look at cards now and then, half plan decks, but sofar have never got back into it.

What demographic am I in regarding MTG if I've never played / enjoyed "Standard"? Literally, been a kitchen table player all my life, playing with family and friends. But I've accrued a collection of 1000's of cards starting back in Arabian Nights.

You're in the "wise people" demographic. Wish I could say the same.

Quit during Darksteel when every member of my formerly-casual kitchen-table group showed up packing Ravager-Affinity with Disciple of the Vault and Skullclamp.

Yeah, I was 19 back then, and they were all at their late 20s and mid 30s

One local game store stopped hosting events, the other has the most dickish staff I've ever seen man a store, and in my playgroup Star Realms replaced mtg as the hyped card game. Haven't played magic in half a year.

>Have you ever stopped playing for a lengthy period of time?

I started playing as a kid, buying packs starting around Ice Age and up through Mercadian Masques. Then I stopped entirely through high school and in college sold off the single card box I had.

Man, I wish I hadn't done that. I had all sorts of classic, original cards.

Anyways, around about the Mirrodin block, I started getting interested again, mostly for the way the color pie was shifting and for the lore. But I didn't buy anything until Scars of Mirrodin, which is when I nabbed a bunch of those thirty-card free starter packs and got my friends back into it.

So from 1999 to 2010, I didn't play at all. I'm sad I missed the original Ravnica, Time Spiral, Lorwyn/Shadowmoor, Alara, and Zendikar.

I stopped after the original Zendikar block, didn't come back for the return to Mirrodin, and sure as fuck didn't come back for Innistrad or the return to Ravnica (god damn I hate that plane so much). I got back into it recently with Amonkhet and HoD, but besides that, just played with my Kamigawa deck from '04.

Plane and deck themes, the over popularisation of Planeswalkers, the fucking player base, you name it. I just lost interest and focused on other stuff. Since I moved out I've found a new gaming scene to get involved with, but yeah, the products wizards was pushing I wasn't buying.

You're meeting some real winners there user.

I'm considering it

I'm staying in my hometown this summer for some work and probably going to stay until next one if I find a job

and I'm fucking tired of playing the same 4 decks every week, moreso knowing that I'm the only one that has actually put money and thought into the game and that I'll win like 90% of the games

they have started getting into EDH so that might be entertaining for a while, until they get tired of their decks and start asking me to lend them mine

I haven't played Magic in around 4 years. I moved to a different city and never met a new group to play with, and then I moved to go to university in the country and we don't even have a club for that kind of thing.

It sucks because I really like the game and I have a lot of cards but I never get to use them. I could go to the FLGS here but it's a very rural area and I'm a faggot recluse. Plus I'm concerned I'll go there and everyone will be twelve.

>love the gameplay of Magic
>hate the TCG model after playing board games for years

Stopped after Timespirial, loved that set. I want to get back into MtG, but everyone in my game group agrees it's too much money. They should just release a "Cube in a box" set, like the Archenemy Box.

I don't have anyone to play with and I don't want to pay to play EDH at my local card shop.

I quit playing when the others I played with switched from playing for fun to a contest of who could spend the most money.

Like, I always played for enjoyment. I would building things like coin flip decks and the like, trying to make it fun for both players. My friends did this for around a year before they started spending hundreds at a time on new overpowered decks that aren't fun to play against and focused solely on winning.

So I quit playing (and therefore quit driving people to card shops), leading the group as a whole to quit (because they can't be bothered to learn to drive) and render all that money spent wasted.

Stopped right after BFZ, but not because I hated the Gatewatch or anything like that. I was just a shitter who couldn't git gud, and was upset that none of the things that I wanted to do actually worked. Granted, that's mostly my fault for wanting to do janky shit, but still. That, and I got straight up dizzy trying to make a deck that I thought that would work in standard (elf tribal). I quit playing any card game for a while and went into a thread on Veeky Forums complaining about standard. I think I saw someone saying something along the lines of "if I wanted to see big beefy monsters plow into each other, I'd just play Pokemon", and started playing that instead. I occasionally play EDH with some of the dudes at a club at my university, and I do alright. But my days spent losing at FNM are over.

The friends I played with moved away and the game itself went to shit post Lorwyn so there was no incentive to buy new cards and thus no incentive to go to FNM.

Is pokemon a good game? What's the cost like compared to magic?

I played religiously in middle school but when I got to high school I got separated from my friends so I quit cold turkey because I didn't want to be that weird friendless girl running around with her magic cards. I never did get back to it.

pic related was the wincon of my favourite deck

Between Darksteel and Zendikar because Mirrodin Block was cancer and I got a fitness-mad girlfriend that occupied all my time.

I haven't played since BoZ.

I haven't found a set that looks appealing to me since M13.

How old were they?

I played for a few months when I was 12/13. Stopped playing and just recently got back into it, I'm now 26... so about a 13 year break lol. I have like 6 friends that play and just got another buddy into it. Pretty fucking weird too... only in the sense where were a bunch of degenerate chads.

It was when I was 19 and then again when I was 22. I'm 27 now.

It was way too fucking expensive and I wanted to be able to play on my computer without needing to drive out to a smelly room dealing with people who had no social skills whatsoever.

Maybe when they finally make a decent MODO ill get back in

Maybe try again now?
17-22 seems like that age where you gotta be the best at everyrhing you try fpr whatever reason.
If you for some reason live in Williamsburg VA I'd gladly play with ya lol.

I was introduced to the game around Lorwyn-Shadowmoor but really got into it at Scars of Mirrodin with a white winnie that abused of Hero of Bladehold. I proceed to update that deck with every expension going from mono W to W/G to Naya and finally a G/R dragon with pic rated. I stopped playing since Origins. I would have kept going if the format hasn't gotten so stupidly fast and expensive.

I even though about selling my cards but an employee from my FLGS talked me out of it. I since made an EDH deck to play with my group of friends.

I stopped after the first Theros set as the cost to keep up with Standard was too much, the EDH group got too try hard, and the community got too political. I may give EDH another to or play Force of Will.

Political as in in game politics or political as in left wing/right wing shit?

The latter, and it swung both ways. I play other games and the communities there don't have the same issue, so it just got on my nerves whenever I would show up to play Magic. I got to a different FLGS now so it should probably be better now.

I haven't played standard since New phyrexia.. Lack of immersing decks. Good discard, counters, combo decks.. Just standard has been boring.

I drafted every Friday for Mirrodin through New Phyrexia. Played the NP standard because Death's Shadow was the tightest shit and a really fun deck to pilot in a format full of budget infect. Went to college right around Innistrad and stopped doing anything other than prereleases since the LGS in town was really shitty. Since then just been going to prereleases, tried to start drafting again in Kaladesh but the limited was lame as fuck. Wish I drafted more during SoI.

It's simple fun, and it's not too expensive, especially compared to magic. If you're playing online, it's pretty hard to pay2win, unless you straight up buy physical packs/card codes. The entire game kinda revolves around drawing your deck out as fast as possible, and the draw support is unrivaled. You know how Ancestral Recall is insane? Imagine that you can play Ancestral Recall FOR FREE, and even then, that's not even very efficient compared to all of the other draw support. On the cost side of things, it's much easier to get into standard and expanded. Most of the staples (barring a very specific one, and blinged out versions) are very cheap, and even the attackers themselves can be very reasonably priced. And every deck usually runs the same core set of staples (Guzma, Professor Sycamore, N, Ultra Ball, etc.), so once you invest on paper, you're pretty much set, minus attackers. If you wanna get a good feel for what the game feels like, while the online client looks like it was made by and for 8 year olds, it's still less clunky and less pay2win than Magic's clients.

>gurl
>plays affinity
Pure unadulterated cancer

Grad School makes it hard to play during a good portion of the year.

I skipped COK block, but that's it. Saw stupid looking cards in the set right after they fucked up the card frame in the previous block.

Returned the next set when ravnica came out.

Anyone ever found something decent to move on to?
After I moved I had nowhere to play and looked into many online alternatives, many which weren't interesting.
Local stores only have the three big games, none of which interest me since I couldn't really get back into magic.
I just want something to play again.

That sucks. My first playgroup had the worst in game politics where even attacking was frowned upon. I can't imagine how obnoxious actual political shitflinging would be. You have my condolences.

To be fair, BFZ coming out put so many people off the game in Standard that many just flat out stopped playing Standard. It almost killed the game with how bad of a set it was.

Hello WotC's market research team.

Two times. The hiatus began right before Lorwyn was released and ended at about the time when Scars of Mirrodin was to be released, and I came back mostly because I found myself with a lot of disposable income and decided to use some of that money on drafts and eventually building a Cube.

The second hiatus is ongoing and began right at about the time of the release of Battle for Zendikar and was motivated largely by a lack of trust in WotC's ability to design the game and the realization that the base design isn't that great to begin with. I'm right now taking steps to selling off most of the cards I have collected over the years.

Cheers mate, might give the online a go
I remember playing the gbc pokemon cards game years ago and i think i liked it

Marriage

Three guesses why I'm playing again now

rude

What do you mean power creep? Standard is the lowest powered constructed format in all of magic. Even pauper is arguably stronger

It's almost bewildering how people will choose to identify with what they do, as though there's nothing else to them. Rather clearly displays a bit of insecurity to me, a need for communal validation they likely failed to find elsewhere.

Haven't touched it for about 3 years now. They neutered Commander, which was like the only fun format. I know I can still play kitchen table EDH, but I was just annoyed and tired of WotC's bullshit.

That seems highly likely, and given a lot of MtG's marketing and the like, a mentality that WotC is trying to foster. Escapism is fine, as is having a hobby as the primary shared interest of a group of people. But between the whole "player psychographics" thing and all of the other attempts to get players to identify and classify themselves within its system, Magic lends itself well to this. In other games, you'd say something like "I play high-end aggro" or "I run a Volg Mill deck". In Magic, I hear players say "I'm a Timmy" or "I'm Dimir" or something like that.

Even the lore speaks to it, I think, though in a way I kind of like -- just, it could be taken too far. Planeswalkers for example, few have the potential to become one, even fewer do. It happens after great tragedy. That can translate into, few achieve greatness, few are capable, and almost all of them suffered hardships to some extreme or another. I can relate to that, as I'm sure plenty of other people can. Bastards sure know their audience, I'd say.

I liked that part of the lore a lot more pre-mending. Like, back then, the game was a bunch of gods dicking around in contests of skill and show, literally warping the lives of countless beings for their own amusement. And the player is the asshole god. Now, it's a bunch of superheroes/supervillains and their ragtag bands of allies, in conflicts with plots that get more and more trite over time. The biggest cancer comes when people from the age group targeted by the old lore embrace the marketing and characterization of the new lore even harder.

Almost seems inevitable for any franchise to eventually see a decline in quality writing. Longer it goes on, the more its soul is lost to the eternal need to "freshen" it.

I'm trying to take a break now because I feel I think about and obsess over it too much.

It's really hard.

Play group split up.

My biggest problem. Damn there are a lot of problems with the game, but in my experience, there aren't really any substitutes. The game is unlike any other, for better and for worse. I quit years ago and sometimes still miss deck building and casual games with friends.

Should really build a cube sometime to scratch that itch.

Numerous times. The first one was around during Tempest block, because 1) I hated Gerrard and the other assholes appearing on every card (think Gaywatch but even more obnoxious and omnipresent), 2) I hated the 6th edition rules changes with combat damage on stack, tapped blockers dealing no damage, etc, which came around at the same time. This is also when I permanently stopped playing constructed Magic.

I briefly came back during Invasion-Odyssey-Onslaught blocks but left again when they changed the card frame. That was way too much of a visual change to me, so I quit Magic in all ways and stopped following news related to it.

I only got back after that because I won a Duel Deck in a raffle during 2014 or 15. That made me read up on MTG news for the first time in over a decade, and I discovered they had stopped with the combat damage on stack bullshit that I hated. I'm now "back", kind of, but I'm now looking at the colorless mana symbol as my next excuse to just drop the game permanently. The symbol is ugly and I don't want any cards that have it on them.

Forgot that during Invasion/Odyssey/Onslaught I was still attending prereleases, but I stopped going to prereleases because the Legions prerelease card was so unbelievably bad (Feral Throwback if you want to look it up). The last official tournament I attended was the Onslaught prerelease.

I haven't gone into the recent preleases either because a random foil rare just isn't good enough. I want it to be either unique art or different language or a ridiculous bomb, not just a random fucking foil.

people moving so play group splitting (but still, did some drafts during the stopping period)

I started playing in Beta and quit around Mirrodin block. I sold my collection to pay for college and didn't intend to play again.

A friend brought me along to a RtR draft and I got back into it. I set a monthly budget and I have most of my old stuff back now (minus P9, etc).

stopped after invasion, or when high school was over. endless money pit and just not worth it to me in the end. miss urza... miss avatars.. miss mageta... blah. REALLY miss megrim and grindstone decks too lol..

to follow up on my post, also had a "friend in highschool" borrow my sliver queen. I paid 15 bucks for her at the time.. never got it back and he moved away. still hold a grudge to that person to this day and wish they would just die.

yeah i get bored and quit annually if not more often

then i get bored and get back into things and learn an expansion or two

repeat ad nauseam

I played some casual jank back during Innistrad, but didn't really start getting into it until the latter half of Khans. I decided to take a break after Battle for Zendikar, since the constant Eldrazi were burning me out. Haven't really gone back yet

I suppose that I have been lucky in that people don't try to tell others how to play the game when things come down. If anything I was the salty one, as the other players would run circles around my Jor Kadeen toolbox and mono blue aggro EDH decks with Maelstrom Wanderer Birthing Pod decks.

Out of curiosity, what changed? I haven't played commander in a long time.

I suppose that I have been lucky in that people don't try to tell others how to play the game when things come down. If anything I was the salty one, as the other players would run circles around my Jor Kadeen toolbox and mono blue aggro EDH decks with Maelstrom Wanderer Birthing Pod decks.

Out of curiosity, what changed? I haven't played commander in a long time.

Money issues mostly. And I´m trying to play another card game. I´m on my second break and trying to make it stick.