What do you consider "good" about Magic?

I get that there are a lot of complex card interactions, but most games don't really involve those, do they? If they do, I'd like to see what decks get them involved, because I hear the "complex card interactions" thing a lot, but never see it.

It's bigger then the competitors.
That's it.

It's the same as DnD, or 40k. It doesn't really have any major merits, other than a large player base.
>A lot of them are bouncers
kek

Magic is awful at that though. It takes minutes to resolve anything slightly complex.

The mechanics of the game. The artwork. The flavor of the fantasy worlds. But most of all:

Booster draft.

>aesthetics I like
MtG is the only big fantasy game out there. I'm not a big fan of Pokemon and FoW is too weeb for me (I don't mind some of it, Kamigawa has some very nice designs, but most art of FoW I see goes overboard) and I'm not big enough of a fan of cyberpunk to enjoy Netrunner's cards properly. Sure, lately they do overuse CG and have less interesting ideas, but that doesn't change the fact there are years of cards I'd rather look at than most other card games out there.

>R&D isn't as smart as the players
This might seem like a con, but it's what keeps the cards interesting for me, they only ever fix "mistakes" for non eternal formats through tonned down reprints and as long as something isn't totally broken, it stays. See pic related, the second card is a reprint of the first for all intents and purposes, but because the first one separates the effects, if you use an ability or instant to phase/flicker/bounce it before the ability triggers, you can use it to exile two cards, one of them permanently. It is not what WotC wanted the card to be used for at first, but it's around and one of the many tricks you can pull off compared to other card games. They'll usually have cards with very specific or simple rules to prevent as many loopholes abuses as they can and most of them would never allow players to have infinite cards, tokens, damage on board, mana or similar.

>bigger freedom towards deck building
It's possible to run decks in most colour combinations in game, save for very greedy ones. There are also very few cards that interact with overly specific cards. You have tribal archetypes, but they don't feel like they overshadow more generic interactions like target equipment or creature.

Now I realise the games has huge issues like the price tag, lands being a poor resource system, most players being autists and everything else, but I haven't found any games that give me those things I want.

>It's bigger then the competitors.
>That's it.
I mean, that would explain the crowd being mostly normies and turboautists.

Ever play a Nekroz mirror or run Sylvans in Yugioh?

>The mechanics of the game
A couple gripes aside, it does have solid mechanics
>The artwork
Haven't really been impressed by any artwork post-Avacyn Restored, and before that, not really since Lorwyn.
>The flavor of the fantasy worlds
Pretty hit-or-miss. Some are great, and some feel like bland summer blockbusters.
>Booster draft.
Is this even actually a thing? I hear about it all the time online, but I've never seen a store actually have any scheduled to be hosted.

>I'm just curious why so many people on Veeky Forums consider Magic the be-all-and-end-all of card games?
Veeky Forums is not one person user

>aesthetics I like
I get that. I personally like Duel Masters' aesthetics best, but that game is dead everywhere but Japan.

>R&D isn't as smart as the players
Broken and exploitable things can be entertaining, but it's kind of shaky when one of the main draws of the game is from exploiting oversights.

>bigger freedom towards deck building
I see this thrown around a lot, but it's mostly illusory from what I've seen. Out of the thousands of cards in the game, only a few are even remotely viable against people with a basic understanding of the game, and while you CAN mix any combination of colors and cards and generic interactions, only a smaller subset of those end up being anything more than an incoherent mess.

I know, but the general consensus that I've seen is that Magic is great and other games are shit. I see that thrown around, even in non-MtG threads. I was just curious as to why, or if that was just some small group of shills or something.

>The size of the player base
If you go to a local game store you'll run into a herd of stinking, fat, obnoxious people, but there were/are groups in middle schools, high schools, and universities whose worst member is acceptably awkward. I refuse to play in an LGS unless I'm drafting.

>The aesthetic
Yu-Gi-Oh and Pokemon treat the fact that they cater to kids as an excuse to have corny/campy/low quality artwork and setting fiction. And Legend of the Five Rings' aesthetic is too limited in scope.

>The chaos of casual play
Yes, it's pay to win. But people in my gaming circles have always had several decks each, with varying levels of power. So I can always find someone I can enjoy playing against. And once you've invested a certain amount of money into the game you can just keep creating new decks with new play styles over and over.

>The size of the player base
I didn't know anybody else until university who played Magic, and then I met a very small number of people who did, and didn't play at the LGS.

>The aesthetic
Pokemon I agree with, but Yugioh has some pretty beautiful cards (not from the anime, usually tied into the Terminal World metaplot), and Magic has some pretty corny/campy/low quality cards, especially in the last few blocks. And I've never seen a Legend of the Five Rings card, other than the Philosopher one posted on here sometimes. But aesthetic is subjective, so I can at least see where you're coming from (especially because the cards shown off and advertised are mostly big flashy animu super dragons).

>The chaos of casual play
Everyone else I know who plays Magic casually has stuck to the exact same playstyle for years, refusing to even consider trying a different deck. And I've found that there aren't actually that many different playstyles in Magic. There's aggro, tribal aggro, midrange, drawgo control, control, STAX, "slow combo" (midrange with a combo finisher), combo, and ramp. And some of these frequently blur over into similar decks (the only difference between midrange and slow combo is if you attack with a couple guys over a few turns, or drop a 2 card win button).

>I didn't know anybody else until university who played Magic, and then I met a very small number of people who did, and didn't play at the LGS.
I grew up in a "city" of 13,000 people and went to college in a city of 56,000. This was in Minnesota.

>Yugioh has some pretty beautiful cards
Yeah, I'm not going to disagree with you there, but there's no iteration of its setting and plot that I haven't found stupid.

>especially in the last few blocks
Yeah, Magic is currently in a low point. Pic related is from Guildpact, one of a number of blocks held to be the gold standard for MtG. I think the last time Mirrodin had decent fiction was around Mirrodin, or maybe Torment, both of which also had sweet artwork.

>Everyone else I know who plays Magic casually has stuck to the exact same playstyle for years
It sounds like you live in an area with lead poisoning. Where are you?

>And I've found that there aren't actually that many different playstyles in Magic.
You're being really reductive and while you aren't technically wrong, you're ignoring the broader meaning of what I'm saying and how MtG functions. Each deck has its own quirks, or flavor, or personality, or whatever. And the same is true of my opponent's deck. And in casual play I really don't give a shit if my deck is well-rounded and can deal with different strategies. Sometimes they are, sometimes I build something to be my guaranteed killer so I can play against other peoples' guaranteed killers, but most of the time my decks are kind of autistic and just focus on a strategy with no concern given at all to how they might be countered or how they might counter other decks. And then I play them against other autistic decks, with unpredictable results. The best thing is when I and someone I know well play against each other with decks that are equally viable, but one strategy totally trumps the other in an unexpected way.

>I think the last time Mirrodin had decent fiction was around Mirrodin

You don't say

I prefer that to very limited or constrained games. I like games that are not afraid of letting me use cards during my opponent's turn for instance, or where the cards don’t present various archetypes and say just pick one of us, instead of presenting various cards and saying do something with us.
That's also what I mean with freedom, I like how you can pick two cards and just try and see if you can make a combo out of them, even if it's bad, sometimes it works.
For a shitty metaphor, MtG feels like you're given dozens of cogs and screws to try and make work together, the best ways to combine them are all out there and will make the best machines, but you can try to build another in a way not even the guys supplying the pieces considered or wanted you to and try and force it to work (there are other card games that also feel like magic in this regard, they only let me down elsewhere). Some other games feel like you have a bunch of pre existent machines you can customize or tune slightly and create something different out of it, but the core of how it works remains and their creators handle it with enough care to prevent you from using it in weird ways. I get that this has some merits, but even weak MtG decks can do cool combos, I currently play one that tries to get two curses on board, one to turn my opponent’s creatures into 1/1 and other to give all of them -1/-1 to prevent them from ever having creatures again. It is not good at all, but it is very fun to try to get there, or to play with the alternate win condition cards, or when you and another opponent duke it out in the stack. I realize most of those moments just don’t ever happen if players are running strong decks, but that doesn’t always needs to be the case, and seeing how a strong one seeks to break the game its own way (how storm tries to cast so many spells at a time or dredge destroys its own library to his own advantage) is still interesting.

Illinois. And I'm familiar with Magic's high points in art. Lorwyn is amazing. Not a big fan of the Izzet - steampunk is pretty stupid in my opinion. And we've had very different experiences with Magic. I've found very little dynamism in it - usually games are determined by who draws the right amount of land at the right time. In the games where both people are drawing the right lands, it then comes down not to planning or strategy or anything, but luck of the draw.

Using Yugioh for example to extend on your metaphor, the creator hands you a bunch of machines, but the machines have parts that kind of look like each other, and there's nothing keeping you from mixing and matching parts, eventually leading to something more than the sum of the whole. One of the top decks right now is a mixture of two different archetypes, that sometimes splashes cards from up to three others in, focusing on the synergies across the different themes over the inherent "prebuilt" ones, which in the past few years has been more effective for many (but not all) decks.
And I've yet to find a Magic community that's both low-powered and accepting of combos. Everything I've seen IRL is either full-competitive, "75%" (what my few friends who still play Magic play), or "if you have any synergies or combos, you're a competitive tryhard who should be banned from the game; there are no bad cards, WotC never makes mistakes; and vanillas should be run in constructed decks"

There's neither steam nor punk in that art, my dude, it's just a copper backpack hooked up to some gauntlets shooting lightning and some multi-magnification glasses. You should move to Saint Cloud. The Somalian population is gargantuan but the rent is cheap and we have decent nerds here.

I'm referring to some of the other Izzet stuff. The ones that are more Teslapunk are okay. And Minnesota is one place I've been looking at moving. My wife and I pay $380 for rent here, with water and internet included, and $40 for monthly electric. What's it like up there?

In order of importance
>1. Playerbase
I would pretty much play the game with the best playerbase, no matter what game it is. The MtG local scene is the most mature by far, hands down. There are a few shitters, but it's relatively calm I've seen our FoW playerbase dissolve into nothing but memers and "ironic" weebs who chuck around stale Veeky Forums lingo every chance they get and call every card with a semi-decent pair of breasts waifu. I've been told most of these players also play yugioh, so that's what I imagine our local scene is like too. I have no clue what our pokemon local scene is like, it could be great or it could be a bunch of old nerds trying to relive the past, I don't know.
>2. the game itself
I'm not in love with magic, but I'll take it over Yugioh and Pokemon. Both of those games are incredibly linear by nature. I understand consistency is key and linearity isn't necessarily a bad thing, but both of those games have 5 minute turns getting the same pieces together to do the same combo every single game. It gets old. Force of Will had a shot if the playerbase wasn't stomach churning, but it feels like makers had no idea what they're doing and the game on a fundamental level feels broken. Like when red rush was a thing you could just inexplicably start the game with 2500 life because they nutted into rukh egg > cthugha > cthugha >cthugha.

Also, MtG "feels" like it's mature enough and presents itself seriously, but not too much in my eyes. Pokemon is pokemon, nothing more needs to be said. Yugioh is all over the place. You have the most ridiculous, grimdark designs and then yippy-skippy cutesy shit next to each other which clashes extremely hard. FoW feels like it's taking the piss in my eyes, especially if you read the story for it, which I'm sorry if you did. MtG is stumbling here and there as of late, but for the most part I would be the least embarrassed showing someone a MtG deck compared to the others.

I'll pitch in since I've been playing for all of three weeks.

Prior to this recent foray, I've been a dedicated historical player - full grog. But one of the other grogs in the group had me sit down for a demo game recently with a blue/black deck and sorta walked me through playing. At first I was really confused, but then I got some weird card with a Scarab God on it, and suddenly those Zombies and Zombie Tokens I had been pumping went from chump blockers to a life-sucking, card-drawing murder-machine.

I'm sure to most people already seasoned in Magic that will sound really simplistic and obvious, but it was my first time ever watching a deck "click" and pull off what it was built for - and I immediately realized how much I would personally enjoy trying to find those combinations on my own. The art is usually really great, even though the lore is a little disjointed with the multiple planes, it's "there" enough to add a nice flavor - but hunting for that interesting/weird/unexpected combo is what I think is genuinely good. I don't even care about winning I just want to make the game do what I want it to do.

However...

I have read about so many horrible incidents where people get subjected to the comically stereotypical knuckle-dragging, mouth-breathing man-children at their FLGS - I don't think I'd have the balls to go to a FNM or pre-release and play with randos. The gaming group I have is a bunch of history nerds that are grown-ass men with families and jobs. I think I got lucky.

Also, I really like the flavor of some of the sets that have rotated out - do those settings ever get revisited or do I have to play Modern to enjoy the sweet Ravnica and Innistrad themes?

The huge variety of decks and type of decks available, the complex interactions and the depth the game has overall which creates a huge skillgap between bad and good players.

I live in a one bedroom apartment that's more than spacious enough for my needs. The building has free wifi, but I still pay for internet because the wireless ain't fucking fast enough. Rent is $520 plus an average of $50 a month for electricity year round, water, garbage, recycling, etc. are included. The building is very quiet and I live in a nicer part of town ten minutes away from most destinations, twenty to thirty minutes away from downtown depending on traffic. There are three dedicated LGS with sizable crowds of regulars, although as I said I prefer to go to the university to play.

I get the playerbase thing. The Yugioh playerbase here is mostly mature and respectful, and the Magic playerbase are the obnoxious, immature ones generally. From what I've seen, most Pokemon players are pretty relaxed, and eager to find new people to play with.

Yugioh isn't necessarily linear - it depends on the deck. Sure, you have linear decks that play the same every game (Dinosaurs, D/D/D, Frightfur, Synchron - although that case is more like Storm, as it's just comboing off for a wincon with different lines of play to the end goal, for example), but there are other decks at varying degrees of relevance with a lot more variability, even arguably than Magic (Nekroz - despite the entire deck being made of tutors, non-Dinosaur Yang Zing, HAT, Invoked variants, Sylvans, for example). Unless you want to argue that Storm, Ad Nauseum, etc. are linear decks as well.

And recent Magic feels overly edgy to me, in a lot of its artwork that isn't just "dollar store novel cover". I'd show off the art of Time Spiral-Alara era Magic before any other card game, but I'd show off most other card games before anything in the New World Order.

I'm not familiar with it which is why I wasn't sure about the example, but the feeling from the deck is just that some parts are not allowed to be used with others, like skull servant cards were used only for the benefit of that deck and so on. I know there are some more generic cards, but the feeling from most pictures I have seen is that it's not the case, at least not to the extent of MtG.

The community part is really subjective, but the fact that you can actually consider so many uses for cards which may have various results and will win if you force the combo to happen if great and feels bigger than other games, even if not balanced.

How plentiful are jobs around there? Jobs are pretty scarce here.

Skull Servant cards just benefit other Skull Servant cards, but some of the better Skull Servant decks are mixes with the Lightsworn, Shiranui, and occasionally Lyrilusc archetypes - each of which, depending on which one is focused on more, can lead the deck in a variety of different play styles. I've found it a lot more back-and-forth than Magic.

Also you're still using the punk designation wrong, which irks me as a fan of William Gibson's work. Cyberpunk was about, "Nothing can be fixed but I'm still going to rebel and rage against the corporate machine because doing anything else is worse." Either that or you're not even rebelling, just going full nihilist and doing whatever the fuck you want until it gets you killed. Because the only alternative is feeling like your soul is rotting away a day at a time. Steampunk is fucking punk, there's nothing there. And Izzet isn't anything-punk, it's just thrill-seeking mixed with mad science and magic, sometimes with some narcissism thrown in.

Depends on what type of job you want. Entry level bitchwork is abundant, temping agencies are doing well. What's your field?

Goddamit, *isn't* punk. Isn't.

As circular as it sounds the fact it's the card game considered the best. I like the comfort of knowing I can find a game in any city at any LGS with ease. I also like knowing my collection will hold some sembelence of value as a result.

I know it's a misnomer, but that's the common descriptor for the "brass and cogs and magically mad science" aesthetic.

Entry level work is what I need.

I think what keeps me playing magic is really in the end the style of it. It's evocative to me in a way that other card games aren't. As much as the old tagline "You are a planeswalker" has kind of fallen to the wayside recently, that idea that this deck of cards is me casting spells and summoning creatures, that there is a character behind whatever deck I run, is fascinating to me. And as much as we bitch about the flavor, name another card game that has official novels, a few of which are actually pretty good. MtG is I guess...consistent in how it presents itself, in how it themes its world and style, and for that it keeps dragging me back.

It also helps that there are so many freaking cards that I never run out of finding cool things. I won't say MtG is the be all end all of card games, but its the one that I like, and its the one that appeals to me most.

I really enjoy sealed stuff so I might be a bit biased, but I'd definitely say go try some prereleases. Those are about the only big events that I have time to go to, and it's really fun to go in to a set with a bunch of other people and try to make something out of brand new cards. The meta of the set hasn't been set down yet, so its a lot of experimentation and fun.
In terms of older themes, you can play modern if you want but really the best bet is to play some casual kind of stuff. The best part of magic is playing it with friends anyway, so formats shouldn't be the be all, end all of what you're going for.

Magic has a very clear division of card types and the design space within them that allows for far more experimentation and design flexibility than any other card game I've seen. The land system, while able to rarely cause a deck to fail in function, is a very strong point in that the resource system the game operates upon has its own entire field of design space, from a land entering tapped in exchange for an upside, to not producing mana at all and instead interacting with the rest of your lands, to altering boardstates with temporary effects or producing permanents. The color pie clearly defines each color's ability to interact and utilize every card type, game zone and potential resource the game can offer, in a streamlined system where color combinations each bring new potential archetypes and strategies on top of each individual color's philosophy, strengths and weaknesses. If you can think of something a card can do, Magic can identify, classify and place it right where it needs to be to work well.

To answer your question, Magic revisits old planes all the time. Return to Innistrad was pretty recent, Dominaria 2 is soon, and Ravnica is popular enough that we'll probably have a third one eventually.
Lorwyn 2 never.

Yeah, you'd be well supplied. Fingerhut employs a shitload of people to do customer service, ordering, credit applications, etc. over the phone for their general retail operation. Electrolux is always hiring people to build fridges on an assembly line, FDC is always hiring to pack shipments together on pallets and then into trucks, there's fast food restaurants, and there's a fair few niche operations like this one company that puts together custom LED light strips for entertainment companies and such.

As I said, I don't really know much from yugioh, just naming cards I remember having seen before. But magic does have cards that can combo in various different ways as well, take counterbalance for example, anything that allows you to select and see the top card of your library goes with it and even though one card is the most popular, just like one of those archetypes must be playing significantly more than the others, you can try various combinations. That goes even further when you look into the stack tricks mentioned above, if you use a card like goblin welder allowing you to use an artifact's benefits before swapping it to have control over your deck, or the opponent's and so on.

Just because the ideal is that nice, doesn't mean the actual game is. From a theoretical, purely potential standpoint, Magic has little competition. But they fail to really make use of that. A vast majority of the effects in the game are underwhelming by its own standards. No other game has as many "strictly worse" non-vanillas. Once we eliminate that chaff, let's look at the keyword mechanics. Sure, they have lots of design space. But think about how many of them were just wasted potential - Arcane/Splice, Haunt, Tribal, Unearth, all mostly looked at as mistakes. And that's to say nothing of the horrendous card design in recent sets. The only Amonkhet block card I own is a Kefnet someone gave me because I like blue decks. The color pie is shaky at best, and completely ignored at worst, and I'm not even talking about Planar Chaos. All these theoretical arguments just make the actual game seem less appealing in comparison to what it could be.

The "you are a planeswalker" thing died for me when they introduced planeswalker cards. The Mending already made it a little wobbly (God-beings fighting using simulacra of soldiers and heroes pulled from across space and time, backed up by powerful magic learned from across the multiverse to superheroes/supervillains having sparring matches using the allies they've recruited) and weakened that end of it for me. There haven't been novels in a long time, and the recent worlds have all been very flat and one-note - everything from Origins onward has felt like a significantly different game. Prereleases are the only form of sealed play I was ever in, and they were boring slogfests, and there was always an incredibly tense atmosphere. Nobody smiled, everybody glared at each other, and if anyone pulled a good card, some of the long-time players would "take a look" and scratch it up to lower the value.

The strictly worse vanillas are only true for eternal formats. Some of them are awful but really relevant for drafts or standard.

I'm familiar with Magic's synergies. But my argument isn't that they don't exist, just that Yugioh also has synergies, and they can be complex as well, especially if we're allowing for casual play.

>what do you dislike about other games?

I answered the upsides in the thread you made yesterday so I'll answer this instead. Out of non-Magic deckbuilding based card games (physical) I'm mainly familiar with Yugioh and Weiss Schwarz.

Yugioh is, in a word, retarded. The fact that it has no resource system similar to mana makes it feel broken from second one, and the fact that all monsters may attack as soon as they're played makes it feel even more broken. Imagine a version of Magic where nothing costs anything and every creature has haste and trample. That is Yugioh. It's no wonder turn two kills were the norm in it until Bandai-Namco nuked the rules recently.

Weiss-Schwarz has a brilliant concept: instead of having an IP of their own, they license popular anime properties, and turn those into cards. In order to immediately be attached to it, you only need to like one of the many sources licensed for it. The problem with it is that the mechanics are ultra generic and have basically no connection to the characters you thought you were playing as. It all amounts to a simple number game that's just skinned with some anime or another. Wasted potential.

Force of Will seems interesting, but after sinking thousands of dollars in Magic already, I'm not eager to start another moneysink CCG.

It's not an ideal. The color pie is the entire reason the game works as well as it does. What part of the most clearly-defined aspect of the game is shaky?

Also, Planar Chaos was a deliberately experimental set meant to find weaknesses within the pie. It has proven invaluable for the long-term health of the game and the decisions made by WotC.

Stop playing at LGS. Buy your cards online and go to your local university campus, preferably not a technical college campus.

Honestly, the planeswalker cards wouldn't have even messed with that if they had been more clear on the entire design behind walker cards, which is "Calling in my buddy for an assist". I think they shouldn't have had them, but there was a way to keep that flavor.

As far as the recent worlds, there's this hilarious dichotomy between them where all the artbooks and stuff detail these super interesting and varied worlds that would be a joy to explore, and then the actual card making and writing team ignore it all and focus entirely on one city. I think a lot of the problem is that their current writing staff is pretty shit, and with the notable exception of a couple people who vary from good to okay, they're just struggling.

Also that sucks with the prereleases, that sounds like shitty lgs community. The one I go to is usually really fun. [spoilers] Also if some motherfucker tried to scratch my cards at a prerelease I'd punch them right in the teeth. Fuck people who try that. [/spoiler]

I wouldn't say the "be-all-and-end-all"
but the rules/wording appeal to my inner autist
and I like that you can build all kinds of fun stupid shit.
but then I play with friends and the rampant stupidity us idiots can get up to with commander and a pack of beers is not to be underestimated.

Thread I made yesterday? Someone made a similar thread yesterday? Also, Bandai-Namco has nothing to do with Yugioh, Yugioh has its own form of Trample, and the game operates very differently from Magic. It's clear you don't know what you're talking about there.

I don't know anything about Weiss Schwarz.

Explain why the color pie is the reason the game works. And I don't remember the exact examples on it being shaky, just that I remember it being shaky, so that could be an error on my part.

From what I've played, it's a fun game in a casual setting. The rules aren't too complex and they have pretty art on most cards.

However, once one person decides that winning is more important than having an enjoyable game for all players it becomes horrible.

>But can't you just cash out for parity or more whenever you want? That's what I keep hearing.

Most people can't. First off, selling your collection is much harder in practice than in theory. If you try to sell it to a shop, you will have to sell it at a loss. Selling it piece by piece on Ebay will cause you to pay handling and postage fees, which will also cut into your profits.

Secondly, the collections of most people are simply not worth what they paid for the cards originally. Some people who have been especially shrewd at playing "cardboard stocks" will be able to make a profit, but majority of people will pay $1000 and be only able to reap back $300-500. (Which is still better than any digital cad game, mind you.)

That's exactly what I thought, but I kept hearing otherwise on here.
>Buying into Modern is safe, if you don't like it, you can just cash out and it'll be like it never happened!
>Buying into Legacy is safe, the Reserved List makes sure your cards never drop in price, so you can just cash out and it'll be like it never happened!
>Standard is a format! There is gameplay!
But yeah, unless you own your own store, you're almost certainly going to cut a loss from what I've seen.

>Also, Bandai-Namco has nothing to do with Yugioh

Konami. Whatever. I can't keep track of which Japanese giant company does what.

>Yugioh has its own form of Trample,
As I said. Converting the game to Magic terms, every creature in it has trample (attack damage overflow), haste (can attack the turn it was played), and costs nothing. It's actually even worse than that, because it lacks a damage system for monsters, meaning (again in Magic terms) every creature is healed to full immediately after receiving damage that doesn't kill it. Any Magic player should be shaking his head at all this nonsense, and yes, the game is exactly as broken as all this makes it sound.

>and the game operates very differently from Magic.
Yes, it operates in a stupid, broken way. It's clear that it was "designed" on the fly by a manga writer who was not a properl game designer.

It's not about how long it takes to "resolve" something in play, it's about looking at the thousands of cards out there and choosing a handful of them to make a deck out of.

Every single part of Magic is able to be traced to the color pie and its' division of strengths and weaknesses. Design archetypes are placed into each color to create a mechanical identity within the color that can be combined with other colors to enable quite literally hundreds of different general strategies. And this isn't even beginning to delve into the design effort put towards multicolor cards, which are created explicitly to promote new ways to combine colors and the mechanical rewards for doing so. Want to play large, fast creatures by amassing resources quickly? Gruul midrange, Golgari aggro and Simic tokens are all viable ways to do so, each with a unique way of doing so that adds more depth to how the colors interact with each other.

magic.wizards.com/en/articles/archive/making-magic/council-colors-2016-08-22

Look through the articles straight from the head of Design himself if you want a more complex understanding. There's an entire archive explicitly dedicated to cataloging this.

If you already were involved, there is actually a ton of money to be had. I collected bitterblossoms when they were banned and dirty cheap, so now I could cash them for quite a lot of money, if you already were part of a format, it is very easy to cash out for minimal losses or small profit, just not if you join now unless you stay around for some years.

They are lying. There's essentially two ways you can leave Modern or Legacy without being at a (major) loss, and they're both situational.
You personally know a lot of people who would be willing to buy them off of you for tcgplayer low-mid prices. Problem here is that you need to find someone who wants your expensive staples, meaning they're looking to get into it themselves. Doubtful to say the least.

Or you're still interested in playing so you trade shit around for EDH or something.

Standard will always be losing value.

you don't have to buy those £50 cards

most of the decks I make cost about £20, they're good enough to have fun with.
and I consider 20 quid good value for a evenings entertainment.

>But can't you just cash out for parity or more whenever you want? That's what I keep hearing.
realistically, no. just workout what cards you want and buy them from china. then conceder that money gone.

At this point, that there is actually people to play it with and that no matter how much they hate it we can play with 20yo cards and ignore the new stuff.

When I was a kid living in the same street as most of my friends I could take days to prepare an RPG sesion or hours building heroclix/heroscape scenarios. Now my job keeps me on the road six days a week and the only reliable way to get my Veeky Forums fix is playing commander at FNM with randoms in a random city because I don't know where I'll be next friday.

Just cost.Game is a little too expensive for me.I do like how diverse the game is and how deck building is so crucial more so than other games I've played.

Self expression is a really appealing part of the game to me.

Where the fuck do you live? There are probably a dozen stores within reasonable distance to where I live that do weekly draft nights, with some bigger stores having two nights a week.

I think one strength the gets ignored a lot (or even dismissed as a weakness) is that magic has a very good handle on complexity creep. Compare the average number of words on an average tournament-playable magic card compared to an average tournament-playable yugioh card. Things like caring about complexity creep and having format rotations show how magic actually puts a lot of thought into the future viability of their game, and whether or not you agree with it, it's still vastly better than yugioh's powercreep and bans model of moving new boosters.

Although the biggest reason is sunk cost and available playerbases, as many other anons have mentioned.

Personally, it's far from my favourite tcg, but the North American tcg market is really small, and focused way too much on the big three. A lot of tcgs in Japan have much stronger and better designed base rules, but they seem to have a much wider tcg market that allows new entries to gain a foothold and a player base.

>But can't you just cash out for parity or more whenever you want?
It depends on which cards you have bought and how much time and work you're willing to put into maximizing your profit from selling them. If you've been in the game for five years and mostly been playing limited and jank builds in Standard, then no, you're likely not gonna make a profit or even break even. You might be able to mitigate the cost somewhat, but you're not gonna make good money from your cards.

If you, however, have been playing for a decade or more and invested in eternal staples early, especially staples on the reserved list, and have traded your jankier cards upwards, then yeah, you're likely gonna be able to at least break even. This is also what I'm currently doing, and even when selling cards in bulk to stores to get out of having to search for buyers for individual cards myself, I still make a good bit more than what I initially payed for them.

>What do you like about Magic
I love the variety of formats. Draft and Sealed are fun if you like the block, or if you have a fun cube/chaos draft designed. Standard has a small enough cardpool, and a cheap enough cost of entry that it appeals to new players and those who want to try out mechanics that can't compete in modern/legacy. Modern and eternal formats have the power level and longevity that you might crave after following a standard for a rotation. EDH has a place for every kind of player.
The rules are all the same (save for a few special commander and draft/sealed rules), so once you learn the rules once, you can easily try out the other formats.

>what do you dislike about other games?
Aesthetics. MTG's art is like big-two comics. They have a general house style that they have to follow, so you get a mostly homogenized look across the board. There are some stinkers, yes, but there are some artists whose work I adore. It can get boring, but least it's a consistent look.
Other games try to jam every kind of animu style into their cards, and it just feels like a mess.

As much as people want to bitch and moan and shit on the magic development team, the care with which magic has been handled is absolutely amazing. It is also a testament to the strength of the game that even when wizards fucked up ROYALLY, like urza's and caw-blade, that magic recovered and kept moving forward. We will never see another game like magic that rivals the longevity that magic has had, or will have.

On that topic there's also power creep, which Magic has done a frankly amazing job of avoiding, to the point where a lot of people are complaining that they're actually too cautious and too afraid to print powerful cards. While I do agree with some of the complaints being so aware of and concerned about power creep is probably also one of the reasons Magic has survived so long.

Don't forget Kamigawa, Mirroden, and all the shit that led up to Time Spiral, which was the closest Magic ever came to actually ending. The game's been through some really low patches before. The fact that it not only managed to survive all of those but eventually start thriving again after each one is testament to the longevity of the game and how much the development team is capable of when it actually gets it's shit together.

i don't consider it the end-all-be-all, but i do rather like it.
the stack and interactions between cards are both the main draws to me, there's a fair lot you can do with it all.
the resource management of mana is also interesting, but it's ruined by the land system. lands are better off in a separate resource deck or something, to be honest.

there's also the aesthetics - not only are the cards pretty, but they read very well because a lot of effort has been put into streamlining the formatting and introducing keywords to cover common situations.
not only does this reduce the amount of text you need to read, it physically gives them more room to play with new concepts.
for example, making tokens over the years looked something like this:
>Put a Bird token into play. Treat this creature as a 1/1 white creature with flying.
>Put a 1/1 Bird creature token into play. That creature has flying.
>Put a 1/1 white Bird creature token with flying onto the battlefield.
in the recent 'kaladesh' block we ended up with this:
>Create a 1/1 white Bird creature token with flying.
it reads much better and they've slowly cut down on the space it takes up to make a token, which can often give an extra line to work with or makes the difference between using one font size and another.

compared to the recent yugioh cards i've seen, it's like night and day. yugioh doesn't seem to have improved its formatting one bit and the cards still seem to always have tiny text, huge unformatted blocks of text, and huge empty spaces.
there's also the weird number bloat that goes on in some other systems - everything's multiplied by 100 or more and it feels redundant. the final fantasy card game and yugioh both seem to suffer this problem.

it's the little differences, really.

>formatting and keywords
Most modern tcgs have gotten much better about this (Wixoss or Weiss even clearly label the type of ability - activated, triggered, etc.), but this is definitely another point of comparison that favours mtg, especially when the main alternative is yugioh.

Although I've to come to dislike land and land-ish mechanics as resource systems. There's too much of a jump between the numbers. There is very limited design space at 1 mana, for example, and there's a weird jump in power around 5-6 mana cards (depending on the tcg and how reliable land drops are). Although this is partially just a rant to explain how great Wixoss is again. Its resource system is a thing of beauty.