MTG noob needs advice

Me and gf are gonna get into pic related.
Where should we start?
What do we buy, are the starter decks?
Best way to learn?
Is there a shifting meta?

All input is appreciated

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Pls

1st: Don't get into it. There are plenty of cheaper, more fulfilling hobbies available.
2nd: Are you trying to be competitive or just play casually? in fact, it may be better to talk to people at your local game store. If you don't have one, I once again warn you not to get into MTG.
3rd: Watch youtube videos or go to to your lgs where someone will teach you.
4th: Ideally the meta shifts only when a set is released, but banlists can update every month and even a day after banlists are announced as proven by Felidar Guardian.

What'd be a better tcg to get into then? I've just heard mtg is the best

Commander decks or duel decks.

Not that guy but try an LCG, these are generally fairly cheap to start and more balanced. I wouldn't recommend getting into any big name TCG these days, definitely not Magic/Yugioh/Pokemon.

>Magicfag
>Gf
I thought all of you were a bunch of fat "people"

He's saying, stay away from TGC's bc they are a vortex... Once you start, you won't stop till you either rage and sell your cards or go broke trying to build unused decks...

If you really want to get into magic, by 2 standard sets and just dip into the hobby... I would recommend getting a Duel Deck or trying out the online version to see if it you truly like playing mtg

RUN WHILE YOU STILL CAN!

ITS NOT TOO LATE TO SAVE YOUR WALLET.

Thank you all anons, will heed your advice and run

Look into playing commander, it's fun, multiplayer, potential to be way more casual, your shit isn't gonna suddenly be worthless, and you can make something solid for cheaper than standard.

If you're going for pure casual save your wallet and get Chinese proxies, they've been ridiculously high quality for a couple of years.

MTG is a fun game and all. But honestly, I've probably spent thousands of dollars on it since I started. And while I enjoy playing the game, if I sit down and think about spending thousands on pieces of cardboard with pretty pictures on it I start kicking myself for being a dumbass.

And then go to tappedout and start planning a new deck I want to build.

This desu

Magic is great if you play proxied legacy and pauper. Look up some tier 1 legacy decks and play them against each other.

A good, but expensive option is to drop $80-90 on a booster box from the latest set. You end up with a ton of cards to build multiple casual decks for the two of you and any number of friends to learn the game. You also have the potential to score some powerful cards in the current Standard meta, which is a big deal in comparison to the into decks purposefully being designed to be junk. Do note that the value of a booster box rapidly diminishes as you gain more cards, so don't do this more than couple times unless you just feel like cracking packs for fun.

If you'd prefer to make small payments at a time, you can see if a local card shop will offer to teach you how to play. Then learn their draft schedule to build up a collection that way. If the store doesn't allow you to keep the cards you draft, immediately turn to somewhere else.

came here to post this

As someone else who just started a few months ago, but didn't do this:

This is a pretty good option. Buy a booster box, make a deck you like, go to an fnm, get your butt kicked, talk to people, decide if the extra $20-300 is worth the investment.

Draft and sell the money rares to finance more drafting.

>Spend $100
>Don't even have a usable deck.

Exactly what I'm talking about.

You will spend THOUSANDS on CARDBOARD.

>Buys Cardboard
>Buys inner sleeves to protect your cardboard.
>Buys normal sleeves to protect your inner sleeves to protect your cardboard.
>Buys playmat to protect your normal sleeves to protect your inner sleeves to protect your cardboard.
>Buy tube to protect your playmat to protect your.. you get the point.

The money isn't even the big deal. The problem is getting attached to it only for Wizards to do something stupid and gut wrenching. It could be anything from an instant loss of hundreds or even thousands of dollars to a shift in some stupid direction and all the while you've stuck in the sunk cost problem.

>Speculating cuck detected
>Reprints are dumb111!!

Literally not even on my mind but good job projecting.

I'm a casual edh player. Nice buzzword though

You are in a better place now.

...

1. What's your budget? Do you want to spend less than $50 a month between. the two of you or do you make enough to invest, say $250 a month. This will determine what cards/products you can buy, and unfortunately will also dictate how much fun you will have (somewhat). If you have less cash you will have to buy more recent products which are a little less powerful and a little more parasitic, mechanically. More cash gets you buying singles from old sets, allowing you to make very high power/high complexity decks.

2. Do you have any friends that play or are you two flying solo? If you have a group you're trying to join, you'll have to find out what format they play (modern or kitchen table). If you don't have a group, you will want to find a store that plays magic or else you both are gonna get bored quick. If you play at a store, you will want to focus more on pre-release and drafting to supplement your kitchen table. Eventually you will want to find a commander group since that's what everyone plays.

With that said, it is both a good and bad time to get into magic. On one hand it's more accessible to new players than ever before, kinda. On the other hand that accessibility come at the cost of dumbed down gameplay and simpler mechanics, relatively speaking. Most people want to play powerful cards but it's too expensive a commitment for new players. If you think you have a good idea about your budget and who you want to be playing with, I will always suggest buying one of the "deck builders toolkits", especially one from one of the earlier core sets (Origins, M15, etc). You'll have lands, cool cards, and enough resources to make several different decks in multiple colors.

Good luck, I love magic but I hate to recommend it wholeheartedly when I know the product itself has been going downhill for some years now.

>I love magic but I hate to recommend it wholeheartedly when I know the product itself has been going downhill for some years now.
What would you say has been going wrong with it?

Even proxy magic can be surprisingly expensive. If you got printer, printing 75 cards in color sucks ink really fucking fast and everyone knows how expensive printer ink is. Not to mention sleeves are like 6-7$ a pop per deck. Buying good quality proxies are around 20$ per deck, which scales to somewhere close with any other boardgame.

The fact that you can buy sealed products until the judgement day and still not be able to build a single competitive deck tells a lot of nature of this fucking game.

>The fact that you can buy sealed products until the judgement day and still not be able to build a single competitive deck tells a lot of nature of this fucking game.

only soyboys buy packs to open.

the ONLY time to buy packs is to draft.

Force of will.

>Me and gf are gonna get into pic related.
Magic can be fun, depending on how much money you are willing to spend, and how you want to play. The answers to your questions are heavily dependent on these.

If you just want to have fun together, then you can buy whatever you want. It really doesn't matter, as long it's balanced between the two of you.

If you want to play other people, especially at FNM, then you are going to need to spend money in order to have fun. If you want to have fun at FNM, you need to spend more money on 1.8 gram pieces of cardboard then some people find acceptable. Pic related, you are going to want 4 of them each (so 8 total). That's only if you want to play Standard, the equivalent card for Modern goes for $31 per card.

>Is there a shifting meta?
Sort of. Standard only uses the newest cards, so older cards rotate out, which causes shifts.

Boxes and Boosters are for drafting. If you want a particular deck, buy singles. Trying to gamble your way to a deck is a waste of money.

FoW is fucking gay anime trash

You could play but honestly you need to be an oldfag in mtg to appreciate pauper anyway.

It's a bit of a self-defeating format in that regard.

I got into it around a year ago, I first bought a couple duel decks to get the rules down, then started to draft.

I would suggest doing the same. For drafting, you can go to your LGS every Friday, pay $15 and get at the least 4 boosters. YouTube it but essentially you pass around 3 booster packs with 7 other people. You then create a 40 card deck out of those cards and battle each other. You get to keep those cards and even if you lose you usually get 1 "pity pack", and if you win enough you get more.

It's a fun way to come up with deck construction ideas, to practice, and to play on a somewhat more even playing field since you're all pulling from the same boosters, rather than battling against someone's $1000 deck with your duel deck.

Find a friend who knows the game and ask them whether you could join a draft sometime.

Different person but:
Design is getting less adventerous, wotc is scared of the crazy things that makes mtg cool

Literally this. LCGs like Netrunner and Legend of the Five Rings are fantastic solutions to the TCG itch. TCG model is outdated, a dinosaur of the 90's. LCGs are the future - they aren't random, you know what you're getting and it's fair. There are also Game of Thrones, Arkham, Warhammer, etc. Ashes: Rise of the Phoenixborn, lots of options. Look into them!

Netrunner revised Core Set comes out next month, good time to get in.

just play hearthstone you normie fag

>core set doesn't come with full playsets of all the cards so you have to buy multiple just for a small handful of cards
>people defend it
Netrunner is fun as fuck, too bad it's 2 player only so you can't get a group of friends playing together like you can with Magic.

Nobody plays 4p mtg.

>tfw you just got into Magic, bought $150 worth of cards and come here to find fellow enthusiasts in 2017
>entire thread is "DONT PLAY IT YOU WILL LOVE IT TOO MUCH AND GO BROKE"

>Where do we start?
At your FLGS. Either start with standard or go straight to Commander(EDH). Standard is the format WotC wants to push on new players to trick you into buying packs and wasting money. EDH is a casual format where you have a legendary creature card or 'Commander' that leads your deck and restricts what cards you can play.
>What do we buy, are there starter decks?
Standard legal precons, or 'Planeswalker decks' are garbage. Stategies are "Bash face but with flavor" and the planeswalkers you get are incredibly weak. Trying to upgrade them just means you play a different and better deck.
Just find an EDH precon.
They're the best precon decks you can get, they contain strong and simple strategies that can be read from your commander face card. Personally i recommend the 2016 four color EDH decks, being 4 color they're pretty much the strongest and with a little bit of cash you can take out every card that doesn't belong there and replace it with something better.If you can't find them the 2017 tribal EDH decks are good enough.
>Best way to learn?
The best way to learn is this video
youtube.com/watch?v=ZixWqaGJVQs
He explains the phases of a turn, the stack and combat pretty well.
>Is there a shifting meta?
In standard, only cards printed in the latest 4 "blocks" (each block consisting of 2 expansions) are legal. The shifts with the printing of each set but its normally only upgrades to existing decks or the creation of a new strategy. When there are 8 sets in standard and another one is printed the oldest 2 sets leave standard. This is when the meta shifts the greatest, because sometimes one of the strongest cards in a deck will become illegal and the deck will become too weak.
In EDH, there isn't a "Meta" as much as there is a list of decks that are considerably stronger than the rest of them. But EDH players normally don't really use it. Almost every card is legal besides a banlist.

Hope you and your gf have fun.

Cut your losses and bail while you can.

no, if anything we're getting a group going in our tiny horrible town to give us something to do over the winter besides drink and watch Netflix. WE BRINGIN IT BACK.

Was only $60

Then do EDH or set a cost limit epr deck. It's way funnier to have several 50$ decks than just keep playing with your one optimised deck. Also give you another limitation to play around while building your deck, wich is always cool.

Want to win consistently and easily, and frustrate everyone? Buy a Slivers deck. You are now on MTG Easy Mode

EDH is very dumb for casual formats, what you should play if you are saving money is pauper, just as cheap but not as ridiculous of a format.

how has pic related not been mentioned? OP if you want to try MTG, download cockatrice. its an online MTG game, free, where you can make decks out of any cards you want.

>pic related
Should post a pic

The problem is man, you and your buddies buy or build a deck. Thats fine for a while, then one of you decides to buy some spicy new cards to make his deck better.

Well once his slightly better deck starts raping everyone at the table then everyone else has to buy new better cards. Someone's going to spend more money than everyone else and have the new best deck.

So now everyone has to build new decks or buy even better cards for their current decks.

Even in casual the MTG arms race gets you. Every fucking time.

Even in 'casual' formats like EDH. The arms race gets you.

Cub3 Draft

>what is commander

Is EDH the ultimate casual budget format?

lol. no.

what is it?

>inb4 pauper
no one plays pauper

So basically, ask a question you already know but reject the answer to.

Ok.

PLAY CASUALLY AND FOR FUN, DO NOT THINK ABOUT BUYING SINGLES - IF U WANT MORE CARDS BUY RANDOM BOOSTERS AND THROW DECKS TOGETHER ONLY FOR FUN

CASUAL MTG WAS ONE OF THE BEST TIMES IN MY LIFE

pick up edh
if youre interested in anything else id say play draft

standard is the worst its ever been and modern is the most stale its ever been, as a modern player myself all of my friends got bored of it but I just cant feel alright letting my investments die so im still forcing myself to play

legacy is still fun but im pretty sure a new player isnt ready to drop a thousand or two bucks for a good deck

That's when you all start proxing dual lands and play full power fun decks.

we all have good jobs. it's not like we're going to remortgage our houses to buy hundreds of thousands of cards. we're fucking excited because we live in a small town where the hobbies include drinking and discussing the weather, so MGT is a very welcome passtime and possible community building tool. I figure if I sacrifice some other frivolous expense like gambling or beer financially it'll be a wash financially. I do have that one friend who always tries to buy his way to the top, but for now I think I can at least keep up by way of tactics over pure card hording.

Depends.

It's "budget" if you're someone who already has a massive pile of janky fun stuff collecting dust. But not if you're starting from square one.

Probably the most wholesome uplifting post here but why are you screaming

Also you all keep using terms like drafting and edh, commander, flgs, netrunner, lcg's, duel deck, modern and kitchen table etc...
Help a nu goy out and gib a quick rundown

draft is where each player gets 3 packs, you pass them around taking one card each pass and then make decks when all the packs are gone

edh/commander is a 100 card format where you can only have 1 card of each type unless the card specifies

lgs is local game store, dunno what flgs means
netrunners a different game from mtg
duel deck is a package sold by wizards that gives some cards which usually makes it worth the cost and some of them increase in value the longer you keep them sealed
modern is a 60 card format but is restricted from certain sets

kitchen table usual means anything goes and is where most people start until they learn about formats and want to shift into more structured games

>drafting
A format where you make decks out of random packs and a given amount of lands. I don't recommend it given the nature of the random pack but it's the best way to spend a few packs that you were going to open anyway.
>EDH and Commander
Basically the same thing as far as you're concerned. You make a 100 card deck with no repeats sans basic lands, all revolving one "commander". A casual, noncompetetive format designed for 3+ players. Fairly inexpensive but not very competetive so it might not appeal to you.
>FLGS
Friendly local game store AKA place you can play cards at. Differed from a "regular" game store in that you can set up and play with others or get advice from people who work there.
>Netrunner
Card game about hacking the planet. Pretty cool.
>LCG
Living Card Game. Basically a card game that comes complete in box. There are no boosters or random packs, only expansions. Far cheaper than a TCG and more fun IMO for various reasons.
>Duel deck
A two player deck set. Comes with two decks and maybe boosters? Easiest way to get into Magic.
>Modern
MtG format where the only cards allowed are the ones made after a certain point, typically noted by the "modern" card layout. Expensive as high hell and wholly unrecommended unless you want to spend four digits on a tournament deck.
>kitchen table
An unofficial form of MtG where it's just you and your pals at the metaphorical kitchen table. Basically a casual format where nobody is a tryhard and generally agrees not to spend retarded money on expensive shit. Every kitchen table is different, it's up to you.

because I regret growing up because now I know too much about magic

Draft: go to a store, open a bunch of packs with random people, you each pick a few cards from the packs and make 40 card decks with each. You keep the cards you take.

edh: same thing as commander: 100 card decks, can't repeat any of the cards but basic lands, one of your card is your legendary commander which you can play at any time in the game

flgs: how faggots call game stores, lgs is that as well

netunner: another card game

duel deck: pre constructed duos of decks made to face each other

modern: format which only allows more recent cards to be used, uses around half of the entire card pool

kitchen table: casual games

>I don't recommend it given the nature of the random pack
Drafting is the format of kings.