Card Games Online

[Glamdring]

Why did I just read this thread about MtG... now I really want to play again.

I haven't touched the game since around the time Alliances was coming out, sold everything I owned, and made out like a bandit with somewhere between $4-5k in net profit.  That money came in handy in college but I really wish I still had those cards.

[SurfD]

Hmmm, any idea where a good place to check current price of cards is?
I have about 600 or so cards dating from the Mirage expansion back, and I have absolutely no idea what they might be worth.
I almost never play with them, and at the moment, they are sitting in tupperware containers in my room down home somewhere.

[schild]

Paper cards older than onslaught aren't worth much anymore. I have Alpha through Ice Age stuff. Oh well.

Anyway: here's my rundown of the current Magic Online System. I've calmed down since some of my last posts.

1. Affinity does not dominate once you figure out how to DESTROY IT.
2. It's more fun than ANY MMO online and with a 6 person FFA might as well be considered an MMO, and the fact there's always 5000+ people online.
3. Magic Players do NOT understand Economics. Here's why:

    a. They sell something called an event ticket online. It costs $1.
    b. Tournaments cost 2 tickets if sealed deck style; constructed costs 6.
    c. There is a room, named Auction (go to marketplace type /join auction)
    d. Player in there regularly sell 200-1000 uncommons for 5 to 10 tickets.
   e. In other words, for 5 to 10 bucks, you can pretty much make a dominating deck. If you know how.

4. With all the new abilities, the game has much more depth than before. A LOT MORE.
5. It's easy to avoid people who are 12. Just look at their name. Seriously, I've never seen a name give so much away.
6. You can also look at their 'information' which gives tournament rankings. Most 12 year olds enter a lot of tournaments and lose (lower than 1500 score) or never enter tournaments (score of 1600/1600/1600).
7. Finding a game 24/7 is so easy it's a joke. I never have to be seen in another comic store again (i fucking hate comic stores).
8. The people don't smell. You might, but noone is around to care.

Edit: To add, I'm starting a Bat Country Clan inside Magic. Since there's no monthly cost. And people can come and go, I see no reason of not starting one. I also suspect some of you are very good at Magic. BTW, Tickets are better purchases than packs, unless you are playing a sealed deck tourney.

[WayAbvPar]

Goddamn it. Now I have to play again. Evil, Schild, pure evil.

[schild]

Goddamn it. Now I have to play again. Evil, Schild, pure evil.

No, evil would be if I was addicted to Second Life.

Magic is actually FUN AS SHIT. It's just expensive as fuck sometimes. Like when a new set comes out (i weep on July 18th).

[Glamdring]

Okay, what do I have to buy to get started online?  I think I have some old box for MTG:Online but I'm not sure if I threw it away or not.

[HaemishM]

Goddamn it. Now I have to play again. Evil, Schild, pure evil.

Shit, this board made me reactivate DAoC. You want to talk about EVIL.... let's talk mucho RVR goodness.

MtGO is the Diet Coke of Evil.

[Rasix]

Goddamn it. Now I have to play again. Evil, Schild, pure evil.

Shit, this board made me reactivate DAoC. You want to talk about EVIL.... let's talk mucho RVR goodness.

MtGO is the Diet Coke of Evil.

I started playing ATITD and bought NWN plus the expansions due to talk here recently.  I'm not sure if that classifies as good or evil.  Judges?

Although I've never played MtG, I think that qualifies as ultimate evil.  I think my wife would just laugh at me if I suggested spending real money on a virtual RPG playing card game. Sounds kind of fun and strategic, but I think I'd dug my hole deep enough this month.

[Alluvian]

The hatred for tournaments comes from burnout. If you decide you want to play an MTG tourney and have fun, you cannot go in without that killer mentality. You will get absolutely RAPED by the munchkins drawn to Magic like moths to flame.

Don't do tournaments then is all I can suggest.  I have only been in real local ones where I knew 50% of the people.  I think I only did that twice even.

Your statement about wanting to fuck WOTC up their asses was like you wanting to fuck Hoyle up his ass because tournament poker players are cutthroat (VERY different games I understand, and a pretty bad analogy).  The game itself is rather brilliant, even if there have been some pretty interesting fuckups in individual cards and some bad sets.

My main problem is I don't really know if I want to start a second virtual collection.  The way schild mentioned trading tickets for uncommons was interesting.  Usually you only need a very choice few rares to make a deck whirr.  I just ordered my new system, I will have to install it at least to play some friends online with the premade stuff.  If I can get the game for free I am more than happy to spend $40-50 on tickets that I then sell for cards to get enough to make some fun decks to play against friends.  None of my friends are likely to go insane card buying so it should not be any problem at all.


Schild, or whoever knows:
What game modes are there besides 1 vs 1 dueling?  I think they had 3 vs 3, right?  3 headed giant?  Mountain? I think that is the right name, similar to 3 headed giant, when we had six we would play our own bastardized house rules for 3vs3.  Does the game have rainbow (5 players, each with one color, allies are adjacent)?  Are there any 2 vs 2 varients in the online game?  Getting 6 might be hard for my friends and our random schedules, while 4 or 5 would be far more reasonable.  Can you play 3 player?

[schild]

1v1
2v2
2v2 2 headed giant
3v3
3-6 person free for all
7 different modes for eliminating certain sets from play
tons of different sealed deck styles
League play
8 person booster draft tourneys
constructed deck tourneys
sealed deck tourneys

The above 2 are the only ones I play in. Because Booster Drafts are where it gets stupid online. People go in to steal rares, then drop from the tournament.

Other than that, that's about it. Well, all I can think of atm.

There are also 4 rooms for playing 1v1: Constructed Casual, Constructed n00bler, Constructed Serious (mostly tournaments decks in here, it's where I play), and Sealed deck.

[Xilren's Twin]

Okay, what do I have to buy to get started online?  I think I have some old box for MTG:Online but I'm not sure if I threw it away or not.

One definately nice thing about MTGO is the whole thing is free to setup.  You can download the client here then click on the free trial links and get setup.  Initial download can take a little while (lotta art) Once you login you will do a lot of downloading the peices you need in the background.  If you decide to buy cards, you can, or not, but your account and collection remains active forever with no monthly fees.

Wotc is convinced once they wet your appetite you'll buy in.  They may be right.  As much bitching about paying real price for virtual cards as I did when beta ended, I am quite sure they have made a mint off this little title.  Whether they would have made more off a more reasonable pricing scheme is up for debate, but what the hell, there making cash.

One thing about it, they seems to have had some issues (read bugs and stability problems) over the 2 year life of it.  Not having played heavily at all, I think I missed them, but their goals for version2.0 seems to be all fixes and stability issues, then version3.0 for new things and enhancements.  Gee, that sounds just like a mmorpg.

Xilren

[schild]

They just fixed a KILLER memory leak today.

Over the last week, after 4 hours or so of being open I was using 700+ megs of ram. Today after 7 hours I'm using 7 megs. W00t.

Edit to add: I'm doing a sealed deck tourney tonight. Two Darksteel packs and a Mirrodin Tournament Pack. Generally I can sell stuff after the tournament, get half my investment back and from playing I get a chance to win 24 packs. Can't complain.

[Mesozoic]

selling in-game for points or Ebaying?  What exactly is their policy on EBay?

[Glamdring]

Thanks, Xilren.  If what you say is true then I guess my old account will still be active.  I don't know if that really matters or not since it sounds as if sealed deck tournaments is where most of the action is at.  But, hopefully I'll at least have some stuff I can trade for tickets.

[Alluvian]

I would be surprised if Ebay was much of an issue in this game as you can already use money to get ahead in the base game.  I suppose a really good player might want to sell on ebay to make profit, but I don't know if that is feasable.

[schild]

Ebay and Paypal are encouraged. Fuck people, comeon, think about it - buy fake cards online, sell FAKE CARDS ON EBAY so that the seller can buy MORE fake cards online. It's frickin genius. They have the license to script make binary money. It's the game to end all games. If everyone didn't think it was so geeky and lame and girls dug magic, Richard Garfield would be sleeping with 75 women at a time on his solid gold harrier jet while riding on a unicorn on the way to 7-11.

[Mesozoic]

Funny.  MMORPGs seem to have downplayed their costs, fearful initially that the PC gaming crowd  - accustomed to one-shot expenses - wouldn't go for a regular fee.  Their costs are creeping up, but from a relatively low starting point.

MtGO, on the other hand, new well ahead of time that their target demographic was stupid enough to spend hundreds or thousands of dollars on rectangular pieces of cardstock.  So they shot for the moon.  Only its a moon made of money, filled with great swirling seas of credit cards and populated by vast throngs of stupid and overpaid near-humanity.

[schild]

If ANY MMORPG was as fun as Magic, I'd pay $100 a month, because I wouldn't need to buy any other computer games.

But MMORPGs suck at the moment, am i rite?

Maybe if an MMO said, you pay us per week, and we provide you with 10x better gameplay, I'd play.

Someone needs to make a Magic MMO or a Pokemon MMO, then I'll quit MtGo. Til then - Wizard can have the moneys.

[HaemishM]

MtGO, on the other hand, new well ahead of time that their target demographic was stupid enough to spend hundreds or thousands of dollars on rectangular pieces of cardstock.  So they shot for the moon.  Only its a moon made of money, filled with great swirling seas of credit cards and populated by vast throngs of stupid and overpaid near-humanity.

I think with MMOG's, no one really thought people would be quite as addicted to boring-ass repetitive gameplay or that people would actually pay some fuckup in his mom's basement real money for a virtual Barbie Doll house. We can ask Raph, but I'm sure Richard Garriot thought about it and said, "Who the fuck would be stupid enough to pay $1500 for a house that's nothing but data on a server they've never seen? Who would pay money for bits on a hard drive somewhere?"

They weren't even sure people would pay money to play an Ultima game on the Internet.

[Xilren's Twin]

If ANY MMORPG was as fun as Magic, I'd pay $100 a month, because I wouldn't need to buy any other computer games.
But MMORPGs suck at the moment, am i rite?
Maybe if an MMO said, you pay us per week, and we provide you with 10x better gameplay, I'd play.
Someone needs to make a Magic MMO or a Pokemon MMO, then I'll quit MtGo. Til then - Wizard can have the moneys.

I've been asking for a mmo game designed around MtG since back when they released the single player game by microprose and it had the world of shandalar.  Hell, I still fire that up when im feeling nostalgic for some type 1 mox action.

Avatar = no brainer,you're a plainswalker who travels from plane to plain seeking magical knowledge to increase your power, you pick your starting primary color and get a base pool and have at it.  Your card library is your advancement mechanism, and battles are straight mtgo type affairs.  There's a ton of backstory and flavor they could develop a world setting from, and it's not like there's any shortages of card to play with.  Only significant challenge would be coming up with a decent npc ai assuming you want to have players be able to pve, but pvp is a done deal.  Make players battle for ante, or bets or fun whatever.  Region locking controlled by area; hell you could design the major areas based on block sets so you could start in one area, work you way up by winning cards until you feel like trying to battle your way into another block area.  

Now that Leaping lizards has already done a good version of magic on the computer which handles the myriad of rules and play, I could easily see this game making the transition to world should someone want to do it.

Xilren

[Alluvian]

It will never ever happen though Xilren.  Not with MTGo making a killing as they are.  They have their audience.  If they released the game you talk about they would drive a stake through the heart of their current game.  No company will do that.  The only way a MMORPG game will exist is if you pay per card for every card.  Because that is the pricing scheme already entrenched.  If they make an RPG with a fixed monthly cost it will almost certainly be cheaper than the current game for the same gameplay + more.  The current game would be a wasteland in minutes.

[schild]

It will never ever happen though Xilren.  Not with MTGo making a killing as they are.  They have their audience.  If they released the game you talk about they would drive a stake through the heart of their current game.  No company will do that.  The only way a MMORPG game will exist is if you pay per card for every card.  Because that is the pricing scheme already entrenched.  If they make an RPG with a fixed monthly cost it will almost certainly be cheaper than the current game for the same gameplay + more.  The current game would be a wasteland in minutes.

Wrong. MtGo as it stands has a lot of crossover between online and offline trade, if they made it so the cards you gathered in the MMORPG STAYED in the MMORPG or were a completely different set, with graphics from the game for the art, if anything they would gain all the people that play Magic and MMO's (I'd say that tops 300k) and MANY MMO people.

Right now, many many many people play MtGo for tournaments and the ability to trade in fake online sets real sets. Just remove this ability from the MMORPG and they're golden.

[Alluvian]

--They would get an unknown amount of new players.
--They would risk losing all their current MTGo income (if you had a choice of reasonable monthly fee for playing the game and getting virtual cards WITHOUT extra cost or paying for every single virtual card, which would you pick?) [edit] You mention MANY playing to trade in real sets or to trade on ebay and make money.   You have no idea how many people that is or what income they represent vs those just trying to have fun.
--The income per active player would be far less in the new game.
--A new game (especially the AI if you let the computer play) would be costly to make.
--Extra server fees at least initially due to running both games.  People will still want to keep playing the old one for free without buying cards.
--If the old game becomes cost innefective to run, will they have possible class action suits for shutting it down?  The monetary value of the virtual cards is well established and encouraged by WOTC.  All WOTC has on their side is an EULA which probably says they can shut down whenever they want, but is the EULA valid in court?  Huge unknown.  I think it would be since you buy the cards AFTER being presented with it making it a NON blind contract.


You can't look at the knowns and equate that with money in the pocket.  It could cost them money if the new game become initially popular and then interest wanes.  The hardcore few keeping MTGo in the money will no longer be shoveling money to them.  They will be just paying their $15 a month like everyone else.  The non-hardcore will probably lose interest when the next new shiny comes out.

No CFO is going to make that risk.  The degree of that risk can't be weighed with current data.  The amount of players and longterm retention rates are entirely unknown.  And we as board posters don't know the kind of money MTGo is raking in.  It may be lots it may be modest.

[schild]

I would pay Magic tons of fucking money to come out with a steampunk game based on the exact same rules of Magic. That would just frickin rule. Now that said, I don't think there's enough painters in the world to pain all the necessary cards. It's the only reason why magic only puts a set out every 6 months instead of 1.

[schild]

I'm having more fun in MtGo than I ever did on am MMO. Someone should license the rules of magic, make their own cards, and make an MMO out of it. Serious. Steampunk mmo, with combat done through card battles based on their system.

That would be luv, am i rite?

[Alkiera]

Am I the only one who read the rules of Magic: The Gathering and wasn't impressed?  Collectible card games hold absolutely no interest for me.  None.  I just don't see the attraction.  I'm kinda curious, admittedly, because so many other people seem to like them, but I just don't see it.

I pay money to be randomly assigned some cards.  I can pay more money for more randomly assigned cards, if I don't like the ones I got, or lots more for specific cards from a card/gaming shop.  Then, I take a bunch of these, either randomly or picking cards I think are cool/go together, and shuffle them, and draw 5 of them.  This sounds like your average card game, rummy or gin or the like.

You need to play lands, in order to get mana to play creatures and other stuff.  Your creatures attack the opponents creatures or them if they have no creatures left.  If you drop this to the level of what you're doing with the cards, this isn't that different from a card game that is able to be played with a $1.49 pack of poker cards.  Maybe two packs to get enough cards.

Why should I pay $13 for a 'starter deck' + more if I want 'good cards', for the same gameplay I can get from $3 of poker cards, which I can also use to play hundreds of other games with them, or solitaire if my friends can't play right now?

I don't get it.
--
Alkiera

[HaemishM]

Magic combined the collection frenzy of comics, with the in-depth subtle strategy of role-playing/miniature games, all wrapped around a shell of fantasy where almost anything you could imagine could become a card. CCG's, when well done, are GAMER'S CRACK because of the addictive nature of the collecting aspect.

I actually think Legend of the 5 Rings was a much better card game, at least in the early stages of the game. It was definitely a better multiplayer game than MtG.

[schild]

Magic will always reign because it came out first.

People graduate from Pokémon and YuGiOh to Magic. It will have generations of life as long as WoTC scales back on some of the power in these new sets. The next set - out of about 135 cards has....22 or so that will be played by ANYONE who can get ahold of them.

You can not get as much fun out of a deck of cards. Magic has, over time, grown to be incredibly strategic. And it's not that your randomly assigned cards that's fun. It's the chance to know whether you're good enough to play with randomly assigned cards. That's the fun of booster draft tournaments and Sealed deck tournaments.

Rumors say they have the next 3 sets of Magic on paper already. As in done (they apparently always try to be a block [3 expansions + 1 main] ahead). But ocmmissioning 15 hired painters to paint 135 high quality paintings is why it takes 6-8 months for a set to come out. Just when people get settled with current strategies a new set is released. It's genius. It makes every single person rethink the game.

Honestly, as geeky as the game is, I truly believe people who insult it just aren't good at it. Or think that people who play it don't get laid. Or some other nonsense.

On the computer (as in MtGO online) it's no more geeky than poker or UT2k4. It's just another computer game.

[Kenrick]

Ah, sorry wrong room.  Thought this was about Canasta on Yahoo games.  :)

[Furiously]

Other then the unreal cost of it all, I agree with you.

Don't think they release these card sets to "mix-it-up" it's to keep them in paper hats made of money.

[Alluvian]

Alkiera, you can't really understand magic by just reading the rules.  The majority of the rules in the game are on the cards, not in the book.  The majority of the strategy is in the assembly of your own deck.  Smart playing will go a long way, but smart deck building will go further.  The game is quite complex.  Not necessarily more complex than other copycat cardgames, but IMO magic is the best I have played.  There are LOTS I have not played though (like legend of the five rings).

The best way to learn the game is to play face to face with a friend who knows the game well.  Preferably one with varied taste in deck design so you can see how the game plays totally differently with different styles of decks.  There are just so many ways to win.

[Alkiera]

Part of my lack of interest is a lack of people to play with, I've never actually played the game, so I decide to give the online version a chance... download the client, only to find that the server is down, the online store I apparently have to use to set up an account is down...  I guess I'm lucky the server the download was on, and the website itself, was up at all.

Well, I'll try again tonight, I guess, unless I find something more interesting to do.

--
Alkiera

[schild]

The server is down to make database updates. Should be back up by now. There's a new expansion coming out called Fifth Dawn, I believe the release date is the 17th.

[Mesozoic]

Can anyone confirm if it is up or down now?  Trying for a free trial still tells me the server is down ATM.

[schild]

It's up. Free trial no longer exists because it's entirely unnecessary.