I'm new to Magic: the gathering and have questions

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Hi, I'm thinking about buying my first deck of magic: the gathering cards. Anybody have any tips for me? What's with all the different editions? Are the earlier ones better? Are the new ones crap? Is this a game played primarily by teenagers or do adults play it too? (I'm coming up on 30) Is this game pretty fun? Are the cards cheap? What's good about the game? What's bad about the game?


Thanks in advance for the answers.

3 sites to look at starcitygames.com, mtgsalvation.com, & wizards.com. You'll find more about the game than you ever thought was possible. I've been playing almost 10 years, & it's been a blast. Traveled all over, made lots of friends, & had lots of fun. Most people who play are guys around college age or older, so you would be at the right age.

It isn't cheap though. Additional cards come out several times a year, & the competetive enviroment keeps changing. You will have to spend money & lots of time to keep up. That's both the game's greatest strength & weakness. It's bad if you're only looking to play a few casual games here & there, as the changes will be too much to handle. But it's great if you consider yourself an avid gamer. Many games get old and are just the same thing over & over every time. However magic is ever changing & challenging. Once you think you have it all figured out, new cards & dynamics come & you have to do it all over again.

To start, I'd recommend getting only new sets. Look up "standard" format tournaments & buy only cards from sets legal there. You'll get the most bang out of your buck that way as a beginner.

I haven't played in a while, but one tip I can give is to try to keep your deck down to only one or two colors.

I remember when I started, and I've seen other "newbies" do this too, you'll have a mixed deck of all five colors, and you'll spend too much of the game sitting there with great cards but no mana to use them with.

Thanks for the advice. I will check out those web sites.

What cards you get really depends on whether you want to enter tournaments. Usually tournaments only allow use of the most recent 2-3 booster pack series to come out. If you want to enter tournaments, I can't help you because I don't play anymore. If you don't care about tournaments... I really liked Sliver decks. Slivers are a type of creature that when in play, gives bonuses to every other sliver in play(obviously not the greatest against another sliver deck). They do have the problem though... of

Although, if you get the right slivers, this ceases to be a problem. I seem to recall having a sliver that gave all the other slivers the ability to tap them and add 1 mana of the same color as the sliver to your mana pool. Other slivers can give you extra attack/defense, flying, swampwalk, regeneration, extra 1/1 sliver tokens(that also get powered up by your slivers), etc... they are an amazing breed of card.

I don't think they had slivers back when I played.

[Enter Level 1 DCI Judge]

*Ahem*

It's awesome. Try to get hold of an intro pack. These contain a deck that you can play straight out of the box, a booster pack and a sheet containing some of the rules. If you want to play with new people, try to track down a venue for an FNM in your area. The people there will (hopefully) be friendly and help you build a Standard legal deck using your intro pack as a base. Or they might even lend you a deck for the night (as some of the regulars at my local have done before).



New sets are released every few months with new cards. Keeps the game fresh.



The overall quality of a set varies. Urza Block featured some very powerful cards and resulted in a number of bannings. However it doesn't matter as for the most part you only need to concern yourself with the sets from the last two years. (Currently these are 10th Edition, Lorwyn, Morningtide, Shadowmoor, Eventide, Shards of Alara, Conflux and Alara Reborn. Soon 10th will "rotate out" to make way for Magic 2010, the new core set which will be an ideal place to start. Then in the autumn Zendikar will come along and push out Lorwyn to Eventide).



It's played by pretty much anyone of any age. At my local shop we have people from their teens to their 40s or 50s (I don't ask ages so that's a guess).



It's a great game! If it weren't, it wouldn't be the biggest selling game in the world.



I'm not going to lie, Magic is an expensive hobby. An intro pack can get you started with enough to play against other people on a casual basis but you'll want to get more packs to try new things, make new decks, and ultimately have new experiences.



It's constantly changing, always expanding into new frontiers. Sometimes things will happen that you had no idea was possible, and each time a new set comes along, you'll be surprised all over again.



It's not a cheap game (as we've discussed). Sometimes you might be frustrated (mana screw is a pain). But the positives outweigh the negatives.

If you do persevere, I and several other will be here to help you in your Magic journey. As a Judge it's basically a part of my job.

Thanks for the info Optician_Of_Urza .

I did something stupid, instead of purchasing a starter pack or a core set, I purchased a bunch of Alara Reborn booster packs. The guy at the store told me that it would have lands in it, but it only had one per pack. Not to mention that each card requires at least two types of lands. I think I'll purchase a core set next time.

Can lands be purchased separately?

There's a few ways to get land. One is Fat Packs and Tournament Packs (soon to be discontinued). These contain some land but more cards leaving you in the situation where you still don't have enough land. Best bet is to ask at your local store. If they are a dedicated games store they might have a large amount of land for Limited tournaments and might be able to give or sell some to you. If you know other players who have been playing for longer than you, you might also want to ask them if they have any surplus land that you can use.

EDIT: There's nothing wrong with buying Alara Reborn packs. Until Shards of Alara, booster packs didn't have any basic land in, now they have one to help new players get land (not working too well eh ). There's plenty of Intro Packs to choose from and if memory serves there should currently be 15 (five from each set in the Shards of Alara block). So other than buying an intro pack, my other piece of advise is this: don't buy any Tenth Edition. 10th Ed cards will only be in Standard for another few weeks (some of the cards in it will be in Magic 2010 but you're better off saving your money until then if you want Core Set cards).

You did nothing stupid. Purchasing boosters of the most recent set is a fine way to get a solid volume of cards. Alara reborn also has a rather high concentration of valuable cards, the highest of any current set, so you made a good choice. Lands are easy to get. You shouldn't have to pay more than a couple cents a piece for a basic land (mountian,forest,swamp,island,plains). Purchase 20 of each, & you'll have all the basic land you'll need EVER.

Right now, think of a deck you'd like to build. Now look at the cards you already have, which of them you want to use, need more of, & don't need. Then look at the sites mentioned above for the values of these cards. Trade at appropiate rates away the cards you don't need for ones you do & you'll have playsets of what you need in no time.

BTW, any card can be purchased seperately. When you get down to specific cards you need, buying booster packs is a waste.

Thanks for the info.

I have another question. What are the strengths and weaknesses of the different colors of magic (red, blue, black, green, and white)? What are the strategies associated with them?

Hundreds of thousands of words have been written on Magic strategy, the philosophy of the colours and which colours each ability belongs in. I can only recommend reading articles from the websites deadeye suggested (I only read Daily MTG at the Wizards site myself but I don't care much for competitive strategy, I care more about the flavour and reading about design and development).

http://www.wizards.com/magic/multiverse/colors.aspx

Also, don't try to do too much research to try to find the best deck to build. I guarantee that all the information will overwhelm you. Just pick a card or strategy you particularly like, & add it to a deck with lots of other similar cards. Then get to playing games of magic. You'll learn best that way.

For example: When I started, I liked forcing my opponent to discard cards. I looked up every conceivable way to make my opponent do that & added them all to a deck. Of course, it was terrible. However, I learned what worked best, what didn't, what I needed more of, & lots of other competetive tweaks. Played dozens of matches and in a months time, I made top 4 in my first tournament.

popular strategies include:

Hit them fast & hard: best done with red & green
build an army: best done with white & green
kill lots of things: red & black
nulify your opponents efforts: blue & white
flying swarm: blue & white also
discard & deck depletion: blue & black

More sound advise from deadeye.

Other common strategies when starting out are the bare bones approach of taking one colour and trying to do what it does best. So you might make:

White: Lots of small efficient guys and effects to make them better or punish your opponents creatures (Pacifism).
Blue: Manipulation and evasion. Counter their threats with Cancel and other counterspells, then hit them in the air with flying creatures.
Black: Do whatever it takes to overwhelm. Kill their threats with Terror and other similar cards then hit them with nasty creatures that may call for sacrifice to be the best (like Nantuko Husk).
Red: BURN! Incinerate the opposition and smash their brains in with a horde of goblins. When the supply of goblins runs low, dragons have a habit of ending conversations.
Green: Forget what those other colours will tell you. Size matters. Sure they might have a 4/4, but when your 7/7 trampling Duskdale Wurm kills their puny 4/4 and still hits them for some extra damage, they will know what it means to be threatened.

(Note: none of the cards I mentioned are rare. Though most dragons are. The Shards of Alara Jund intro pack contains one badass dragon in the form of a foil Flameblast Dragon though.)

Wow! I just bought some core packs(I know that the new packs are coming out in July, but I couldn't wait). This is a good card game! I played several games against a family member last night and had a lot of fun. I played with all blue cards and then all white cards while he played with the Boggart Shenanigans theme pack. I'm surprised at how well a single color can stand up against a theme pack. I love the pacifism and pariah cards in the white pack. All the counter spell and remove creature cards are awesome in the blue pack.

Now I am going to have more specific questions.

Can you choose which enemy creature you attack with a flying creature? Or is it still up to the defending player to assign damage where he wants it. (The defenders don't have flying or reach and I'm choosing not to attack the player directly.)


I also bought an electronic card shuffler at a garage sale for $3.50. It's pretty nice for this kind of game.

Whenever you attack, you attack the player, not individual creatures (this isn't Yu-Gi-Oh...). The only time I can think of when you have a choice is where a player has a planeswalker card in play. Planeswalker is a new card type from Lorwyn and there were more in Shards, Conflux and soon the Lorwyn ones will be reprinted in M10. Planeswalkers can be attacked like players and their controller can allocate their creatures as blockers for the planeswalker. There are other trickier rules but you don't need to know those right now. Any other questions, feel free to ask.