the Gathering. Well, most popular CCG at least. Over the years we've
amassed a fairly sizable collection, although we haven't increased our
collection for a year or so. We have mostly commons and uncommons, we
only keep the rares we absolutely have to have, like Angels. We've
sold most of our rares to help fund the game. I guess you can say we
are "pauper" players. A lot of our commons we actually picked up on
the secondary market for next to nothing. In short, we don't dump a
lot of money into the game, preferring to play on the cheap.
Lily and I love the game, especially during Soccer season. With games
on the weekend, two practices during the week, and all the other
things she does after school its hard to find time to play D&D or
board games. Magic is the best game for squeezing in between running
here and there. Plus we love the artwork, and you can use one deck
and have the game play out differently every time. Lily is getting to
the age where she can really benefit mentally from the game. Not only
does it teach strategy, but the game rules are constantly changing
from one turn to the next leading you to constantly adapt to the
changing parameters.
Friday night we played constructed. I have two angel decks that I ran
through. One is a all white Serra Angel deck, the other is a
White/Black Life and Death deck. Both are fairly powerful and
tweaked, but are known to loose against fast competitive decks. Lily
on the other hand played her Green Badger Mushroom Snake deck, and her
White Pegasus Unicorn deck, two very simple decks. She was fairly
competitive, but its hard to beat my angel decks given enough time. I
won both games that we played.
Saturday after we got home from Church, dinner and Shopping, Lily
wanted to play again. This time instead of playing constructed, we
drafted. A few years ago I learned of a new format called Cube Draft.
Lily and I have a TON of cards laying around doing nothing, but are
cool nonetheless. We decided to collect our cards into a cube and
drafting them. Our cube is a Pauper cube consisting of 250 land cards
(50 each of islands, swamps, plains, mountains, and forests), 50 of
each color, and 50 artifacts. Enough for us to play with up to 5
people. We have a lot of cards, we can scale it up if we need to.
Most of the time its only two or three of us playing.
The official way to draft is to have three packs per person. Thats 45
cards per player, and they should be an even amount of all colors and
artifacts, excluding land cards of course. So 45 cards per person
makes 90 cards, divide that by six (five colors plus artifacts) and
you have 15 cards of each color plus artifacts. So we shuffled each
color out of the cube, counted out 15 cards of each color, and
constructed three booster packs per person.
Now, the normal way you draft is to lay out the boosters face down.
Each player picks up a booster, picks a card, and passes it to the
right. Repeat until each card has been drafted. Now since there is
only two of us, this format does not work for many reasons, so we
Winston Draft. Shuffle all 90 cards together to form one massive
library. Take the top three cards and form three piles next to the
library. Each player takes turns drafting by looking at the first
pile, keep it if you like it or turn it down. If you turn it down,
take a card from the library and place it in the first pile, then do
the same for the second pile. If you look at the third pile, and turn
it down, take a card from the library, add it to the third pile, and
you have to take the top card of the pile. If it sounds complicated,
its not. Just watch this Youtube video demonstrating the process
http://goo.gl/KUYR
Once we had all the cards drafted, we constructed Limited decks with
our cards ( thats a deck of at least 40 cards ) and played the game as
you normally would. Lily played Black, Blue and Green. I ran with
White, Red, and Green. The first game went to me easily, Lily kept
drawing land. For the second game we shuffled up her deck really
good, and she easily beat me! She had a lot of unblockable creatures,
she really played the blue color well.
All in all it was a fun couple of nights!
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