Thanks! I made a deliberate effort to not overuse "Villain," which as you said was part of the distraction/problem last week. Like, "I was staring at a turn-one Steppe Lynx" instead of "Villain cast a turn-one Steppe Lynx." Hopefully that's a happy medium, and the detractors won't find it so grating that they stop reading...
Lacerator is VERY good. Gruul Daz is playable. Surrkar is solid. But you know what? He either already is playing those cards or doesn't have it, so how does comparing those to the seeker helps here? My argument is that blood seeker is better than war paint and mb sludge/lava axe. Also, combined with bushwacker, it can do some extra damage, helping his 2 gruul daz intimidator finish the job. And the argument about topdecking it being awful, u could say the same about a lot of tiny creatures. Ever topdecked a llanowar elf in the late game of a m10 match? its horrible. And still, its a solid card. (not comparing elf to seeker, im saying that being useless in late game does not make a card crap). Lastly, everyone says that u dont attack with blood seeker, and why the hell not? it is quite possible that opp wont leave a blocker every single turn. Buswacker allows it to trade with a bear on attack. And it can trade with some X/1 creatures as well. And u know what, an early drop that can do 3-6 damage (unblockable, unsoakable) is a-ok in my book.
i know ive been teaching at friend at college to play and can see i may have misstepped a few by starting him off with tricky strategies instead of the more basic approach. I may make him a normal monocolored deck so he can get a better grasp of mechanics before i continue delving into startegy and timing.
ok well i know i said i disliked the use of 'hero' and 'villian' last week, but i think that was only from seeing the same word repeated so often...readin this week i agree villian flows very well in match walkthroughs and is more interesting than he did this and i did this and he did this...etc. Keep up the amazing drafts although you are now costing me cash from how fun you make it sound that now im drafting more.
Sealed is hard. Picking between one crappy color base and another is confusing. And you often have to run subpar card like the War Paint. It is frustrating to read people saying that you shouldn't run the Paint, and that it sucks. It's pretty obvious that you aren't happy to run it from the way you talk about it. You know the inherent risks with cards like that and play around them as best you can. I mean war paint sucks, but if you can get it on a 3 toughness guy bringing him to 5 toughness, that can be tougher to remove.
Totally agree with your assessment of Marsh Casualties. It's really good and will go up in draft/sealed value more as people realize it. It can totally wreck a lot of the highly touted aggro decks in the format, even on turn 2 without kicker. (some stuff that aggro plays that die to an unkicked MC: Plated Geopede, Surrakar Marauder, Goblin Bushwhacker, the 2/1 red ally, Goblin Ruinblaster, Steppe Lynx, Guul Draz Vampire, Hagra Crocodile, River Boa.. ETC).
I really like waiting to blow my sweepers and don't mind trading some life to get that extra creature dead. Some opponents will foolishly over commit to the board creating a situation where they almost can't come back. It's worth the risk in those cases.
At that point in the game I didn't really see it as a major risk to wait.
Re: Merfolk Seastalkers. I really like this card as well. It can totally hose G, R, B, and W decks sometimes, and is even good vs blue as it has islandwalk. However looking at Godot's pool, I don't think they are enough of a force to warrant looking to play blue.
Blood Seeker is far from a good card. It's a classic card that people mis-evaluate in my mind because of it's annoying effect on the game state. First things first, you are playing a 1/1 creature for 2 mana. For an epic failure of the vanilla test like this, the special ability had better be quite good. Blood Seekers special ability SEEMS better than it is because your opponents will complain or bemoan the extra point of damage they take just for casting a creature. The problem is, at the end of the day, this will sometimes (IF dropped on the earliest turn possible) do 3-6 damage, sometimes a bit more, sometimes a bit less. In the meantime, it is a nearly useless 1/1 that will end up as a chump block most of the time.
Compare this with some of the other cheap black creatures.
Vampire Lacerator: 2/2 for B? Crushes the Vanilla test and the drawback isn't even *that* bad. And to be honest, in limited this creature often doesn't cut it.
Guul Draz Vampire: 1/1 for B is on par for the vanilla test, and if you can aggro your opponent down to 10 life or less, it becomes a black Bladetusk Boar. Not amazing but a nice finisher and a pretty good bargain in the right deck.
Surrakar Marauder: 2/1 for 1B is ok, but with a reliable Intimidate trigger, it's a great early beater capable of getting in for 8-10 with ease vs non-black decks.
When you put Blood Seeker in contrast to these other guys, he fails miserably.
I think that those who are advocating running this card are making another classic mistake; they are viewing by it's best case scenario. Sure, getting this guy down on turn 2 he might have some potential for some damage, but what if you rip him in a late game situation? Awful.
What do I like about this card? I like that nobody wants to blow removal on it, and that casting creatures is usually an inevitable part of limited play. This means that if it does go down on turn 2, it can make a decent difference in a race. I also like that it has a certain clock aspect to it. It makes people rethink which creatures to cast and when they do.
Overall though, that card is far from good, it's conditional, and you should look to play other stuff first.
Oh, I still make strange/bad picks. If I catch any breaks for my questionable pick/play decisions in the comments, it's usually because I beat posters to the punch with self-critical remarks in my own analysis, not because I've distracted anyone with cuteness or length. Check out the comments from today's article if you need proof, there are lots of vocal readers who disagree with some of my build and play decisions.
Don't be disheartened, though, your article has an extremely important feature that none of the negative comments can take away: it exists. Find the constructive even in the remarks not intended to be, keep an open mind about pick critiques, and apply the lessons for next time.
(And replay functionality is frustratingly spotty, it's bitten me more than once. The worst is when they work when I start an article, and then they stop working after downtime, but before I've finished...)
First, understand that formatting standards are writer-by-writer on this site. The editor gives articles a once-over for glaring errors, but he doesn't impose standards or change/add content, so one writer doing it one way has no bearing whatsoever on how another writer does it.
Second, special formatting requests *are* a bit of a pain. "Putting the cardnames under the pictures" seems like a simple enough request, but you are talking about converting the draft to the image form, then cutting and pasting the text for all 45 picks one at a time from the draft recorder file to underneath the appropriate image...oh, but wait, the draft recorder file has a carriage return after each card so it reads in list form, so to get that in sentence form, first you have to reformat the recorder text to turn all paragraph marks into ", ". Oh, and if you want them linkable, add parentheses around them. And if you want to preserve the suspense of what was picked, remove the "-->" in front of the picked card...
Anyway, my point is that, yes, it *is* hard to put the cardnames under the draftpictures, at least if you are going to do it right. Basically, *all* the formatting in an article is a pain to set up (I'm constantly fighting with the various editors I use to get my text and images to behave consistently and as desired), so any extra layer of it is just more work in an already-laborious process.
I considered doing a cut-and-paste of the basic draft recorder output into a column, but to me that looks unformatted and out of place, and then people who are fine with the images (the majority) have to scroll past a wall of text to get to the rest of the content, and I can't abide by that. I believe one author who met your request used some slick tagging and mid-article link stuff to let people jump accordingly, but again, that's more work, and I don't know how to do it anyway.
For my articles, I've just gone with the theory that since my game walkthroughs are image-heavy by necessity, there isn't much value in doing extra work to present the draft in text form.
If I'm wrong and you would find value in having access to a text version of a draft despite the image-intensive walkthroughs that follow, let me know. One thing I would be willing to do is throw up the unedited draft-recorder output text onto an outside blog entry, then link to it from within the article. That would only add ~5 minutes to prep time, which is entirely reasonable.
I've gotten my girlfriend to start playing (with my cards... she isn't quite to the point of buying here own yet). I told her about this article and her response was "And don't forget to include holograms". Sigh.
Definitely! These tips are meant help any advanced player teach/play with a less skilled person who may not be totally into the game yet. I actually taught my little brother to play when he was about 14, and now of course he's way better than me. Oh well!
Good article with good advice. I've used many of these techniques while teaching my kids to play and enjoy Magic, so most of this advice applies for any new player who isn't squarely in the target demographic to begin with. ("You're a 22-year old male strategy gamer with disposable income who likes the fantasy genre? Wow, this is going to be a tough sell...")
I met my husband while learning to play UFS, another CCG. We were even on teams together in tournaments. We learned playing MAGIC together a few months ago when Planeswalkers came out on the 360. I built my own green deck and he has made wonderful changes to it and we use each other as playtesters for our decks. It is a great way to spend more time with each other and hey, I usually win against him! But that's because we built an awesome green deck together... I admit, I am one of the rare gamer chicks, totally ready to learn a new game or challenge my hubby. I totally recommend any girls out there to at least give this game a chance! You could have a great time with you guy and maybe even bond a little. (Also, it's fun to be the only chick in the tournament at the game shop!)
I can't explain it much better than I did below. It's about the game plan of the deck, and my sense of how much damage I can expect from a given spell given the game plan of the deck. Technically war paint offers a 2:1, yes, but if played correctly, it does so after it has already led to 4-8 extra damage, at which point it has paid for it's card disadvantage in damage.
Ideally, as with all "buff" auras, I would not maindeck them, but bring them in against decks against which they are most effective, namely red and green. I didn't have that luxury with this pool, and liked its damage potential more than the seekers.
I've already expressed my disappointment with the sludge, but a sure-fire, instant-speed, condition-free five damage in unstable footing is a superior play to the high-variance seeker, who's best-case damage scenario isn't much better than what footing offers anyway.
You were playing against a pretty bad opponent. He refused to block for no good reason, he could have easily traded 2 cards for your 2. And if he had, as he SHOULD have, blue bounce, you could have suffered a massive tempo loss for your troubles. Into the roil kicked against a creature with war paint? game over.
War Paint goes strictly against what I considered your philosophy. It is an aura that does not grant evasion, replaces itself or protect the creature. Meanwhile, you're playing to maximize card advantage with marsh casualties, mosquito and such, all the while playing in your deck cards that a) offer 2 for 1 or b) have 0 board impact. How can you justify running that and sludge/footing over the 2 blood seekers (or other useful cards) is beyond me and just doesn't fit with the experienced and careful player I considered you to be. It just doesn't fit.
I remain unconvinced that blood seekers were a better play than war paint or unstable footing. First off, running the seekers certainly doesn't make the feast playable, nor do they help me play control, and being good against cobra trap barely registers on the scale of things to consider.
With all of this bottom-end stuff (basically Blood Seekers, War Paint, Unstable Footing, Mind Sludge, Vampire's Bite, Goblin Bushwhackers, and Grim Discovery), it becomes a question of how much damage I can expect the card to produce. Villain cast between three and six creatures each game by my count, which seems fairly typical, and since I'm unlikely to attack with a Blood Seeker, six-ish damage feels like the high end. Its low end is zero, and I hate that kind of variance if I have a consistent option like Unstable Footing, which is going to do its 5 every time.
Again, I try to avoid being results-oriented, but as an example, in R1G2, the war paint effectively produced 18 points of damage in the course of three attacks by making a 6/5 giant that was too big to trade with. While that's not a result I am counting on every game, I feel that between haste, making big guys out of weenies, and huge guys out of big guys, war paint is going to generate considerably more damage on average than a seeker, even if the enchanted creature only gets a couple of licks in before being neutralized.
Accordingly, I would still rather run war paint, bushwhackers, and unstable footing for sure over blood seekers with this pool, and it's a close call on blood seeker vs. vampire's bite.
Because 5 > 3, and Unstable Footing is legitimate reach while bite requires a creature going unblocked and opponent not having any tricks in response.
War Paint is not something I'm actively looking to play, but it is better than the bite for filling out an aggressive BR deck, in my opinion. Played carefully, war paint is almost always going to produce more damage than the bite, and an ongoing +2/+2 is obviously superior to a one-shot +3/+0. Bite's potential for life gain isn't completely irrelevant, but it's not at all the heart of the matter when comparing the two.
Really, I don't want to play either in general, but I did want to give it a try to see if the haste feature was as relevant as I thought it might be, and a RB aggro weenie deck (or mono-red) is really the place for it if it's ever going to see play at all.
Yep, art totally matters! I like the groups idea, too. I've never played in a group, but I used to hang out and watch these guys in my dorm play magic in college (they never got up the nerve to ask me to join in... too bad!)
I wouldn't say you should NEVER play frustrating or complicated cards... but definitely avoid them until she's comfortable. (ie, not going to cry). If I'd never seen tricky cards, and got super comfortable playing with easy ones, I think it would be hard for me to "unlearn" my assumptions about the game in order to work in totally new mechanics. Although I guess this depends on how far your girlfriend is planning to get with magic. If she's never going to play anyone but you, maybe it doesn't matter.
Hmmm... if she's getting bored, maybe you should try using some booster packs (Steve and I made up about a hundred one weekend from old boxes of cards). We'd shuffle 3 of each land into a pack without looking at any of the cards, and then just play blind. The games were a little silly, but certainly not boring! It was fun to have no idea what card I'd draw, and usually it was one I'd never seen before.
Thanks! I made a deliberate effort to not overuse "Villain," which as you said was part of the distraction/problem last week. Like, "I was staring at a turn-one Steppe Lynx" instead of "Villain cast a turn-one Steppe Lynx." Hopefully that's a happy medium, and the detractors won't find it so grating that they stop reading...
Lacerator is VERY good. Gruul Daz is playable. Surrkar is solid. But you know what? He either already is playing those cards or doesn't have it, so how does comparing those to the seeker helps here? My argument is that blood seeker is better than war paint and mb sludge/lava axe. Also, combined with bushwacker, it can do some extra damage, helping his 2 gruul daz intimidator finish the job. And the argument about topdecking it being awful, u could say the same about a lot of tiny creatures. Ever topdecked a llanowar elf in the late game of a m10 match? its horrible. And still, its a solid card. (not comparing elf to seeker, im saying that being useless in late game does not make a card crap). Lastly, everyone says that u dont attack with blood seeker, and why the hell not? it is quite possible that opp wont leave a blocker every single turn. Buswacker allows it to trade with a bear on attack. And it can trade with some X/1 creatures as well. And u know what, an early drop that can do 3-6 damage (unblockable, unsoakable) is a-ok in my book.
i know ive been teaching at friend at college to play and can see i may have misstepped a few by starting him off with tricky strategies instead of the more basic approach. I may make him a normal monocolored deck so he can get a better grasp of mechanics before i continue delving into startegy and timing.
ok well i know i said i disliked the use of 'hero' and 'villian' last week, but i think that was only from seeing the same word repeated so often...readin this week i agree villian flows very well in match walkthroughs and is more interesting than he did this and i did this and he did this...etc. Keep up the amazing drafts although you are now costing me cash from how fun you make it sound that now im drafting more.
Sealed is hard. Picking between one crappy color base and another is confusing. And you often have to run subpar card like the War Paint. It is frustrating to read people saying that you shouldn't run the Paint, and that it sucks. It's pretty obvious that you aren't happy to run it from the way you talk about it. You know the inherent risks with cards like that and play around them as best you can. I mean war paint sucks, but if you can get it on a 3 toughness guy bringing him to 5 toughness, that can be tougher to remove.
Totally agree with your assessment of Marsh Casualties. It's really good and will go up in draft/sealed value more as people realize it. It can totally wreck a lot of the highly touted aggro decks in the format, even on turn 2 without kicker. (some stuff that aggro plays that die to an unkicked MC: Plated Geopede, Surrakar Marauder, Goblin Bushwhacker, the 2/1 red ally, Goblin Ruinblaster, Steppe Lynx, Guul Draz Vampire, Hagra Crocodile, River Boa.. ETC).
I really like waiting to blow my sweepers and don't mind trading some life to get that extra creature dead. Some opponents will foolishly over commit to the board creating a situation where they almost can't come back. It's worth the risk in those cases.
At that point in the game I didn't really see it as a major risk to wait.
Re: Merfolk Seastalkers. I really like this card as well. It can totally hose G, R, B, and W decks sometimes, and is even good vs blue as it has islandwalk. However looking at Godot's pool, I don't think they are enough of a force to warrant looking to play blue.
Thank you! I've been lurking on this site for a while, mostly reading Steve's articles... it's fun to "come out" and write my own.
Blood Seeker is far from a good card. It's a classic card that people mis-evaluate in my mind because of it's annoying effect on the game state. First things first, you are playing a 1/1 creature for 2 mana. For an epic failure of the vanilla test like this, the special ability had better be quite good. Blood Seekers special ability SEEMS better than it is because your opponents will complain or bemoan the extra point of damage they take just for casting a creature. The problem is, at the end of the day, this will sometimes (IF dropped on the earliest turn possible) do 3-6 damage, sometimes a bit more, sometimes a bit less. In the meantime, it is a nearly useless 1/1 that will end up as a chump block most of the time.
Compare this with some of the other cheap black creatures.
Vampire Lacerator: 2/2 for B? Crushes the Vanilla test and the drawback isn't even *that* bad. And to be honest, in limited this creature often doesn't cut it.
Guul Draz Vampire: 1/1 for B is on par for the vanilla test, and if you can aggro your opponent down to 10 life or less, it becomes a black Bladetusk Boar. Not amazing but a nice finisher and a pretty good bargain in the right deck.
Surrakar Marauder: 2/1 for 1B is ok, but with a reliable Intimidate trigger, it's a great early beater capable of getting in for 8-10 with ease vs non-black decks.
When you put Blood Seeker in contrast to these other guys, he fails miserably.
I think that those who are advocating running this card are making another classic mistake; they are viewing by it's best case scenario. Sure, getting this guy down on turn 2 he might have some potential for some damage, but what if you rip him in a late game situation? Awful.
What do I like about this card? I like that nobody wants to blow removal on it, and that casting creatures is usually an inevitable part of limited play. This means that if it does go down on turn 2, it can make a decent difference in a race. I also like that it has a certain clock aspect to it. It makes people rethink which creatures to cast and when they do.
Overall though, that card is far from good, it's conditional, and you should look to play other stuff first.
Oh, I still make strange/bad picks. If I catch any breaks for my questionable pick/play decisions in the comments, it's usually because I beat posters to the punch with self-critical remarks in my own analysis, not because I've distracted anyone with cuteness or length. Check out the comments from today's article if you need proof, there are lots of vocal readers who disagree with some of my build and play decisions.
Don't be disheartened, though, your article has an extremely important feature that none of the negative comments can take away: it exists. Find the constructive even in the remarks not intended to be, keep an open mind about pick critiques, and apply the lessons for next time.
(And replay functionality is frustratingly spotty, it's bitten me more than once. The worst is when they work when I start an article, and then they stop working after downtime, but before I've finished...)
First, understand that formatting standards are writer-by-writer on this site. The editor gives articles a once-over for glaring errors, but he doesn't impose standards or change/add content, so one writer doing it one way has no bearing whatsoever on how another writer does it.
Second, special formatting requests *are* a bit of a pain. "Putting the cardnames under the pictures" seems like a simple enough request, but you are talking about converting the draft to the image form, then cutting and pasting the text for all 45 picks one at a time from the draft recorder file to underneath the appropriate image...oh, but wait, the draft recorder file has a carriage return after each card so it reads in list form, so to get that in sentence form, first you have to reformat the recorder text to turn all paragraph marks into ", ". Oh, and if you want them linkable, add parentheses around them. And if you want to preserve the suspense of what was picked, remove the "-->" in front of the picked card...
Anyway, my point is that, yes, it *is* hard to put the cardnames under the draftpictures, at least if you are going to do it right. Basically, *all* the formatting in an article is a pain to set up (I'm constantly fighting with the various editors I use to get my text and images to behave consistently and as desired), so any extra layer of it is just more work in an already-laborious process.
I considered doing a cut-and-paste of the basic draft recorder output into a column, but to me that looks unformatted and out of place, and then people who are fine with the images (the majority) have to scroll past a wall of text to get to the rest of the content, and I can't abide by that. I believe one author who met your request used some slick tagging and mid-article link stuff to let people jump accordingly, but again, that's more work, and I don't know how to do it anyway.
For my articles, I've just gone with the theory that since my game walkthroughs are image-heavy by necessity, there isn't much value in doing extra work to present the draft in text form.
If I'm wrong and you would find value in having access to a text version of a draft despite the image-intensive walkthroughs that follow, let me know. One thing I would be willing to do is throw up the unedited draft-recorder output text onto an outside blog entry, then link to it from within the article. That would only add ~5 minutes to prep time, which is entirely reasonable.
I've gotten my girlfriend to start playing (with my cards... she isn't quite to the point of buying here own yet). I told her about this article and her response was "And don't forget to include holograms". Sigh.
Definitely! These tips are meant help any advanced player teach/play with a less skilled person who may not be totally into the game yet. I actually taught my little brother to play when he was about 14, and now of course he's way better than me. Oh well!
Good article with good advice. I've used many of these techniques while teaching my kids to play and enjoy Magic, so most of this advice applies for any new player who isn't squarely in the target demographic to begin with. ("You're a 22-year old male strategy gamer with disposable income who likes the fantasy genre? Wow, this is going to be a tough sell...")
I met my husband while learning to play UFS, another CCG. We were even on teams together in tournaments. We learned playing MAGIC together a few months ago when Planeswalkers came out on the 360. I built my own green deck and he has made wonderful changes to it and we use each other as playtesters for our decks. It is a great way to spend more time with each other and hey, I usually win against him! But that's because we built an awesome green deck together... I admit, I am one of the rare gamer chicks, totally ready to learn a new game or challenge my hubby. I totally recommend any girls out there to at least give this game a chance! You could have a great time with you guy and maybe even bond a little. (Also, it's fun to be the only chick in the tournament at the game shop!)
I can't explain it much better than I did below. It's about the game plan of the deck, and my sense of how much damage I can expect from a given spell given the game plan of the deck. Technically war paint offers a 2:1, yes, but if played correctly, it does so after it has already led to 4-8 extra damage, at which point it has paid for it's card disadvantage in damage.
Ideally, as with all "buff" auras, I would not maindeck them, but bring them in against decks against which they are most effective, namely red and green. I didn't have that luxury with this pool, and liked its damage potential more than the seekers.
I've already expressed my disappointment with the sludge, but a sure-fire, instant-speed, condition-free five damage in unstable footing is a superior play to the high-variance seeker, who's best-case damage scenario isn't much better than what footing offers anyway.
You were playing against a pretty bad opponent. He refused to block for no good reason, he could have easily traded 2 cards for your 2. And if he had, as he SHOULD have, blue bounce, you could have suffered a massive tempo loss for your troubles. Into the roil kicked against a creature with war paint? game over.
War Paint goes strictly against what I considered your philosophy. It is an aura that does not grant evasion, replaces itself or protect the creature. Meanwhile, you're playing to maximize card advantage with marsh casualties, mosquito and such, all the while playing in your deck cards that a) offer 2 for 1 or b) have 0 board impact. How can you justify running that and sludge/footing over the 2 blood seekers (or other useful cards) is beyond me and just doesn't fit with the experienced and careful player I considered you to be. It just doesn't fit.
I remain unconvinced that blood seekers were a better play than war paint or unstable footing. First off, running the seekers certainly doesn't make the feast playable, nor do they help me play control, and being good against cobra trap barely registers on the scale of things to consider.
With all of this bottom-end stuff (basically Blood Seekers, War Paint, Unstable Footing, Mind Sludge, Vampire's Bite, Goblin Bushwhackers, and Grim Discovery), it becomes a question of how much damage I can expect the card to produce. Villain cast between three and six creatures each game by my count, which seems fairly typical, and since I'm unlikely to attack with a Blood Seeker, six-ish damage feels like the high end. Its low end is zero, and I hate that kind of variance if I have a consistent option like Unstable Footing, which is going to do its 5 every time.
Again, I try to avoid being results-oriented, but as an example, in R1G2, the war paint effectively produced 18 points of damage in the course of three attacks by making a 6/5 giant that was too big to trade with. While that's not a result I am counting on every game, I feel that between haste, making big guys out of weenies, and huge guys out of big guys, war paint is going to generate considerably more damage on average than a seeker, even if the enchanted creature only gets a couple of licks in before being neutralized.
Accordingly, I would still rather run war paint, bushwhackers, and unstable footing for sure over blood seekers with this pool, and it's a close call on blood seeker vs. vampire's bite.
Because 5 > 3, and Unstable Footing is legitimate reach while bite requires a creature going unblocked and opponent not having any tricks in response.
War Paint is not something I'm actively looking to play, but it is better than the bite for filling out an aggressive BR deck, in my opinion. Played carefully, war paint is almost always going to produce more damage than the bite, and an ongoing +2/+2 is obviously superior to a one-shot +3/+0. Bite's potential for life gain isn't completely irrelevant, but it's not at all the heart of the matter when comparing the two.
Really, I don't want to play either in general, but I did want to give it a try to see if the haste feature was as relevant as I thought it might be, and a RB aggro weenie deck (or mono-red) is really the place for it if it's ever going to see play at all.
Really?
I must play vastly differently than most...
I almost never right clicked, except when casting and activating abilities. However they've already moved that to be mirrored with the left click.
That leaves concessions as the only other thing that I current use right clicking for in game.
I believe a lot of our right clicking dependence is based on our current UI limitations more than anything.
I mean, somehow macs have survived a decade without them and they have a muched beloved OS...
The blackberry I'm typing on right now only has one "button" as well, and again, is quite functional because of good UI decisions.
Yep, art totally matters! I like the groups idea, too. I've never played in a group, but I used to hang out and watch these guys in my dorm play magic in college (they never got up the nerve to ask me to join in... too bad!)
I wouldn't say you should NEVER play frustrating or complicated cards... but definitely avoid them until she's comfortable. (ie, not going to cry). If I'd never seen tricky cards, and got super comfortable playing with easy ones, I think it would be hard for me to "unlearn" my assumptions about the game in order to work in totally new mechanics. Although I guess this depends on how far your girlfriend is planning to get with magic. If she's never going to play anyone but you, maybe it doesn't matter.
Thanks! Glad some girlfriends are reading this.
Hey, faeries was one of the top decks for a while, right?
Sounds like you'll definitely win her over. Good luck!
Hmmm... if she's getting bored, maybe you should try using some booster packs (Steve and I made up about a hundred one weekend from old boxes of cards). We'd shuffle 3 of each land into a pack without looking at any of the cards, and then just play blind. The games were a little silly, but certainly not boring! It was fun to have no idea what card I'd draw, and usually it was one I'd never seen before.
I guess I'll have to write again...
I have to admit, I've never really made my own deck, unless you count constructing one from a booster draft.
Maybe I'll have to try making one now! I can start with my unicorn collection (haha)