In terms of efficiency, yes, MTGO is better. I love it. The main reason I took a couple breaks from Magic was because I didn't have anyone to play, or anywhere to pick up singles. MTGO got me back into the game.
However, I get much more satisfaction playing paper magic than MTGO. It's awesome that I can find a game 24/7 online, but I don't care as much if I win or lose. If I win, cool. If I lose, oh well, I can just find another game. Even if it's a close game, my heart doesn't race unless I'm in a tournament. When I'm playing paper magic, the games mean a little more to me.
The same comes with deck construction. It is awesome to be able to get whatever cards you want online with a couple clicks. However, there is something satisfying about slowly piecing a deck together and watching it come to completion over a few weeks.
When I first started playing 14 years ago or so, my Saturday nights would be staying up late playing Magic with my dad and cousins doing huge multiplayer games and drinking a lot of Mountain Dew (taking a break for Are You Afraid of the Dark?, obv). Unless I make some close, personal relationships on MTGO, which I find doubtful, I will never replicate (heh) that feeling online.
The cheating is just different. The biggest cheats are outside assistance and playing on other peoples accounts.
As for chess clocks - no way it is 90%. I know my reaction to any chess clock suggestions is outrage. I liked chess clocks when I played speed chess competitively, but never, ever outside of that. And I'd loce to dump chess clocks on MTGO if there was any alternative.
As for friends - it was the number one reason for playing paper in the article on SCG, and it is the main reason that I am playing paper tonight. Social interactions online are a very pale imitation.
I used to play paper exclusively and shunned MTGO for reasons that I didn't need two identical collections plus the lack of "old" cards online. With MED1 that changed, and so did my attitude.
I now only play online and sold off a large part of my collection to help finance it. Online play provides me opportunities that I cannot achieve in paper: playing in tournaments. As I moved to college in a part that had no active or competitive Magic scene, MTGO gave me a chance to compete in tournaments and pusht he edge of my play skills. For this I like to play online.
"Note: this is part two of a two part series. Part one, “Ten Reasons Why MTGO is Better than Real Life Magic” appears on another website, one dedicated to paper Magic."
I think Part One is why real life is better than mtgo. Anyway I've read and loved both parts of your articles as I also play both MTGO and paper magic. It does get expensive having to get 8 copies of every card, 4 online and 4 in paper, but each has its advantages and disadvantages as you've so thoroughly pointed out in your 2 article series. Well written!
I'm sure it gets lumped into Bookkeepping, but NO CHEATING. I don't think that outright cheating is as rampant in the game as it once was, but just the constant vigalance of watching your opponent detracts from the game. Not only that, but things like worrying about spectators giving tells, marked cards, slow play, and various other issues just aren't a problem in MTGO. In fact the only real issues like this are purposly exploiting a bug, and a disconnected opponent. One is rare, the other doesn't do anything but annoy.
As far as the social aspect of the game - Friends, Skype, and Team Viewer. Watch each other draft/play, chat, playtest, trash talk, borrow cards, cube draft (its a chore - but its fun), etc. Its a hell of a way to spend an evening.
Things like "never missing a trigger" is that it is somewhat conteracted by things like misclicks and pressing F2 one too many times.
Oh, and the time clock! One of the things I'm sure that 90% of the players out there wish could be part of paper Magic.
I quit paper magic recently for a much different reason. While the travel was usually annoying (2+ hours to edison, NJ.... 45minutes to an hour to philly, and even 20-30 minutes to the "local" card shop.) it was usually the fact that the larger tournaments I wanted to go to fell on days my girlfriend was off. While it is nice to get out of the house and make "friends"... I'd much rather draft at home and help her with dinner or something.
2. You can play other games. You don't have to just play mtg at an mtg event or venue. You can bust out your old Jyhad or Illuminati or L5R cards, or even play crazy 8's or a boardgame like Settlers. On MTGO people pretty much only talk about mtg and sometimes warcraft as a joke. If I went to a tournament for a whole day or a weekend, it might be nice to play other games in there too.
1. Getting out of the house and making friends. You can call your buddies to meet you at the store or have a heck of a good time travelling to a tournament. You can reconnect with old pro's you haven't seen in a while, meet new people, drink beers, etc. Sure, people at card stores and tournaments are nerds, but so are we if we're playing this. MTGO is a solitary activity that tries to emulate a social one. I've heard it said of televsion that it gives the illusion of participating in society. The same is true for MTGO. You can't really have conversations with people you're playing with, or between your games, really. Sure you can buddy list people, but sometimes you have a better chance of seeing a Wizards employee than some random buddy. I like making new friends and having conversations. I guess that's one of the reasons why I've never played in a tournament on MTGO; I'd rather go outside or read a book than be committed to the screen for hours. This isn't to bash people who do like tournaments, they're just not my c.o.t.
Wizards had a slogan for its DND ads to compete with World of Warcraft: "As long as you're sitting in your basement pretending to be an elf, you might as well have some friends over."
(Unluckily for me, the two card stores near me that used to have game tables have both gone out of business; mtg paper dealing is a difficult business model.)
Cute idea. The statement about books being dead was a little over the top. :) I seem to be unable to finish my huge list of books to read so until that's done Books are very much not dead for me. The idea of spelling out someone's name is fun. Not sure what you'd do if it was Pesci. 5 cards does not a deck make. :p
On a side note in the game against the monoblack deck with the Megrim you could have held some land. It is often a good idea when you know you are facing discard to do so.
That's a very good point, actually! I think that lower prices will help a lot of these formats get new/more people that otherwise wouldn't have bothered.
Based on the marketplace prices, most of the dropping classic cards haven't actually sold near the listed "last week" prices for a while. Most dealers, including the one which the price guide is based on, have simply kept their prices artificially high on speculation that demand would recover and are finally dropping closer to market value. I don't, therefore, think there is any reason to see this as a particularly bad week for the older formats.
I was an online only player for about 4 years. I decided that I never turn the program on anymore and sold all my cards. I went back to playing paper magic. I had such a hard time. I didn't want to go through sorted boxes and random piles of cards just to build decks and having to find sleeves (this is especially hard when you don't have a card store within 60 miles of you). Then I had to get a play group together (which comparatively wasn't that hard). One thing you failed to mention about MTGO was the affordability of the cards, yeah you mentioned buying cards and only needing 4 copies, but generally the actual price of cards is far lower then that of the paper world.
I would regularly spend my 100 dollars a paycheck towards MTGO in creative ways, yeah I'd draft, but I'm not consistent enough to win all the time, though I do win occasionally. But I'd really just load up a cart at Traders and build literally 5 or 6 new decks for 100 dollars. You can't do that in the paper world. I tried to build just a fun casual deck from one of my past articles here on PureMTGO that I figured would be really cheap (I probably spent 25 dollars for it on Traders) It cost me close to 100 dollars in the paper world.
You don't see random rares for 12 -50 cents in the paper world. Most are at least a dollar and even then you fill completely ripped off because you are not going to use this card in any other deck.
So along with only needing 4 of any one card (yeah in the paper world you can have your copies "travel" around but who likes to do that) it is actually more economical because the price of the cards are far lower than that of the paper world as well.
Just for balance...
-- When you are playing paper magic if you attend a pre-release or draft people will often leave their unwanted commons on the tables. For poorer players this means catching up on 4-ofs that might actually cost you something otherwise. That might not seem like a big deal if you have many boxes of 5k cards each but for the average player it is. Neutral Ground was famous for this and as long as you checked with the people at the table that they really were done with them you could take what you wanted. A friend and I actually went through the trouble of collecting those scraps for a few months (thousands of commons and uncommons) and sent them to a new player in another country. Can't really do that online. People DO give away commons, more particular the couple of free-bots which are sponsored by stores like mtgotraders. However those 32 or 64 cards are it for the month or 3. Which leads to the 2nd thing...
-- Trading in paper magic has its hazards. You do have to watch for thieves etc but given a certain amount of vigilance (that should come naturally if you live in a big city) you will find trading both a rewarding and social event almost as much fun as actually playing. I remember turning a handful of cheap rares into a good box full of decent playable rares over the period of a day trading at a convention. That was near when I first started and had a relatively low end collection. That seems far less likely online where despite the fact that trading should be easy to initiate it takes a long time and is arduous. People have no good place to advertise without running into BOT spam.
That said for the most part I agree with your points. I sold my collection years ago and have few cards now. I still occasionally find cards hidden under things but generally speaking I have no magic cards left. I am glad to not have to heft them around to find a game, though the casualty of this my girlfriend and I no longer play mtg together. I did build a couple of proxy decks for us but that doesn't really suffice.
I miss Neutral Ground (at least the idea of it) but the truth is even while it was still open I stopped playing there years ago. MTGO is so easy and convenient and since I am often on a night time schedule I can find a game any time I feel like it, though night time waits can be a bit longer for 'Special' Formats.
Very nice article Pete, I think you covered all the important aspects of the subject which is why MTGO is better than MTG.
However I know that there are also a lot of people out there who are hardcore MTG players but never ever in their entire life truely played an online game. And I believe that those people would also have things to say about why MTG (in their opinion) is much better than MTGO.
And an important note: I agree with everything you said but I also believe that MTGO has some downsides as well. The first things I can think of are:
1- Misclicks: That happened to me a lot in the past, and is still happening. You just can't experience such a thing while playing with real cards on a real table against a real opponent.
2- Lag: This is a purely technical issue and sometimes it's getting out of hand (welcome to the online world!). There were times when I clicked "okay" and noting happened so I clicked again and ooops!... just missed my chance to attack. This is only a problem of the online community.
3- The Annoyance of Anonymity: People can hide behind a Goblin Warchief avatar and act like one! Bad sportsmanship, leaving games hanging, disconnecting just before the game ends etc...
4- The neverending debate of "What's Casual" in the Casual Room: Sometimes it's fun to watch people argue about it but I know I've been blocked by many just because I cast a Wrath of God or just played an expensive dual land in the Casual Room. Not kidding, that happened. And that can get boring after some time.
5- Scammers: It's very unlikely that you can get scammed while trading with/for real cards and just look at Mtgotraders' Scammer List and see the difference.
6- No Big Online Events: Yes that is changing but change comes slowly. All the well known pros are paper players playing with paper cards. WotC loves the paper game and therefore so do the pros. Ever heard about an Online States Championship? Does other sources such as starcitygames.com supports online play and organize online tournaments?
These are the things I can think of right now but I'm sure there are other things as well.
Again, this was a well thought and well written article.
I agree that many people tend to shuffle illegally in paper magic. However, Elsan is right, even someone who shuffles legally for 20 minutes is not going to have the same completely randomness as MTGO. As a matter of fact, if you disregard cards that affect the order of your library (put on top or bottom of library, etc) the MTGO shuffler doesnt even shuffle. Every time you draw a card, it is randomly selected from the remaining cards in your deck. No shuffling involved, just randomization. I am not sure if this is good or bad. It seems to put more luck into the game than in paper. I mean, is it even possible for someone to be over 2000 rating in constructed online? There are several players above 2000 in paper.
I would love to see more emphasis or the pro tour online, but is the shuffler the main reason we may never see the whole pro tour online?
Also, some nice 'pre-canned' searches that I've been using a lot.
Month, showing only sealed events:
http://www.mtgotools.com/?q=calendar%2F2009-07&tid[]=10&tid[]=11&tid[]=13&tid[]=14&comment_count=0
Month, showing only Constructed Events:
http://www.mtgotools.com/?q=calendar%2F2009-07&tid[]=12&tid[]=6&tid[]=4&tid[]=8&tid[]=7&tid[]=1&tid[]=18&comment_count=0
Month, showing only Events with repsonses/cardpools/etc
http://www.mtgotools.com/?q=calendar%2F2009-07&tid[]=9&tid[]=10&tid[]=12&tid[]=11&tid[]=5&tid[]=6&tid[]=2&tid[]=4&tid[]=20&tid[]=8&tid[]=13&tid[]=7&tid[]=3&tid[]=15&tid[]=14&tid[]=1&tid[]=18&comment_count=1
I agree with the shuffler except that I've never heard of mana weaving. The shuffler just seems to suck more because it's truly random. Even shuffling for 10 minutes, it will not be truly random.
Cool idea for the MTGO Tools website. However, when I set the filters to just set releases and then get the ical feed, it seems that the ical feed is still set for all the events.
How do I go about getting an ical feed for just set release events?
i completly agree with all these reasons. I will add 3 other reasons :
> To open a pack with a Juzam Djinn into : as well juzam is an example, but i am so glad to crack packs and to discover some old iconical cards into ... plus the price of many old casual cards are affordable in mtgo, although you have to pay them a huge amount of bucks irl
> Drafting old series : where could you find any Tempest draft outthere than on mtgo ? Really, it is a pleasure to me to draft old sets...
> Find opponents : if i got a computer & an internet connection, i can play mtgo everywhere without taking a heavy collection with me, and even in a desert, i can find opponents in every format i want (24-7 as you well mentioned).
4 copies are mostly enough - for example if you actually try to enter a 2nd constructed event (something I don't entirely agree with, but depends on the circumstances) you cannot submit the same cards that are still being used in the 1st constructed event. I'm just saying this because I remember this one stumping a large amount of people when we had the free to enter constructed events of v3 (and also because, IIRC, it worked differently in v2).
In terms of efficiency, yes, MTGO is better. I love it. The main reason I took a couple breaks from Magic was because I didn't have anyone to play, or anywhere to pick up singles. MTGO got me back into the game.
However, I get much more satisfaction playing paper magic than MTGO. It's awesome that I can find a game 24/7 online, but I don't care as much if I win or lose. If I win, cool. If I lose, oh well, I can just find another game. Even if it's a close game, my heart doesn't race unless I'm in a tournament. When I'm playing paper magic, the games mean a little more to me.
The same comes with deck construction. It is awesome to be able to get whatever cards you want online with a couple clicks. However, there is something satisfying about slowly piecing a deck together and watching it come to completion over a few weeks.
When I first started playing 14 years ago or so, my Saturday nights would be staying up late playing Magic with my dad and cousins doing huge multiplayer games and drinking a lot of Mountain Dew (taking a break for Are You Afraid of the Dark?, obv). Unless I make some close, personal relationships on MTGO, which I find doubtful, I will never replicate (heh) that feeling online.
The cheating is just different. The biggest cheats are outside assistance and playing on other peoples accounts.
As for chess clocks - no way it is 90%. I know my reaction to any chess clock suggestions is outrage. I liked chess clocks when I played speed chess competitively, but never, ever outside of that. And I'd loce to dump chess clocks on MTGO if there was any alternative.
As for friends - it was the number one reason for playing paper in the article on SCG, and it is the main reason that I am playing paper tonight. Social interactions online are a very pale imitation.
I used to play paper exclusively and shunned MTGO for reasons that I didn't need two identical collections plus the lack of "old" cards online. With MED1 that changed, and so did my attitude.
I now only play online and sold off a large part of my collection to help finance it. Online play provides me opportunities that I cannot achieve in paper: playing in tournaments. As I moved to college in a part that had no active or competitive Magic scene, MTGO gave me a chance to compete in tournaments and pusht he edge of my play skills. For this I like to play online.
just pointing out a typo in your 2nd paragraph:
"Note: this is part two of a two part series. Part one, “Ten Reasons Why MTGO is Better than Real Life Magic” appears on another website, one dedicated to paper Magic."
I think Part One is why real life is better than mtgo. Anyway I've read and loved both parts of your articles as I also play both MTGO and paper magic. It does get expensive having to get 8 copies of every card, 4 online and 4 in paper, but each has its advantages and disadvantages as you've so thoroughly pointed out in your 2 article series. Well written!
I'm sure it gets lumped into Bookkeepping, but NO CHEATING. I don't think that outright cheating is as rampant in the game as it once was, but just the constant vigalance of watching your opponent detracts from the game. Not only that, but things like worrying about spectators giving tells, marked cards, slow play, and various other issues just aren't a problem in MTGO. In fact the only real issues like this are purposly exploiting a bug, and a disconnected opponent. One is rare, the other doesn't do anything but annoy.
As far as the social aspect of the game - Friends, Skype, and Team Viewer. Watch each other draft/play, chat, playtest, trash talk, borrow cards, cube draft (its a chore - but its fun), etc. Its a hell of a way to spend an evening.
Things like "never missing a trigger" is that it is somewhat conteracted by things like misclicks and pressing F2 one too many times.
Oh, and the time clock! One of the things I'm sure that 90% of the players out there wish could be part of paper Magic.
I quit paper magic recently for a much different reason. While the travel was usually annoying (2+ hours to edison, NJ.... 45minutes to an hour to philly, and even 20-30 minutes to the "local" card shop.) it was usually the fact that the larger tournaments I wanted to go to fell on days my girlfriend was off. While it is nice to get out of the house and make "friends"... I'd much rather draft at home and help her with dinner or something.
You are now offically my hero with the release of that site.
Also forgot:
2. You can play other games. You don't have to just play mtg at an mtg event or venue. You can bust out your old Jyhad or Illuminati or L5R cards, or even play crazy 8's or a boardgame like Settlers. On MTGO people pretty much only talk about mtg and sometimes warcraft as a joke. If I went to a tournament for a whole day or a weekend, it might be nice to play other games in there too.
These are some good points, I'll add a few more:
Advantages of paper:
1. Getting out of the house and making friends. You can call your buddies to meet you at the store or have a heck of a good time travelling to a tournament. You can reconnect with old pro's you haven't seen in a while, meet new people, drink beers, etc. Sure, people at card stores and tournaments are nerds, but so are we if we're playing this. MTGO is a solitary activity that tries to emulate a social one. I've heard it said of televsion that it gives the illusion of participating in society. The same is true for MTGO. You can't really have conversations with people you're playing with, or between your games, really. Sure you can buddy list people, but sometimes you have a better chance of seeing a Wizards employee than some random buddy. I like making new friends and having conversations. I guess that's one of the reasons why I've never played in a tournament on MTGO; I'd rather go outside or read a book than be committed to the screen for hours. This isn't to bash people who do like tournaments, they're just not my c.o.t.
Wizards had a slogan for its DND ads to compete with World of Warcraft: "As long as you're sitting in your basement pretending to be an elf, you might as well have some friends over."
(Unluckily for me, the two card stores near me that used to have game tables have both gone out of business; mtg paper dealing is a difficult business model.)
Cute idea. The statement about books being dead was a little over the top. :) I seem to be unable to finish my huge list of books to read so until that's done Books are very much not dead for me. The idea of spelling out someone's name is fun. Not sure what you'd do if it was Pesci. 5 cards does not a deck make. :p
On a side note in the game against the monoblack deck with the Megrim you could have held some land. It is often a good idea when you know you are facing discard to do so.
Good Article. Keep them coming :)
That's a very good point, actually! I think that lower prices will help a lot of these formats get new/more people that otherwise wouldn't have bothered.
Based on the marketplace prices, most of the dropping classic cards haven't actually sold near the listed "last week" prices for a while. Most dealers, including the one which the price guide is based on, have simply kept their prices artificially high on speculation that demand would recover and are finally dropping closer to market value. I don't, therefore, think there is any reason to see this as a particularly bad week for the older formats.
I was an online only player for about 4 years. I decided that I never turn the program on anymore and sold all my cards. I went back to playing paper magic. I had such a hard time. I didn't want to go through sorted boxes and random piles of cards just to build decks and having to find sleeves (this is especially hard when you don't have a card store within 60 miles of you). Then I had to get a play group together (which comparatively wasn't that hard). One thing you failed to mention about MTGO was the affordability of the cards, yeah you mentioned buying cards and only needing 4 copies, but generally the actual price of cards is far lower then that of the paper world.
I would regularly spend my 100 dollars a paycheck towards MTGO in creative ways, yeah I'd draft, but I'm not consistent enough to win all the time, though I do win occasionally. But I'd really just load up a cart at Traders and build literally 5 or 6 new decks for 100 dollars. You can't do that in the paper world. I tried to build just a fun casual deck from one of my past articles here on PureMTGO that I figured would be really cheap (I probably spent 25 dollars for it on Traders) It cost me close to 100 dollars in the paper world.
You don't see random rares for 12 -50 cents in the paper world. Most are at least a dollar and even then you fill completely ripped off because you are not going to use this card in any other deck.
So along with only needing 4 of any one card (yeah in the paper world you can have your copies "travel" around but who likes to do that) it is actually more economical because the price of the cards are far lower than that of the paper world as well.
I love the article.
Just for balance...
-- When you are playing paper magic if you attend a pre-release or draft people will often leave their unwanted commons on the tables. For poorer players this means catching up on 4-ofs that might actually cost you something otherwise. That might not seem like a big deal if you have many boxes of 5k cards each but for the average player it is. Neutral Ground was famous for this and as long as you checked with the people at the table that they really were done with them you could take what you wanted. A friend and I actually went through the trouble of collecting those scraps for a few months (thousands of commons and uncommons) and sent them to a new player in another country. Can't really do that online. People DO give away commons, more particular the couple of free-bots which are sponsored by stores like mtgotraders. However those 32 or 64 cards are it for the month or 3. Which leads to the 2nd thing...
-- Trading in paper magic has its hazards. You do have to watch for thieves etc but given a certain amount of vigilance (that should come naturally if you live in a big city) you will find trading both a rewarding and social event almost as much fun as actually playing. I remember turning a handful of cheap rares into a good box full of decent playable rares over the period of a day trading at a convention. That was near when I first started and had a relatively low end collection. That seems far less likely online where despite the fact that trading should be easy to initiate it takes a long time and is arduous. People have no good place to advertise without running into BOT spam.
That said for the most part I agree with your points. I sold my collection years ago and have few cards now. I still occasionally find cards hidden under things but generally speaking I have no magic cards left. I am glad to not have to heft them around to find a game, though the casualty of this my girlfriend and I no longer play mtg together. I did build a couple of proxy decks for us but that doesn't really suffice.
I miss Neutral Ground (at least the idea of it) but the truth is even while it was still open I stopped playing there years ago. MTGO is so easy and convenient and since I am often on a night time schedule I can find a game any time I feel like it, though night time waits can be a bit longer for 'Special' Formats.
Very nice article Pete, I think you covered all the important aspects of the subject which is why MTGO is better than MTG.
However I know that there are also a lot of people out there who are hardcore MTG players but never ever in their entire life truely played an online game. And I believe that those people would also have things to say about why MTG (in their opinion) is much better than MTGO.
And an important note: I agree with everything you said but I also believe that MTGO has some downsides as well. The first things I can think of are:
1- Misclicks: That happened to me a lot in the past, and is still happening. You just can't experience such a thing while playing with real cards on a real table against a real opponent.
2- Lag: This is a purely technical issue and sometimes it's getting out of hand (welcome to the online world!). There were times when I clicked "okay" and noting happened so I clicked again and ooops!... just missed my chance to attack. This is only a problem of the online community.
3- The Annoyance of Anonymity: People can hide behind a Goblin Warchief avatar and act like one! Bad sportsmanship, leaving games hanging, disconnecting just before the game ends etc...
4- The neverending debate of "What's Casual" in the Casual Room: Sometimes it's fun to watch people argue about it but I know I've been blocked by many just because I cast a Wrath of God or just played an expensive dual land in the Casual Room. Not kidding, that happened. And that can get boring after some time.
5- Scammers: It's very unlikely that you can get scammed while trading with/for real cards and just look at Mtgotraders' Scammer List and see the difference.
6- No Big Online Events: Yes that is changing but change comes slowly. All the well known pros are paper players playing with paper cards. WotC loves the paper game and therefore so do the pros. Ever heard about an Online States Championship? Does other sources such as starcitygames.com supports online play and organize online tournaments?
These are the things I can think of right now but I'm sure there are other things as well.
Again, this was a well thought and well written article.
Thank you.
LE
7) i agree though i am one of the players you are writing about. Thanks to help me understanding that problem.
I agree that many people tend to shuffle illegally in paper magic. However, Elsan is right, even someone who shuffles legally for 20 minutes is not going to have the same completely randomness as MTGO. As a matter of fact, if you disregard cards that affect the order of your library (put on top or bottom of library, etc) the MTGO shuffler doesnt even shuffle. Every time you draw a card, it is randomly selected from the remaining cards in your deck. No shuffling involved, just randomization. I am not sure if this is good or bad. It seems to put more luck into the game than in paper. I mean, is it even possible for someone to be over 2000 rating in constructed online? There are several players above 2000 in paper.
I would love to see more emphasis or the pro tour online, but is the shuffler the main reason we may never see the whole pro tour online?
Horray! It's up. I was getting ready to brandish my pitchfork.
Also, some nice 'pre-canned' searches that I've been using a lot.
Month, showing only sealed events:
http://www.mtgotools.com/?q=calendar%2F2009-07&tid[]=10&tid[]=11&tid[]=13&tid[]=14&comment_count=0
Month, showing only Constructed Events:
http://www.mtgotools.com/?q=calendar%2F2009-07&tid[]=12&tid[]=6&tid[]=4&tid[]=8&tid[]=7&tid[]=1&tid[]=18&comment_count=0
Month, showing only Events with repsonses/cardpools/etc
http://www.mtgotools.com/?q=calendar%2F2009-07&tid[]=9&tid[]=10&tid[]=12&tid[]=11&tid[]=5&tid[]=6&tid[]=2&tid[]=4&tid[]=20&tid[]=8&tid[]=13&tid[]=7&tid[]=3&tid[]=15&tid[]=14&tid[]=1&tid[]=18&comment_count=1
iCal filtering looks to be working now. Please let me know if you have any other troubles with the site! :)
Hmm. It *should* filter them out, I'll look into that and post what I find!
I agree with the shuffler except that I've never heard of mana weaving. The shuffler just seems to suck more because it's truly random. Even shuffling for 10 minutes, it will not be truly random.
Cool idea for the MTGO Tools website. However, when I set the filters to just set releases and then get the ical feed, it seems that the ical feed is still set for all the events.
How do I go about getting an ical feed for just set release events?
i completly agree with all these reasons. I will add 3 other reasons :
> To open a pack with a Juzam Djinn into : as well juzam is an example, but i am so glad to crack packs and to discover some old iconical cards into ... plus the price of many old casual cards are affordable in mtgo, although you have to pay them a huge amount of bucks irl
> Drafting old series : where could you find any Tempest draft outthere than on mtgo ? Really, it is a pleasure to me to draft old sets...
> Find opponents : if i got a computer & an internet connection, i can play mtgo everywhere without taking a heavy collection with me, and even in a desert, i can find opponents in every format i want (24-7 as you well mentioned).
I like this kind of article :)
4 copies are mostly enough - for example if you actually try to enter a 2nd constructed event (something I don't entirely agree with, but depends on the circumstances) you cannot submit the same cards that are still being used in the 1st constructed event. I'm just saying this because I remember this one stumping a large amount of people when we had the free to enter constructed events of v3 (and also because, IIRC, it worked differently in v2).