Well, Ancestrall Recall still should have the price of an average LCD TV, so it impresse me at least.
Well, Ancestrall Recall still should have the price of an average LCD TV, so it impresse me at least.
Mmm, but back then, I don't think any card was even in triple digits? After all, it wasn't "powerful card that's been out of print for over a decade", it was "powerful card that's been out of print for maybe 6 months or a year."
Well, if I ever travel back in time, I'll tell myself that out-of-print cards are a good investment.
The most recent set I've played was uh, Mirrodin Besieged. Which was about half a year ago or so. I played standard so most of the cards you guys talk about fly over my head (though I've seen a few used in EDH).
I've mostly quit already except for playing Duels of the Planeswalkers on steam once a while (even if they're prebuilt deck, it's nice to just be able to play mtg for the price of 3 boosters). Planeswalkers are fun cards to play for sure.
These days I've mostly switched to L5R, just because I like tedious and sprawling games that give you too many options at any one time over MTG's more automatic nature due to more limited arrays of actions at any point, and a resource limit on ones available per turn. I mean, hell, a beat down deck in L5R basically has as many options to play at any one point as draw-go-card-advantage control >_>
... games take a lot longer though.
I am pretty attached to the lore and concepts behind the whole thing too, but I'll take a look at L5R. Does it have some nice underlying principle like the MtG color pie? How about the lore, is it good?
Ok, I replaced the 2x Indebted Samurai and 2x Dawnblades with 4x Devoted Retainers. I also added the 2x Samurai of the Pale Curtain. I also took out the most expensive cards and replaced them with 2x Castle and 2x Ghostly Prison. I also added the Vedalken Orrery. I took in 4x Selesnya Sanctuary just for the sake of more mana.
Last edited by Keyne; August 27th, 2011 at 10:21 AM.
I love the art of Samurai of the Pale Curtain.
In fact, I love a lot of Magic art. It is just so incredibly superior to most TCG art.
SHENSHEEEE~~~<3
I always got the feeling Urza was straight trollin' with the Weatherlight crew and indeed his entire battle with Yawgmoth.
Hope Rides With His Godly Ronin/Cowboy Brother In Law
What do you mean?
Because they are actually art pieces. I am willing to bet money that most people won't feel ashamed to hang lithographs of MTG in their living room, the same can't be said about almost all other TCG.Originally Posted by I3uster
I think it has something to do with the creator actually being a PhD and the target audience being "old guys with neckbeard".
L5R is both a CCG and a roleplaying game IP, so story and lore is actually central to the game. Aside from the money, most tournament prizes have to do with changing how the story progresses, rather than just cash prizes.
The main structure of the game is the 9 clans: Lion, Crane, Crab, Dragon, Scorpion, Phoenix, Unicorn, Mantis, and Spider. Ronin, minor clan, or other unaligned decks are possible too, depending on cards printed.
Cards are technically 100% interchangeable between each clan, but personalities from your own clan are put into play at a 2 gold discount. Strategies (which are like instants) are also fully interchangeable regardless of clan, but almost always specify a keyword that you or a personality or something that you should possess, effectively restricting where it's practical to play them.
There are 4 main win cons: Military victory (destroy all 4 provinces of your opponents, eliminating them from the game), Honor Victory (Raise your family honor to 40 or higher, and reach your end phase), Dishonor victory (eliminate your opponents from the game by bringing them down to -20 family honor), and Enlightenment (Bring 5 Rings into play and reach your end phase).
Military can be anywhere from beatdown to being midrange. Honor are usually stall decks. Dishonor usually run like control decks. Enlightenment depend on deck manipulation and plays like a combo deck, except completing the combo is the end, not the means to one (to put a ring into play from your hand, you have to complete certain conditions within a time frame, such as the Ring of Water, which can be put into play if you've played 4 battle actions in a single battle).
Each edition, each clan generally fall into 3 themes, with a stronghold printed for each. Most decks either go balls deep into one victory conditions, or are built so they have the option to switch between two at a particular point in the game ("switch", e.g. mliitary/honor switch).
Lion: Military (main), can do honor switch.
Unicorn: Military (main), can do honor switch.
Scorpion: Dishonor (main), can do military and sometimes military-switch too.
Crane: Honor (main), often can do dishonor too.
Spider: Military (but many kinds, always has a zombie theme which is personality swarm)
Crab: Military (many kinds, usually has a scouts theme, which is follower swarm)
Mantis: Military (main), dishonor switch is possible, sometimes full dishonor too
Phoenix: Honor (main), but from edition to edition, can often try for military, dishonor, or enlightenment too, but there's a catch regarding why they seem so versatile.
Dragon: Enlightenment (main), can do military, but usually only to fulfill conditions to do enlightement, has by far the best deck manipulation tech in the game.
You could say a color pie exists, but this isn't defined by color or clan so much as which victory condition you choose to pursue, since the actions to pursue it are inherently colored by what they're doing, and you can rarely move along multiple victory cons simultaneously. Switches are possible because synergies do exist, but they mostly exist in a meta way, rather than a color pie way (for example, people often make dishonor-honor switch, so you can win the match up against honor--you're both trying to honor out, but you can also lower their honor while you raise your honor--but playing that kind of meta makes your deck inherently less consistent, etc.). So switches really only happen in certian match ups.
Each clan also has a gimmick, some more overt than others. Like, Unicorn are similar to Lions, but they have cavalry (which sort of works like flying, but can also work like this: imagine if you had to assign blockers first, and the attacker was able to assign which blocker their attacking creature would attack--that is cavalry). Certain Mantis themes are similar to the Crab, but they get Naval (gives you priority to play battle actions, which are kind of like sorceries you can only play during the combat segment, and both players take turns playing--usually the defender gets to play the first one, naval overrides that). Other themes of Mantis are like Scorpion, but they focus on attacking gold costs (bribery, etc.) rather than honor (libel, defamaction, slander, etc.). Phoenix can be similar to Dragon (only two, really, that can do enlightenment) but they get Shugenja (units that don't do much, but can attach a particular type of equipment called spells, which have a variety of effects. Crane's pretty dissimilar to others, but they specialize in Duelist, which make them good at duels (most fighting in L5R is between armies, not individual personalities). Explaining how that makes them different would be hard w/o explaining combat in L5R, which is pretty different than MtG.
Etc.
So, I dunno, it's more like a pie sandwich. You choose what kind of bread you want, and which filling you want. But you don't get bread that's whole wheat and white (or well, you can try, but it tastes bad) and you don't get filling that's simultaneously jelly and turkey.
Stuff like that. The game can get a bit tedious and get very overly complex, so it's a game that's easier to explain by playing.
Also, L5R is very keyword heavy. So, say, a lot of the good strategies and equipment a ninja deck would play, are keyworded to ninjas, so you can only play them if you play ninjas. Also, several keywords have inherent effects (cavalry, naval, and shugenja being ones I've already mentioned).
Ooh, the MTG thread's livened up!
I play a few decks myself, but I'm more a builder than a player; and I've always played Legacy instead of Type-2 or the rest.
I can put down some of my various deck lists here if peeps are interested.
With my uni friends I've been playing more Weiss Schwarz than Magic now-a-days though.
That sounds pretty cool. I guess I check it out.
Legacy? Do you have too much money and want to get rid of it?
Last month, I went back to California for a month before returning from break (being in China means not buying magic cards and stuff), and so, I haven't bought much magic the gathering cards in my life, but I thought, hey, why not. So I went and spent five hundred dollars buying five boxes of booster packs. And then I entertained myself with opening these booster packs. I think I got an obsessive disorder with wanting to open and sniff new cards. Maybe it's something with the water...
Oh god. I love the smell of new cards.
But I never bought a display. Ever. I went from theme decks to straight-up buying. Which isn't affordable right now because of the Mythic Rare introduction, making the cheapest tourney-viable decks 300€, and the more expensive ones 800€ for something that rotates out after a year. It's nothing compared to a legacy deck, but then again people play legacy in teams to afford that shit.
I got 31 of those mythic rares in my booster packs! A lot of them were swords... XD I have three of these 'sword of mind and body's, one of this 'sword of war and peace', and a bunch of these guys who don't have any attack. The cards say they are planeswalkers... hm... New card smell is awesome...
If you have a bunch of planeswalkers you can sell them and get the money for the display back. A few of them a worth 100$ plus. Yeah, for a standard legal card. The world has changed ;_;
Well, it's not like I wanna give up this new card smell. Plus, I didn't spend much money on the cards anyway, could do it ten more times before I might have spent a tad much on a silly childhood game! But it was fun playing with these cards for two weeks before leaving them back in California... XD
Nah, even Jace at his worst point was just $80. Nowadays Firebrand's like, what, 40? I forget Eraser's cost.
Getting full decks is indeed expensive. But hey, at least you're not playing YGO.
That's another nice thing about L5R, though. The editions run 2 years long rather than 1 year, and all sets released as a part of that edition are legal throughout the entire edition. The sets that come out near the end of an edition (lately) are double bugged so they're valid in the current and upcoming editions too.
When the game designers are really cocky, they'll even triple bug certain cards, just to certify that they think they'll be good for use for the next 4 years... granted this is very rare, and the ones that are like this have decent reason to be.
Finally, one thing I forgot to mention about L5R: you draw at the end of your turn. Which, while seeming like a small change, turns some cards that would be really badass in MtG into ones that could be a dead card in certain situations.
Another big thing is L5R is played with two decks: the dynasty and fate decks. Dynasty is put into your provinces, and you fill up your provinces whenever they empty face down, and flip them at the beginning of your turn (your opponent can see what they are). Your personalities (kinda like creatures) and holdings (lands) come from it, along with events/regions/celestials (which basically come into play upon being flipped, and do something). Fate is where you get your actions (similar to sorceries, instants, etc), equipment (weapons, armor, spells) and followers (also like creatures). Personalities are put into play during its own main phase after the combat phase (so it's like they have summoning sickness) but followers are put into play before the combat phase (no summoning sickness). But followers do what their name imply; they have to attach to a personality, and move with him as a unit (but contributing force separately).
So, just imagine a game where you have a hand of 8, and they're basically all either sorceries or instants that do badass things. And in addition, a crap ton of your cards in play also have printed abilities you can use. Basically there's a lot of time in the game where you have a lot of options, and it's tough to decide what is the right one to take (whereas in Magic, you're probably lucky to even have 2 counterspells sitting in your hand and the mana to play them--beatdown can't even contemplate having that; whereas L5R military decks will run almost as many actions as a stall or control deck.
Uhhh, stuff.
Anyways, MtG is still fun, so if anyone's bored and ever has a spare $10 lying around, I'd be more than happy to play Duels of the Planeswalkers 2012 over steam.
But you can buy more displays with more cards in them that way without spending money on them (or at least VERY litte), turning it into an infinite card new card smell machine!
You could fill a whirpool with cards, and bathe in new cards until the smell sticks to you, FOREVER.
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