Rediscovering Magic: The Gathering

Posted by Alana on Jun 3, 2013 in Card Games | 0 comments

I am currently researching opening my own comic/game store. There is so much to look into: the license for the shop, locations that don’t suck, figuring out how much space we need for what we want to do, how many employees we’ll hire, and who we are going to go through for distribution. We haven’t really decided on a name yet either. At least my husband and I are in agreement on what kinds of things we are going to have in our store. I’ll be running the gaming side and he’ll be running the comic book side. I hope once we get it off the ground it will be your favorite nerd store.

I have had a lot of questions. My local gaming store and comic shop have been super great with answering them for me so I can take notes for future talks with my husband. One question that has stood out is “How do stores like this make money?” An answer to this question is Magic: The Gathering a collectable trading card game where you make a deck and battle against other players. There are different types of cards and they are sought out for their rarity and usefulness in the game. Each card is common, uncommon, rare, ultra rare, or mythic rare. Out of these cards there are creatures, spells, artifacts, and lands (also known as mana) that come in five different colors (blue, red, black, white, and green). Going into this journey I knew the basics about the game. My younger brother had played Magic in high school and would practice making his decks better by handing one of them to me to try to beat him on our 4 hour car rides to visit grandparents. Of course he would kick my butt. So I knew with my first deck I wouldn’t be winning any tournaments anytime soon.

In building my first deck I had my friend Gunn help me. He asked me what I knew about the game and what kind of play style I would want to have. We decided on a Red-Blue deck or Izzet with the current storyline that is going on in the different sets that are coming out. My reasons for this were because I like to say “No, you can’t do that.” (Blue) and “BWAHAHAHA FIRE!!!” (Red). Blue allows me to stop my opponent from putting out monsters and lets me fizzle spells before they can go off. Red gives me the fire power to take down my opponent’s life and kill the monsters s/he is able to get onto the board. Lucky me I was able to pull Ral Zerak with the latest block of Magic cards called Dragon’s Maze.

I have been pretty good at pulling cards. So much so that others playing the game have given me good trades for my deck. There have been many jabs at Magic players over the years. Most notable of them was an article written by a woman who made the whole community angry and only did it to get more hits on her article, AKA nerd baiting. With this in mind I figured it was going to be harder to make friends and find people who would help a n00b like me. This however wasn’t the case. I have made many great friends and even was invited to a Legend of the Five Rings game, where I wasn’t a n00b because it’s roleplaying.

Overall it has been great learning a new game and meeting a great new set of friends. I’m very much looking forward to having Magic tournaments in my future store. Is there something nerdy you haven’t tried yet because you are unsure of the community? Will you try Magic the Gathering now that you have read this article? What colors do you play in your deck? Let me know in the comments below.

 

 

(c) Ral Zarek is owned by Wizards of the Coast
(c) Magic: the Gathering is a CCG owned by Wizards of the Coast