Welcome everyone once again to a Thursday edition of Mayday, Miss Marcy! in which I take your questions, tap them for mana, and produce answers of CMC 3 or less. This week, I’ve got a collection of Magic the Gathering focused questions, which is actually more surprising than you might think as they all arrived in my inbox without prompting for a theme. Serendipitous! If you missed last week’s article, we talked about lore, allies, and crushes!
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And now, on to the questions!
Tapped Out
Miss Marcy,
I am a long time Magic player. I started around 2011 with some friends, and have honestly had a rough history with it. From jumping around with Standard, Modern, Pioneer, Legacy, and Commander, I finally found my niche with Pauper. Our local community is honestly amazing. We play competitive decks, but the environment is very casual. The community is amazingly inclusive, and it has become something I always look forward to. My issue arises with my dissatisfaction with how Wizards (and Hasbro as a whole) is running the game; insane power creep, Universes Beyond, it almost feeling like a collectible more than a game… This has honestly soured my want to continue with the game. Buying some commons feels minuscule, but I am starting to feel it as a Pauper player even.
Do you have any tips or pointers?
— GeneralWaffles.
Dear GeneralWaffles,
Ironically, if you’ve been a longtime reader of the site, you may know that I often contribute to our coverage on Magic the Gathering, usually talking about new sets and how they fit into Standard (if at all), and I used to play quite competitively in Standard and Modern. The biggest reasons I fell out of playing were twofold: the first is primarily that I moved, and thus lost my regular play group, and the second is the cost, which I found increasingly prohibitive when I tried to get back into the game locally. Even on Arena, the actual investment of money to play the game is incredibly poor. Sadly this continues to prove to be true, as the current meta Standard deck, Vivi Cauldron, is nearly 800 USD at the time of this article’s publication.
The best actual option you may have is building a Cube, and using that cube to play with your friends. Cubes are not exactly “cheap”, depending on what you want to put into them, but since you are buying single copies of cards, this can often be mitigated. Cubes can be highly competitive because they are a draft format whose power level you (or the cube owner) has the ability to control, and there are lots of cool ideas for theming your cube. I’ve seen a few that are specifically built around certain blocks from older magic sets, others that try to create “Pauper” or similar thematic “styles” of Magic, and many other possibilities.
Before anyone says “Just play Commander”, Commander is also pricing people out, and honestly prices people out faster than before. While a lot of Commander precons are “generally fine”, Commander has some pretty big monetary asks if you want to play certain levels of decks. And there’s also just really the issue that Commander may not be for you; I certainly never really enjoyed it that much after a while, because it wasn’t the type of Magic I wanted. If you do make a Cube, just remember that there’s nothing wrong with filling it with temporary proxies either while you assemble the rest of the set around whatever theme you are going for, and you could even ask your regular playmates if they’d like to donate cards to the cube as well.
Confusion Cloud
Ms. Marcy,
My local game store is probably like most stores, in that it has a lot of people and they play games. Most of the time the store is great and there’s really nothing to complain about, but something odd happened recently that a few us us are trying to figure out how to deal with.
Someone left a fairly negative review of the store on google, stating that the people playing are “unfriendly” and “rude”. The issue is that we are all pretty sure we know who left this review. to keep things brief, during Friday Night Magic, a player we’d never seen before came in with their kid.
You can probably guess where this is going, but the kid was made to play Magic against adults in buy in competitive FNM, and lost. Badly. Their parent became very combative with players, the judge, and even the customer service people.
Our issue is that the owner of the store has been threatening to end support for FNM over this, claiming it is ruining his business. None of us went out of our way to bully this kid or be “rude”, we just played Magic, that we had all paid for.
Is there anything we can realistically do here?
— Miserable Magician.
Dear Miserable,
There is a LOT going on in this question. I am not going to claim that you are leaving things out, but there are multiple parties doing things wrong here and my biggest suggestion is that maybe you should look for a different store that supports Friday Night Magic; I don’t know if there’s a really healthy relationship between players and owners here.
But let’s try to piece together some of what is going on in this situation and see if that helps shed some light on the various perspectives of what happened here. First, you say that you are a player at a LGS that is pretty much like most other LGS; I assume that means you live in a fairly large city that can support what I’d call a “corporate” store, rather than a smaller indie run shop. I think my conclusion here is supported by this overly negative and outlandish response to a single Google review, because it feels like a community connected owner / manager wouldn’t react this way to something like that.
However, you do say that “you did not go out of your way” to bully this kid, but what exactly did happen? Did you all 2-0 a kid with Vivi Cauldron decks (or whatever your FNM is, I assume Standard, you don’t say), and create a completely unwelcoming environment? It sounds like you want me to side with you and state that the parent was over-reactive to their kid being upset and miserable, but consider: WERE they upset and miserable? You aren’t this kid’s parent or friend or anything, but there are certainly ways to consider or question if your group did actually create a hostile environment because you felt this kid didn’t deserve to “Be there” and “waste your time”, which sounds like the tone of your letter.
You also don’t really tell me what the parent was doing. Are they a regular? A regular customer, at least? It sounds like they have some level of familiarity with Magic, and the kid must have had some deck, so… how or why was your time “wasted”? I think that while the owner is perhaps overreacting, I don’t know if you are being introspective enough. There really is the possibility that you cost this store money, business, and reputation by freezing a kid out of the tables by making it seem unwelcoming, and worst of all, you may have killed a kid’s interest in a hobby entirely.
Unless this store is also a 21+ bar or something, that kid has every right to be there, and you all taking such a defensive stance of “we didn’t do anything” is not helping you see that you possibly did actually wrong the only innocent party in all of this.
Is There a Draft in Here?
Miss Marcy,
My friends and i enjoy playing magic, but i greatly prefer constructed formats like standard or commander. lately, my friends have wanted to play exclusively drafts, either at events at our local shop, or just by splitting a box and doing casual drafts at home.
i hate drafting, because i am frankly bad at it. i do not think i am bad at magic, but i struggle with drafting. i’ve tried watching videos, following guides, but something about it and my brain don’t click.
should i just quit? i really don’t want to, since it’s how my friends prefer to play, but i also tend to lose and have a pretty bad time.
— Drafting for Dummies.
Dear Drafting,
I don’t think you should quit, per se, but I do think that there is some serious diminishing returns if you are just not having fun. Drafting is not the easiest format in the world to understand, because there are many layers going on. First, you need to have a pretty good idea of the “meta” of the set you are drafting, and what archetypes you could likely draft out of it. Second, you also need to know the “meta” of who you are playing with, and what types of decks they like to pursue. Then, there’s the actual ability to predict or “search” for cards as they come around.
One of the hardest parts of Drafting is resisting the urge to pivot. Obviously you should be mindful of having options if what you wanted to draft isn’t manifesting, but a big learning curve is knowing when you can pivot and how. This relates to archetypes, certainly, but also recognizing what is “missing” from the packs you are passed.
Anyway, enough tips–you say you have been looking for them and I’m not about to pretend to be the best at explaining it over what you’ve looked up–the thing is that no, quitting isn’t great, but I do think that if this is costing you money and time and you are not having fun, then it is at least worth reconsidering. Perhaps, like I suggested above, you could see if your friends would like to create a Cube? They seem to really enjoy drafting, and you must have a lot of cards laying around, so a Cube is a great way to help you at least lessen the price/cost of money over your time, which may not be helping; it sucks to pay money and “know” you will lose (although that’s a mindset issue). If they are insistent on playing Draft, then I think you may just need to find something else to do, and see where your overlapping interests lie. You deserve to have fun and enjoy yourself without giving in to what others want you to do all the time.
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