you can never go back again.

warning: massive nerd content.

I started playing teh magic again. miyuki got a nice necklace for valentine's day (ordered from england early so it'd be here in time), so I got magic cards (also early, because we're horrible people that don't celebrate holidays properly). I've spent over a hundred dollars on cards in the past three weeks. enough to put together what I thought were a few decent decks.

boy, was I wrong.

things have changed a lot since I last played. first of all, in high school, my friends and I had missed the ridiculously powerful cards already... we came in during revised, when wizards of the coast had already purged the ridiculous cards. sure, the purged cards still existed, but they were really expensive due to scarcity, and weren't "legal" anyway. we made due with what we had. we all spent roughly the same amount of money, from the same core set(s), and generally had a good time. the only advantages or disadvantages we had was our own ingenuity. it was an otherwise even playing field.

the expansion sets wotc came out with, the less interested I became. the expansion sets were very gimmicky, and complicated, and annoying. turns out they've only gotten worse since.

last friday, I went to play with my friend tony and some of his friends. I got raped. hard. these were people that had been playing non-stop for ten plus years. they had tens of thousands of cards. they were using cards I'd never heard of and combinations I never thought possible. really cheap, lame combinations. "if I have 200 life, I automatically win. here's something that gives me fifty life every turn". "I have an artifact that gives this effect. I can combine it with this other card to give me really annoying creature INFINITE toughness. or I can give myself INFINITE life." that sort of shit. I didn't have much fun.

tonight, I went to a "magic meetup" on queen anne... generally a half dozen people or so get together, supposedly all levels of skill represented. wrong. I got raped 100x worse than I did friday. at least friday there were a couple people who were normal. and to be fair, nobody friday night was a dick.

tonight, I was reminded why I hated expansion sets. they're all built on themes. and the themes are pretty much unstoppable unless you're playing a different theme from the same expansion. I was destroyed in under five minutes four different times by people playing with these theme decks. "this card creates tokens." "this card makes all of my creatures/tokens better." "this card makes you lose cards every time I create a token." before I knew it, I was overwhelmed with fucking TOKENS that were all causing me to hemorrhage cards at a ridiculous pace. the one time I thought I was going to get close to winning, the other guy played an eight year old, long banned card that destroyed EVERYTHING: creatures, artifacts, land, etc. I never drew another land card. I lost because of this. if I would have kept my land, I could have beat him.

that was the problem I was having... 98% of my cards are from one core set. the core set doesn't include any gimmicky cards, they're all straightforward, basic shit. everyone else I played against was either using older cards, which were either cheaper or improved versions of what I had, or were outright banned because they were so ridiculously powerful (sol ring, fork, channel, etc), or they were using these expansion killer combinations I had no hope of countering. soldier deck. merfolk deck. cleric deck. every card they played compounded the effect of another card. a card that on its own would have been a simple creature, not very powerful and easily destroyed, very quickly becomes unstoppable.

I was there for three hours. there was one game that was going on the entire time I was there, I don't even know when it started. when I left, one guy had 304 life, the other guy had 79. you start with 20. the idea is to reduce the other guy to zero. one of them had a 90-something power creature on the table, I think it was originally a 6/6. he just kept sacrificing tokens to it to make it bigger. that game had at least a dozen DICE on the table, counting different tokens and shit like that. card games should not require dice. hell, the guy with 304 life was using three d10 dice to keep track of his life total. I use a d20. why? because I start with 20 life, and it's supposed to go down.

I know I wasn't the only person there that was frustrated. I guess it was the highest turnout they've ever had (eleven people) and there were other newbies (to that group, I was the only true newbie there). I kept hearing terminology I've never heard before... I'm pretty sure "standard" means the current set of legal cards. I have no idea what "aggro" means, but it was in regards to a deck that was all over the place and ridiculously powerful... it could mean "aggregate" or it could mean "aggressive" or something else entirely. there were several other words I can't even remember. lots of the annoying cards had rules I'd never heard of... morph. echo. there were a bunch of others. gone are the days of having just summon, enchant, instant and sorcery... now everything has like six rules or types attached to it. it's really confusing.

I really doubt I'll ever go back to that group. these were people that played in tournaments and have probably never had sexual relations with another human being. they took the game way too seriously. after I got beat badly twice, I resigned to just watching for awhile. a latecomer showed up and asked if I'd like to play. I explained my situation, I hadn't played in ten years and didn't have very good cards. no worries, he says, he'll go easy on me...

yeah, I was about ready to punch him in the throat. he was playing one of those token counter/stacking creatures from hell types. after I was visibly pissed at him for the first game, he said he'd try a different deck that should be more fair, and then proceeded to do the same thing with a different deck with all the same types of cards.

now, I don't go around beating up three year olds. I'm pretty sure I could. they're usually quite small and not very smart. I don't do it because it's not very fun after the first few minutes. what's the point? they can't put up a fight. I don't understand what compels someone to want to do the magic equivalent of beating up a toddler... especially after the first game and seeing I was clearly not playing in the same league, or even on the same planet. I really did want to hurt that guy. I'm pretty sure that's why I'm sitting here hammering away on my keyboard two hours after I should have been in bed.

I really do want to play this fucking game again, but I want to play it under a closed set of parameters. I want to play in a fun way, not an uber-competitive way. I want to play on a more or less even playing field. and I don't want to have anything to do with those annoying fucking expansion cards. I want to win my share of the games, but feel like I earned the win and that any given game could go either way. I basically want to play as if it was 1994 again, with my friends from when I was seventeen. back when it was fun. I don't know if I'm ever going to be able to recreate those circumstances. I think I have a few people I can play with, and I'm hoping it doesn't get out of hand, but I really doubt it will ever be the same.

times like this make me realise I'm NEVER going to be happy with anything along these lines. this make me angry, and makes me want to lash out at the world. and it makes me really not like myself. right now I really DO want to kick the shit out of a three year old, just so I can feel like I'm good at something, and got something accomplished.

I really do want to feel like I'm good at something. I'm not athletic, I'm not artistic, I'm no good at games, I'm generally just not motivated to do anything.

there's nothing quite as humiliating as being "outclassed" by a bunch of twenty- and thirty-something virgins who still live with their parents. the fact that I actually showed up and stooped to their level is the worst part. of COURSE they're going to beat me, that's all they do with their. but why did I LET them? I have the common sense to not walk into an astrophysics conference and throw down over quantum theory with anyone there, so what made me think I could hold my own against people whose sole existence is this pathetic game, when they've spent thousands of dollars and tens of thousands of hours on it since I last even looked at it?