Eventide, the expansion block to Shadowmoor for Magic the Gathering is officially released later this week and as usual I imagine my gaming friends and I will be picking up a few random boosters.

Generally I don’t purchase boosters these days, preferring to buy individual cards from King of Cards locally, or ordering online from Star City Games or Card Kingdom (who accept PayPal btw). However there is certainly some appeal in blowing a few dollars occasionally and seeing if you get anything interesting. I also find random booster purchases occasionally guide your hand towards deck creation if you draw a particularly juicy Rare.

As boosters are usually opened in store and rifled through for decent cards, I was interested to see this recent article on the Magic site which describes the ‘Pack War’ concept. As a fairly new Magic player this is the first time I’d heard of Pack Wars, although it’s obviously not that new a Magic concept.

From the article: in Pack Wars you simply combine one fresh booster pack and three of each basic land (Plains, Island, Swamp, Mountain, Forest) and play that using normal Magic rules as a 30 card ‘mini-deck’. It also works best if you play blind by shuffling the opened booster into the lands without examining the cards.

My gaming mates and I have tried it a couple of times with various boosters and it works surprisingly well, although you do tend to get a little flooded with lands. However the Eventide block adds the new Retrace (video link) keyword to Magic which allows you to re-play certain cards from your graveyard by discarding a land card in your hand. Even as a Magic rookie it’s obvious that Retrace cards will go some ways towards addressing issues with Mana flood that occur to any Magic player occasionally, not to mention make the end game more interesting (and also increase the utility of creatures like Yixlid Jailer).

I suspect our regular Friday Magic gaming lunches will probably become Eventide ‘Pack War’ lunches for the next little while, at least until we collectively tire of purchasing boosters.

We’ve just had a long weekend here in New Zealand, over which I attended King of Card’s Morningtide Sneak Peek Tourney. As I’m a Magic newbie this was my first time at an official ‘DCI sanctioned‘ tournament so I approached it with some trepidation. I generally avoid official war game tournaments because I play for fun and the type of high pressure players you can encounter at tourneys kills the game for me. Not to mention I’m often a mediocre general as I favor the painting and modeling side of the hobby more than the dice rolling.

However the rigid structure, well defined rules interpretations and fairly even playing field of a Magic ‘Pre Release’ Tourny attracted me. You’re all given the same number of cards and the same amount of time to construct a 40 card minimum deck and the option of tweaking your deck as much you like between opponents. So Saturday morning I wandered into King of Cards and plunked my $35nz entry fee down. The mix of players looked good, there were only twelve of us, not too many teenagers and only one child attending with his father.

Of course going into the tourney I had absolutely no expectations of winning a damned thing because I’m definitely a noob and the Morningtide release is part of the Lorwyn block in Magic which I’ve largely avoided to date. I’ve been playing Time Spiral and Tenth mostly. Lorwyn doesn’t really grab me with it’s creature heavy theme and natural tendency to limit your decks to one or two creature types. However Morningtide changes a lot of that because it carries the Lorwyn theme into creature classes as well like Rogues etc. This appeals to me more because I tend to play a lot of Rogues (favoring Black) and because class based mechanics don’t tend to limit you quite as much to certain Magic races.

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As I was putting together the 2007 round up I was surprised to note how little modeling I got done towards the end of last year. I listed a number of reasons for my lack of modeling, bar one which I’ll confess to now: September last year I started playing Magic the Gathering, the original collectible card game.

Prior to starting a Magic collection I was strongly opposed to collectible games of any sort, simply because they create a totally artificial economy based on the false ‘rarity’ of mass produced cards or figures. However an old war gaming buddy of mine Griff (who’s featured here before) decided to take the plunge and at the same time managed to convince me to spend $20nz on an older Planar Chaos deck: Unraveling Mind.

That was a mere four months ago and in that time I’ve spent over $300nz building up a moderate collection of Magic cards. I’ve found it a surprisingly enjoyable game, with a reasonable amount of depth to it. I guess there’s a reason Magic is still in print after fifteen years. Magic is also ridiculously cheap compared to anything else I play regularly, despite the fact it’s collectible. Even my modest collection allows me to build decks in combinations of all five colors and have enjoyable games against my friends with smaller or larger (Griff, how much have you spent again?) collections. Although no doubt I’d get stomped on in any games store tourney.

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