HAT TCG General

[esper]

bizarre and horrifying spectacle the TCG market is becoming in the last couple years!

editing this to say real quick that i do not like gadgets.

[neen]

rediscovered an awesome mtg youtube channel tonight. keith the misprint guy has an incredible collection of misprints, test prints, and related magic cards. perhaps the most impressive is his collection of playtest cards from when they were developing the game before it went to print. they're just xeroxed onto card stock. unfortunately he hasn't uploaded a video since 2016.

[neen]

card player minigame: try to find sellers on tcgplayer that are both relatively close (for shipping reasons), decent on price relative to other sellers, and have most or all of the cards that you want.

i've been playing this minigame a lot because i've been buying a lot of important cheap cards for a cube i plan on building soon. so i need lots of, for example, 1 mana blue 1/1 creatures with flying. or any blue flying creature that has power equal to or greater than its converted mana cost. the deck is called "flying men". some are even flash flying 3/1s for 3 cmc like brazen borrower and nimble obstructionist. brazen borrower isn't cheap but the ones that fill out the deck are usually cheap commons and you need as many functionally-same creatures as you can get because cube is usually singleton and if you want aggro to be viable you need a lot of the cheap cost:power creatures.

[neen]

for me it's part fun part horrible. i impulsively buy magic cards quite a lot, which in the past has evaporated a lot of my money. so now, i'm trying to buy lots of cheap cards, because it helps the collection overall by making more singleton decks/cubes possible, and i still get my shopping spree. i last sorted my collection maybe a year to a year and a half ago. since then it just keeps pilling up in a semi-chronological, random box that has ore veins of alphabetized, color-sorted cards.

tonight i was watching a video about the mtgo cube and the card bribery came up. took a moment but i remembered i had actually bought one back in june. took me ten minutes to find the damn thing. the next big collection organization is nigh.

[neen]

the first and so far only magic the gathering draft i've ever done took place in early 2020 (just before the first covid lockdowns in my state) and the format was theros beyond death. the highlight of the evening was meeting and talking with the store employee who ran the event. he put on warren zevon's album excitable boy right as we began drafting.

the tournament itself was okay if a bit bad. one of my opponents was a tryhard who breezed through important game actions without asking for me to pass priority. i conceded to get away from him and the rest of the opponents were cool. one just gave me a copy of dig through time because i guess my intense social fear appeared to him like i was new at the game or something.

after the tournament i talked a bit with the store employee and he described a science fiction novel he had read recently, and we talked about music. he straight up gave me a copy of an album he had recently recorded.

overall a great experience but not because of the magic gameplay. i think i could get used to playing in public LGS tournaments but i have so many problems with social stuff with strangers it may not be feasible.

[neen]

still feeling bad about the time i locked my then gf out of a game with smokestack+strip mine+crucible of worlds.

she got like actually mad and we agreed to just stop and do something else for thevening.

[Mr. Airplane]

this thread looks like a nightmare after some post cleanup, I'm so sorry