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Magic: The Gathering
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What can you begin to say about Magic, the World's Number One card game? Card games come and card games go, but the first card game of them all is still well and truly the foremost. Is it because of the unparalleled levels of organised play and prize support? The larger than life characters, big money and high level competitiveness of the professional tournament circuit? Or the way it seems to reinvent itself with every new release? Truth be told, if we knew, we'd bottle it and sell it. But Magic is proof positive that all the licenses in the world mean nothing if you've not got good gameplay. 'Cos that's what Magic's got in spades.
Mechanics: You play wizards attempting to reduce your rivals to zero life points. In order to do this you play spells and summon creatures, but every card you play and most actions you take cost different coloured mana points which you harvest each turn from land cards under your control. Controlling your mana flow - and that of your opponent - is frequently crucial to achieving victory.
How You Win: Reduce your opponent to zero life. You also win if your opponent runs out of cards in their library, making card cycling quite important. Both victory conditions crop up in plenty of Magic's imitators - but remember, you saw them here first.
Deck Archetypes: Aggressive Red creature swarm decks, or burn decks packing direct damage spells are usually a good place to start. Blue and white decks tend to favour control victories by running their opponents out of cards. Combo decks rely on two or more cards working together to wreak havoc with the game environment. The best ones like Necropotence pass into gamer folklore.
Organised Play: Yes, and lots of it. Friday Night Magic is the name of the game; the place Fan Boy Three for one of the best supported OP programs on the planet. We also hold excellent pre-release and sneak peak events before every major release. But even our cavernous organised play space can't hold a full sized Magic tournament - the Pro Tour Qualifiers regularly get in excess of 500 players!
Website: There are literally hundreds of Magic sites out there. So www.magicthegathering.com is a good place to start.
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