The Raven and the Stormcrow

I've been playing more Magic: The Gathering recently. What's nice about Magic is that you can play it on so many levels. You could play in competitive tournaments where the average cost of a sixty card deck is around Php 5000. You could also play casual peasant where all your cards are 2 peso commons. What really captures my interest though, are Limited formats.

One type of Limited is Sealed Deck, where you are restricted to using cards from only a few packs. For example, at the Dissension prerelease, you're given a Tournament Pack from the Ravnica expansion (equivalent to three Ravnica boosters), three boosters of Dissension, and basic lands. Out of this pool of 90 random cards, scattered across all colors, you try to build a 40 card deck, and play opponents who have done the same.

What I like about Limited is the way it levels the pre-game playing field. The biggest problem for tournament-level Constructed formats is the way the most expensive cards dominate the less luxurious decks. On the other hand, for casual "fun" play, it is unusual to find a situation where two players bring decks on the same level of seriousness. In Limited, having similar card pools puts players on the same starting point, which is great; most fun is had out of even matches.

"But", you ask, "wouldn't buying six boosters, per player, every time you play, be really really expensive?" Yeah, so you don't really do that. Instead, you buy a large pile of commons and uncommons when an expansion comes out, shuffle them up, and repack them. Whenever you run out of packs, you just shuffle and repack again. You can play an indefinite amount of Sealed with only the initial investment.

The best pile, of course, has a uniform distribution of each common and each uncommon. I suggest two of each common in a set and one of each uncommon (even the expensive ones). There's no need to use rares; they're either totally dominating or perfectly useless in Limited, so I suspect you're better off without any rares at all.

The second best way to get all those commons and uncommons is to buy a booster box and put the rares in your trade binder. The best way? I'll tell you next week.



Stormcrow

Labels: cards, games