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I remember Magic: The Gathering as an innocent and enjoyable game of my childhood which we had a lot of fun making new cards for, themed after our cats, characters in books we were reading, and family-specific references it would be difficult to explain. Our decks were towering and wooly.
Apparently in the years since I last played it has become a cut-throat optimization engine. Perhaps it always was. But in the last two rounds of our last game, each of which lasted fifteen minutes, I took no meaningful actions (unless you count reciting random snatches of poetry about death) while my flatmate Hayden carefully operated the cause and effect chains of a dozen complimentary cards such that at the end of the round I was attacked by twenty-three zombies. No one else I know could do a thing like that with such sincere glee; his grin and chortle, which I received in a post-boredom state of zen calm, made the whole experience worthwhile. I have nevertheless vowed not to play against that deck again unless I have devoted considerable ingenuity to working out a method of hamstringing it. A good second vow to make would be to not devote considerable ingenuity to finding a method of hamstringing it, but we shall see. On this sort of thing a trading card game company thrives.
Apparently in the years since I last played it has become a cut-throat optimization engine. Perhaps it always was. But in the last two rounds of our last game, each of which lasted fifteen minutes, I took no meaningful actions (unless you count reciting random snatches of poetry about death) while my flatmate Hayden carefully operated the cause and effect chains of a dozen complimentary cards such that at the end of the round I was attacked by twenty-three zombies. No one else I know could do a thing like that with such sincere glee; his grin and chortle, which I received in a post-boredom state of zen calm, made the whole experience worthwhile. I have nevertheless vowed not to play against that deck again unless I have devoted considerable ingenuity to working out a method of hamstringing it. A good second vow to make would be to not devote considerable ingenuity to finding a method of hamstringing it, but we shall see. On this sort of thing a trading card game company thrives.
