Thread title says it all tbh, I grew up playing 60-card rakdos decks way back when I was in elementary school, nowadays my 3 roommates all play commander so I've gotten deep into it over the last year or so.

Anyone else? I'm dying to find more ppl to talk deckbuilding with.... maybe a MTG themed ohb one day or something?

I like you had a uni house full of mtg-ers that lured me into their money pit ways. Though that was the year 2010 and I have forgotten most if not all of the fundamentals since.
Still like the premise around card battler games though, just not the collectible side. like slay the spire is a longstanding fav

a few years ago ordinate hosted a few cardboard ohbs where you rolled a random card and made a song about it, which I still think is a pretty fun and easy way to generate inspiration.

I pretty much completely quit playing Magic in 2020 for probably obvious reasons. I wound up appreciating that all the time, energy, money and brain space that I spent on the game was freed up to do other things. but I was very involved between about 2012-2019.

I started out playing casually with friends, then Standard, then Modern when it was brand new, Duel Commander with a buddy... I ended up getting the most involved in regular Commander and in Legacy, in the end. but I played all sorts of formats, limited and constructed; played in a bunch of Grand Prix events, nearly qualified for the Pro Tour once (one win away!). I built a cube at one point to draft with friends. I wound up spending over three years working at a game store where most of my job involved managing the store's inventory of MtG singles and scheduling and running most of its events/tournaments. I was a judge for a few years too. it was fun work, I'm proud of having built up a great community there.

...but yeah, in all honesty I am quite over the game, and I've been constantly flirting with the idea of selling most or all of my collection. Hasbro has pretty clearly pressured WotC towards more and more profitable maneuvers out-prioritizing the health of the game, between the quillion different card/art variants and the absolutely fucking insufferable IP "collabs" (gross word for businesses to appropriate). it's only served to dilute Magic's identity in a way that I think is absolutely a shame. so even though I was deeply involved for years, and I made most of the friends of my early-mid 20s that way, I can't say I'm eager to ever re-involve myself.

Criticisms of WOTC absolute felt man, that shit really pisses me off. That being said, I proxy most of my cards straight out of my roomie's printer anyway, so money considerations aren't rly there for me. I don't care for sanctioned events so it quite literally makes no difference for me.

By the way I would definitely be interested in buying some of ur collection if you're looking to sell. I might proxy usually but hey, buying from someone is very different to buying from WOTC.

I doubt I'd be of much good conversation but I'll chime in with my experience for the heck of it.

I was raised a Yu-Gi-Oh! boy, and had lots of good times playing with my older siblings decks in the family and stuff, but once I tried playing with other people in the local area I quickly grew disinterested, since the meta shifted to the new playstyles that were basically incompatible with the way we used to play and changed a bunch of stuff around (I speak mainly of pendulum and link, everything prior to that I didn't have much issue with).

Just a few months ago, some of my friends roped me into playing some casual magic with them after our D&D sessions, and while it seemed really intimidating at first with a lot of the talk going over my head, when I actually sat down and played a game with them for the first time (brutal initiation, mind you: 5-way commander draft that went until 4:30 AM) it wasn't nearly as scary as I thought.

I've played a bit more now, and have my own deck that I'm slowly improving off of a pre-con, so that's neat! I don't have any competitive ambitions for sure, I'm basically only playing the game since it's something my friends do in their free time and it's thus a way to spend more time with them engaging with their hobbies, so I don't plan on dumping a ton of money on it; just doing the bare minimum to have fun with the game and occasionally cook up something fun once I'm ready to.

I'll also mention that, despite only playing a small handful of games, I recently tried out the Dragon Ball Fusion World card game, and it's pretty solid! Fun and very approachable for people who are new to card games, and I definitely didn't need to know anything about Dragon Ball to enjoy it. I mainly tried it since one of my friends has been going professional with it and attending tournaments and whatnot (even helped start a podcast about it of all things).

So yeah, in most MTG conversations I'm the guy nodding my head "yeah" while the other 2 go on at length about the current meta and strategies for an hour, but I have a fun time with it. Some day I'll be able to play a full match without being babysat by my friend answering questions and offering advice, haha.

played it lots off & on since I was kid but never at a tournament or anything like it. mostly with my brother and a few friends, and with decks build from our own shared collections, a mix of old and new. 'twas fun times and some days I wish these days could be relived

anyhoo, the reason why magic and wotc kinda went downhill have already been mentioned and after playing magic arena, or what it's called, for a few months and becoming annoyed by p2w vibes & the ip collabs I quit it altogether. it's tragic, since the game was so fun, rich in history and there are so many talented artists involved but teh endless money milking gets to everything eventually it seems

my own old collection has been fused with my brothers
love card games like these a lot, when done with love, good rulesets and artworks. just wish there was a way to have the same fun with a collecting / trading card game without it being so expensive and exploitative, but then again, that aspect is kinda baked so deep into most of these games, that it might not even work.

inscryption, cult simulator and slay the spire haven been a good replacement for that itch. each in their own special way, but I miss playing with people. tabletop games as well, but I only ever played very few rounds of call of cthulhu. fhtagn!

I picked it up in 2007 (around the Time Spiral - Lorwyn sets, which in retrospect was a wildly new-player-unfriendly period for the game's design, but I didn't notice). It was my stock lunchtime activity throughout middle school and most of high school. I played less often after that outside of the occasional draft or Prerelease, but got strongly back into it twice later:

- In 2017, through Penny Dreadful, a fan-maintained format on Magic Online featuring only cards that could be acquired (digitally) for 2 cents -- so you could build a deck for a dollar, and the format was constantly churning as the list of legal cards updated every 3 months.

- In 2020, through Magic Arena, as a pandemic coping mechanism, though I continued to studiously avoid spending any money on it. That time I got kind of competitive and obsessed with playing Mono-Blue Tempo and Arclight Phoenix-based decks.

I've also always enjoyed reading about Magic, even when I'm not actively playing it; I consistently kept up with head designer Mark Rosewater's AMA blog and his articles on the Magic website. For all of Magic's faults, I think it's a really interesting channel for learning about game design, because of its constantly-updating nature, its different formats, and how much both its designers and its players have written about it. (Here are two

of my favorite articles

.)

I mostly swore off interacting with Magic after the crossover sets dramatically increased in prominence last year, as I don't want to support a game that's 50% product placement, but I make two exceptions:

- I cube draft with a specific group of people occasionally. (Which I think is a healthy way to view Magic as just another social board game in the rotation rather than a lifestyle.)

- I follow The Resleevables

, a YouTube series in which two crusty old players (both game designers themselves) are doing a retrospective of all the game's sets in chronological order.

I used to play during the late 90s until it turned me into a broke teenager. I've never tried again, and many, many rules have changed since then.

Many people tell my to try Arena, which is not as expensive as the physical cards.

I may give it a try someday, but after 25+ years I'm afraid I'll feel as if I were playing a totally different game.

I will always hold resentments towards TCG's in general but especially MTG after having to witness the holocaust they made of my hobby shop basement

I started playing in the mid 90s. Kenny Moote used to give me Magic cards to do trick jumps off the swing set in third grade--it's how I got my first Serra Angel. I played casually into the early 2000s, or whenever it was they introduced Planeswalkers. Occasionally I play with my old cards since then; I never got rid of them.

I've played commander (or Elder Dragon Highlander, as some of us old people used to call it) and I was playing online in a non-official free application called XMage as recently as this year (I think). That was hard, I don't know anything about the mechanics and meta for the last 15-20 years and it's ahrd to jump back in