It's Magic
Back in the 90s I used to hang out in a comic book store where a friend worked. Around then it seemed everyone was buying Magic The Gathering cards. At the time it seemed to me a silly offshoot of Dungeons & Dragons. But after having read Johnny Magic & The Card Shark Kids, I have a new respect--it may have all the fantasy trappings, but apparently it's a killer game (not D&D-like at all) of complex strategy.
The book spends some time with Richard Garfield, who invented Magic. He asked why should card games have a set deck? Why not one where players can create it themselves? It's also a good deal for the manufacturers, who keep putting out new cards that fans have to buy.
But that's just the start. The talent required to play Magic at top level worked in other games, and when he came of age (actually, a little before), he started making money--millions--translating those skills to poker, blackjack and sports betting. He also helped bring in many fellow players, and to the surprise of the old guard, they're starting to take over the gaming community.
Stuff like online poker was made for them, and in the early 2000s these upstarts began to appear at the World Series Of Poker. If you follow the sport, you may have heard of one--Finkel's good friend David Williams, who finished second to Greg Raymer (on a tough beat), winning $3.5 million in 2004. Maybe I should start learning Magic.
posted by LAGuy @ 12:10 AM
3 Comments:
I'm no card shark, but I took up Magic in the mid nineties. We had young kids and it was something I could do (work up my decks) sitting around the house, since we didn't go out much anymore. I worked at a computer company, and the techs played it at lunch - sucked me in by giving me a hundred or so average cards. Boy did they like the fact that they could beat the company lawyer.
I went to tournaments for a few years, but only the ones where they gave you a set of new cards that no one had seen before and you had half an hour to assemble a deck to play with the rest of the competition. It put me on a more even footing, because people who really get into the game spend the money to get the most powerful cards for their deck, and it's pretty tough to match up with them.
It is a brilliant marketing strategy, because people really into it end up spending a lot of money to stay competitive.
I still don't get how there's strategy and talent in a game that depends on which cards you have, and getting the best cards is like collecting baseball cards.
You can buy the best cards from dealers, and the better the card, the more you will spend. The pros don't worry about getting a lucky package in the store. They look at all the cards available, develop a strategy that involves combining different cards, and buy them. That's why it's an expensive game to get hooked on.
The strategy involves combinations that allow you to either press an attack that can't be countered, or fend off the attack of your opponent. The element of luck relates to what cards you have in your hand of no more than 7 at any one time. And to keep the game reasonable, you can't have more than 4 of the exact same card in any one deck. And you must have at least 60 cards in you deck.
You could build a giant 200 card deck, but then the odds of drawing the cards you need to work your combination would be lower (here is where its like poker, except each player is drawing offtheir own deck and only they know what cards are in the deck to be drawn, at least in the first game).
Think of it like a trumping game like Pinochle - you build a deck with trump cards, but you need two kinds of trumps (defense and offense) and you need a certain amount of non-trumps to be able to play at all, so it's a balancing act to build the deck - and then the luck of the draw determines if you had the right balance.
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