Students Blog

Play Experiment with Tom Coppin, Glenn Song, Eric Spoerner, Vince Diamante, Waylon Fong

Tom, myself, and Eric decided to meet on Friday to have our Magic the Gathering night. We started at 7:00 pm in the IML and the first game was played by me, Tom, and Waylon. By the end of the night, sometime around 3 in the morning, we had an eclectic group of people playing Magic: a philosopher, jazz musician, a computer scientist, and an architect – Eric, Vince, me, and Tom. Between games we also watched our fair share of Arrested Development and Coupling – I’m getting convinced that it’s a good show. Let me take a moment to give my shout out to Arrested Development. It’s returning on television December 5th at 8pm on FOX. FOX is trying to cancel the show again and there are only 8 new episodes left. Please watch.

I’ve never played Magic the Gathering before. The last set of cards I ever tried to collect as a kid was Star Trek: The Next Generation anniversary cards. They weren’t a game, just cards that represented things on the show and I thought that was pretty neat – it’s my favorite show. Before that it was baseball cards, but I only did it since it was the popular thing to do amongst my circle of friends and we played little league and all that. Eventually I just stopped collecting. I knew one or two guys in high school who collected cards and played Magic. The closest I ever got to a deck of Magic cards was the three-ring binder that a Russian kid had brought into our AP Computer Science class; we were bored and checking them out (and making fun of him for smelling like potatoes – he was a good guy anyway).

So, now I’m in graduate school, I’ve found people interested in games, and I’m interested in most aspects of games: the engineering, design, and playing of games. I have what seems to be a whole childhood of games I need to catch up on, Magic the Gathering included. It seemed inevitable that I would play it since the game Rick and I did for our first lab assignment, “Utilization,” involved rules from Magic, and the game is constantly mentioned in class including Chris’ economic breakdown of the game. I pegged Rick about Magic and now Tom, my partner for our last 488 game design project, and decided that I needed to play it at least once.

And the best way to do that was to jump right in…

How to Play

The story of the game goes is that the players are wizards and they use the items in their deck to destroy one another. Each player is given 20 hit points and when that hits zero then the game’s over for that player.

Tom had already formed seven or eight decks of cards with specific styles of play in mind – he didn’t form them for us, he just has eight decks preassembled to play. He had a deck of blue and green cards that focused on creating powerful unblockable creatures; another deck focused on revealing and forcing a player to discard; and yet another deck’s strengths were in trying to destroy an opponent’s land cards. The deck of cards is called your Library and to start the game the seven cards on top of the deck are picked and placed in your hand. You can only have seven in your hand when your turn is over. The order of play is Untap, Upkeep, Draw Card, Main Phase, and then a secondary phase after the battle, and then you discard (if you have more than seven cards in your hand).

On every turn you can play a land card if you have it in your hand and these land cards become your economy. I don’t know all of them but some were forest, water, some blackish card with a skull on it, mountains, and white cards. The other cards in your hand represented spells: summoning creatures, placing enchantments, casting instant spells, and using artifacts, etc. All of these spells require you to “tap” your land resources.

Tapping means that you take each card and turn it on its side to indicate that you’re using one of your resources in your mana pool to cast a spell in your hand. Spells may require you to tap two forest cards and then, say, four land cards of your choice – on the spell card it’s denoted as two trees and a grey circle with the number ‘4’ in it. Once you do you can place the spell card on the table. If it’s a creature card it has “summoning sickness” meaning you can’t play it until your next turn – unless the creature is gifted with haste. You can enchant creatures to have more strength and hit points and transform them with other cards.

Once you’ve tapped your resources to enact spells you can then enter into the main phase of the game: attacking your opponents. To attack you announce to the gathering which creature you’ll use to attack which player. The defending player gets to pick which card he wants to use to block or if he wants to take the damage. Dealing damage is fairly straightforward. Your creatures have two numbers associated with them, their life and their strength. Damage is dealt by subtracting and the guy with the highest number wins the match. There are plenty of modifier cards in the game so things aren’t as straight as they might seem. Both players can play Instants which are quick effect spells that can change the outcome of a fight. There’s this concept of a stack involved with the combat where players can keep layering cards to enchant their creatures and manipulate the outcome of the battle, and then things are resolved starting from the last thing enacted down to the first.

When the main phase is over you have a chance to recoup (a second chance to cast spells if you have resources left) and discard and play continues. Depending how many resources you’ve “tapped” during play – summoned creatures on the board and land, those remain tapped until your next turn. This means that if you’re attacked and all of your resources are tapped, you’re pretty much screwed.

It’s a lot to keep track of. At times I would forget that my creatures had summoning sickness or I would forget to do something, but I’d like to think that I was able to catch on pretty quick. I can see how deep the strategy goes. This game definitely falls under the category of “easy to learn, hard to master.”

Deck Building

I didn’t get an opportunity to build a deck but I asked Tom how he went about it. It follows the game design process pretty closely. You get an idea in your head as to what type of deck you want to build, and then you look through your extended library of cards for things to help you. Tom said that he usually had one land card per two creatures. It makes sense that everything in the deck should compliment one another so that the spells you cast require the land that’s in the deck, that way you don’t have wasted cards. Rick had mentioned to me that he knew a guy who built decks for a living and play tested decks against one another. It’s a very interesting and expensive meta-game.

Strategy

The last game played by our group was a team game. Tom and I played on one team and Vince and Eric on the other. I used a deck of unblockable creatures and Tom’s deck was a massive 90-card deck that forced players to discard. Eric used a deck that dealt direct damage and Vince – well I don’t know what kind of deck he used.

As the game went out Tom was getting attacked the most, but one of the strategies of his deck was that he enacted a spell that allowed him to recover life whenever anyone discarded. Since he could force players to discard, although he was always close to dying, he always managed to regain at least five points of HP every time he played. I was the damage dealer on our side. I would send out my unblockable creatures and Eric and Vince were pretty much always forced to take damage on themselves – I say almost, since Eric eventually figured out that he could do direct damage to creatures and not just the players. Eric’s play consisted of pecking at the players dealing one or two points of damage. It’s not much but overtime he was very close to killing Tom off a few times. I took out Vince first since he had the unlucky draw of the cards – he had a bunch of powerful spells and creatures but not enough mana to bring them into play.

The game ended when I pulled out a 8/8 creature called Mythic Enchantment (I think it was called that). It was pretty much unblockable and unstoppable. I held that card for more than half of the game and kept my poker face about it just in case anyone had any inclination to do something dastardly.

A part of the play does have to do with the luck of the draw – getting the cards you need to enact spells is pretty big since it can put you into a bind. There’s a certain way you can shuffle the deck though to ensure that every so often you’re hitting a land card to increase your economy. You shuffle the deck by separating the creatures and land and stack them together in a certain ratio (2 creatures to 1 land card) and then shuffle. It’s a good way to create a random factor that doesn’t totally hurt you in the end. A lot of the play strategy is on the fly. You choose what cards to put into play and it affects how the game goes. Players also choose who to attack and try to psyche one another out. There’s an element like poker to it, questioning what type of cards your opponent has in their hand and what they’ll do next or what they’ll do when you attack with a creature.

Dramatic Elements

Anything I have to say regarding dramatic elements can be summed up by this video here. (It’s an AVI and hopefully will play on most machines.) Note: The video is ~3 mbs but worth it. The video should play right side up for most everyone else, except me. BSPlayer is my default and it causes the video to be played upside down. That makes it even more better.

The video: Vince took it upon himself to read the flavor text for every creature and enchantment summoned with his best “chronic smoker radio voice.”

Conclusion

We had a great time and I finally got to learn Magic. There is a lot of interesting play mechanics going on, but since this is the first time I’m playing it, I’m lucky if I can just remember the order of play correctly. I think it would take a lot longer to learn the cards, and learn deck building, and be able to really capitalize off what the game offers in terms of strategic play. I’m interested in getting more into strategy games since my poor brain needs more of that to feast upon.