There's plenty of different ways to play Magic.

Maybe you're a fan of intense constructed tournments, with four-hundred dollar decks honed by dozens of online articles and hours of playtesting. Perhaps you enjoy limited battles, where any card in a set could matter, and little efficiencies are found in every interaction. It could be you prefer 6 player free for alls using decks with cards from every set, or just from the latest. There's so many ways to play Magic, you might think there's no wrong way to play. Sadly, there is. It's the way I learnt to play and did so for four years. When I first moved to my new school at the age of 13, I quickly located the nerds and became one. They were playing this strange card game during their lunchtimes, of which I shan't bore you with the details. I quickly picked up the rules, but it wouldn't be until years lateer that I would realise that while we had a great grasp of the actual rules, none of us had the faintest idea how to really play the game. The first mistake was an easy one, and that was to pick up a hobby while living in a city totally devoid of any shops that sold the cards. The nearest shop was a half hour drive away, and none of us would get our licences while still at school. We had to beg our parents to drive us out on weekends. Once, we tried to catch the bus out there, but after waiting at the stop for an hour we gave up and discovered that there were no buses anywhere on weekends. But the distance, coupled with the reluctance to spend too much money (especially after we discovered Warhammer, that sucked all our cash) meant we saw the same cards over and over. The next mistake was playing in an era not dominated by the internet. Oh it was around, but at $2.50 per hour I couldn't kill an evening on it. We could have learnt so much about deckbuilding, card evaulation, and just generally how to play, but we never connected with that. It was a small part though: I once bought cards to complete a Saproling deck from the UK via some auction system run through an email group. I sent the seller money hidden in a floppy disk, and he sent me my cards, apart from the one rare I really wanted. But we got very confused when new cards sometimes had their expansion symbol in silver or gold. He eventually suspected that they indicated rarity, but when we noticed Congregate was still only black, and that card was so clearly a rare, we figured that couldn't be the system. Mistake three is collecting. We all had only one deck. It would be the colours we played, since we would trade away all other coloured cards. For me, I started by buying two Tempest tournament boxes (man, I started at the right time, they've got this thing called Buyback! Imagine if you could only use your spells once.) which contained Soltari Guerillas and four Circles of Protection, so I played red and white. I traded all my blue, black, and green cards away for more red and white (including Serra Angels, Lightning Bolts, and Swords to Plowshares). When I switched to White and Black, I traded all my red cards away. Mistake four is the deckbuilding. That one deck would be at least 80 cards, probably more. We had no idea how to build a deck, apart from the strict rule of one land, one creature, one spell, broken only by the assumption that zero mana artifacts could be added to any deck for free. The decks were, of course, completely janky. Mistake five is multiplayer, or more specifically the fact that I never knew that 2-player games were even possible. We played no other style than five player free for all. Mistake six is the biggest one. All the rest could be overcome, but this is the killer. The actual method of playing. After carefully arranging our decks so that every third card was a land, and vaguely shuffling (mistake seven is no sleeves and poor treatment. One player had bought a few rares from the store which came in sleeves. He figured we'd let him have just two cards of his deck sleeved, since they were the only ones that needed protecting. Unsurprisingly, we said no.) we'd sit down in the

classroom that only we were allowed in, since we were trusted nerds and could stay inside while all other students had to spend lunch outside. The game would begin. Let's say I played a 1/1 on my first turn, and someone else does to, but three players are open. When it's my turn, who do I attack? One of the three vulnerable players, or the other 1/1? The answer is, I attack nobody. The first problem is that if I do even one damage to any of the other players, that player will devote all their resources for the rest of the game to destroying me. The second problem is that if I attack, I can't block, and I could take one damage from that other creature. The fundamental play style of every player at the school was this: never spend resources hurting the opponent if doing so could leave you any more vulnerable. Think this through logically, and you'll see that game will go on a very long time. But recall that we play during school lunchtimes, which were an hour. Games didn't go on for a long time. They just never ended. I think back to my four years of playing Magic at high school, I don't recall a game of Magic that ended with a winner. Often, a player would die. This player was named Sean, and we were horrible to him. I believe that nerd kids can be even crueller than the general school population, because having been kicked so often, they want to kick someone else. Suddenly, we other four players would all kill him. He would have to just watch for the rest of the lunch hour. I regret that. But mostly, the game would stall, then the bell would ring, and we would all race to look at the next few cards in our decks to argue why we would have won had the game gone on longer. It wasn't until university that I learnt to play properly. And these days I have a pretty good group, which attends Sealed prereleases and mostly plays casual. Although I can't help notice the occasional issues creeping in to the group. The insistance on large free for alls, games that slow down for fear of retaliation, these things begin to remind me of the kind of games I played when I would put Shield Spheres in a White Weenie deck because it's a free card...