MtG online and arena really boosted MtG’s popularity. Far easier to do a booster draft in your underwear from home than drag your binder of paper cards to a comic book shop for a tournament where you get your ass beat by king of the nerds who dished out hundreds (perhaps more) to get a killer deck.
I have never once played MtG but am somewhat fascinated by it. Just the idea of grown-ass men paying thousands of dollars for a perishable piece of cardboard has always amused me. I strongly believe the fact I could trade this
for one of these
and five figures cash is a strong leading indicator of the state of a society.
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I’m an even bigger sucker for cards, I’ve spent easily $2000 on my hearthstone collection. I don’t know its total raw value but it would be a lot. I have most of the cards from every single expansion back to the beginning. And it’s just virtual, like my account could get banned and I’d lose it all instantly.
Hearthstone is probably the most obscure thing I do regularly and it’s not really that obscure. I have placed top 100 in north america before, more than once, and played against all of the famous players.
I guess the only actually obscure thing I do is speed run the original mario bros. I have my best time down to 5:04 which is very respectable. The world record is 4:55 so it sounds very impressive but shaving those last 9 seconds requires an extraordinary amount of technical skill and ability to glitch the game in extremely difficult ways.
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You should get into Gwent.
October 1 comes Super Mario 35 which is online competing. Basically play classic mario levels and do better than your competition.
Looks interesting and fun but I dont own a switch.
I did win a few bets drunk at parties when the nes mini was really popular and everyone had one. My bet offer was typically that I could finish in under 10 minutes without a game over (if i was super drunk)
If i was just slightly drunk I’d bet I could beat it without dying.
It’s funny how pissed people would get when they saw how I ran that game. I just race through without stopping at all.
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Yeah virtual cards are kind of worthless when you don’t control the servers. They’re also painfully illiquid. MTGO used to let you cash in your full sets for real cards I think but none of my friends were serious enough to do that.
I’ll be pretty disappointed if I don’t make a couple grand on these binders. The big decision is whether to send them down to America to get graded (much bigger hassle from my igloo up here) because the difference between NM and Mint for this collection is probably several thousand bucks. I’m not an expert grader so my eye isn’t trained to assess things like centering and surface quality which make the difference between 8 to 10.
is there much of a competitive scene though? I like games I can stream and drink. Card games are usually perfect but only if people know wtf they are.
How much does it cost typically?
i liked Magic online because you could sell your collection to like cardhoarders as well and get back alot of the money. Magic arena is just there, just throwing money down a hole but they compensate you i guess by being able to grind the collection for free if you want and never having to spend much money since you can’t just go and by the cards you want. I actually redownloaded arena a week ago or so
I haven’t played it in a while, but there was a decent competitive player base, as well as casuals.
It’s free to play, and it gives you bonuses often enough that it’s not hard to craft any sort of deck you want.
Biggest shameless brag / last post from the binders:
4 grim monoliths!
Paid about 1.5 US for the binders. These are about 1.5 if they’re 8/10. Honestly they look like 9/10 or higher to me.
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I have a bunch of magic cards but know hardly anything about the game’s cards or meta. I play draft tournaments with my family on holidays. I think draft is the only format I’d be interested in. It’s funny how much hearthstone game fundamentals knowledge translates into magic. A lot of the same resources and concepts - mana, health, “value”, trading, card draw, etc. are present in magic too. My uncle always gets so pissed because he’s played magic for years and I can squeak out victories even though I still gotta ask what the correct order of play is.
My magic friends that are really into magic want me to get into it but the price entry point just seems absurd to me. I’ve spent a lot on hearthstone but it’s over a period of like 6 years now and I dont think I could stomach the ~$200 starting point for a lot of competitive decks.
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If you like I can come on your stream and do some drafting with you. With judicious management of multiple accounts I’m just about infinite on draft and I draft a lot more than is optimal. We could see how far you get for the initial $15 welcome bundle as a little challenge. They’re just about to flip to a new set so it could be a good time.
haha I’m down but I’ll probably get destroyed. I somehow doubt that the meta in my uncle’s living room when half my opponents are disinterested 12 year olds compares to the ferocity of online play. But yea I’m down to try it.
Yea I was going to say you can just do arena and play a lot and build a competitive deck very quickly with little investment. I’m sure you will do well from what you are talking with hearthstone and such.
Just draft RB and go under whatever anyone else is playing. Worked for me for 10 years.
I guess $2k for a whole collection of virtual cards would seem like a lot if I didn’t know how much people were paying for individual MtG cards. How does it work buying virtual cards and why do they cost so much? (Or maybe I’m underestimating how many cards you have and it’s like $1/each which seems totally reasonable?)
If you think that is weird wait until i tell you that people (usually teenagers) regularly spend 5 figures on virtual gun skins for their weapons in Counterstrike Global Offensive, the skins don’t have any competitive advantage they just look cool. To be fair to some of the people they started with a pretty minimal investment and made a shitload of cash trading items to others.
I was trying to think of something I could put in this thread and I guess that might be it, for a few years I gambled on CS GO matches using weapon skins as currency and bought and traded skins regularly. It was a pretty fucked up scene back then, young kids putting hundreds or thousands of dollars on matches using their skins, there were some teams that were banned from the game for throwing matches including one of the bigger US teams. My inventory never got that expensive but it was worth low 4 figures at one time (I just looked for shits at it and it’s currently valued at $500), I wish I would have dumped some cash into some of the rare items because the ROI would have been huge, I was just too big of puss to do it.
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„We ended up driving cross country. We switched the driving, every half mile. We only had one cassette tape to listen to the whole trip. I can’t quite remember what it was.“
-Steven Wright
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Scarcity is a helluva drug.
The weirdest (and only) collectible cards I have are from a game called Illuminati: NWO by Steve Jackson Games and I’ve never once played a round of it. I just like reading the cards and laughing at them because I like to learn about all of the loony tune conspiracy theories people believe in. It’s been out of print since 1995 but had a few noteworthy cards including these two:
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