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Oh my god.  Best Johnny card ever, and it’s a common.

Check out magiccards.info for advanced searches on Magic: The Gathering cards and a cool random card feature.

Do autocard links like this: http://magiccards.info/autocard/Forest.

I’ve started reviewing Magic repacks.  See here, and feel free to request repacks to review.

(Magic post)

I went to the Ravnica prerelease today and had a blast.  Got some nice cards, too.

At the table where we were constructing and playtesting our decks, I played a game against a EE major from Cal Poly SLO. I was using a card with a mechanic called Dredge, which has, as a cost, putting cards from your library into your graveyard. One time when I used the ability, I lost the one card from my deck that could have won me the game against him.

“That’s why Dredge is dangerous,” he said.  “You can lose your best cards.”

An aerospace engineer, another technical person, and I all chimed in to disagree. We contended that it was just as likely that worthless cards would be put into our graveyard, giving us access to our better cards.

The technical person to my left said “I consider the top card of my library at all times to be the superposition of all the cards in my library until drawn,” and grinned.

“But then you open up your deck box and your cat is dead,” I countered.

The engineer exclaimed “What’s this dead cat doing in here?!”  And we all laughed.

“We’re nerds,” I said.

The full spoiler for Ravnica is up, and it is phenomenal. Thirty cards are going directly into decks when they are released (that’s an average of one per deck.) Twenty-four others look quite playable in Legacy, but I don’t know where to put them yet. Char and Lightning Helix together mean R/w Burn will be viable in Extended, I predict. Moonlight Bargain is going to get a ton of play. Cloudstone Curio combos with about half a million cards to form infinite combos; I’m sorry now I scrapped my Aluren deck. Pre-order auctions are already ending on eBay.

Read.  Salivate.  Repeat.  A set hasn’t looked this good since Urza’s Saga.

For Magic players, CardShark seller greggo4randy is donating all proceeds on card sales to “relief efforts for the people affected by the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina”.  He has 9249 cards in stock.

Very, very sad day.  Mark Gottlieb will no longer be writing House of Cards.

Another Magic post. In 1994 I was trading cards on Prodigy, but I didn’t have very easy access to information on the rarity of cards. I offered my Demonic Tutor for someone’s Demonic Attorney. The Demonic Attorney was rarer, and I’ll never forget the response I received from the guy, namely, “Yeah right! What are you smoking and where can I get some?!”

Today, the Demonic Tutor is worth $7.23 and the Demonic Attorney is worth $1.52. I still have, and play with, the Demonic Tutor. It’s very nice.

But I won’t mention the Mox Sapphire I sold for $15 that same week.

A quick story about the game Magic: The Gathering. Magic is a trading card game, the first game of its type: you collect the cards as if they were baseball cards, form them into decks, then play with them as if they were a card game. You can then take your favorite decks to shops, conventions, student union buildings, friends’ houses, and Taco Bells and challenge the people you meet to duels. The most interesting part of the game is that with the thousands of cards that have been printed, you never know exactly what sort of deck you will be facing.

The second most interesting thing is that practically no one knows how to play the game. I don’t mean people on the street don’t know how to play, I mean the people you play against don’t know how to play. It takes about an hour to learn the basics of the game, and after a couple weeks you should be fine with 99% of the card interactions. But that last 1% of card interactions takes years of intensive study to master. The Comprehensive Rules take up more than one hundred 8.5″ x 11″ sheets of paper. Most cards don’t do exactly what they say as there are extensive errata for the game. The casual players among you think I’m exaggerating. Quick: Name the six layers of Continuous Effects, the errata for the card Humility, and how to combine them to explain what happens with both Humility and Opalescence in play. If that’s too easy, what happens if you put a creature with morph into play with an Illusionary Mask?

In 1997 Wizards of the Coast decided to simplify the game for younger players.  The sets called Portal, 1998’s Portal: Second Age, 1999’s Portal: Three Kingdoms, and 1999’s and 2000’s respective Starter sets were the result. Some of the simplifications made sense, but some were boneheaded. For instance, in regular Magic creatures can block incoming creatures.  But to simplify the game for children, instead of talking about blocking, they renamed it intercept, which is probably a high school vocabulary word. The cards had regular Magic card backs — that is, face-down you couldn’t tell them apart from normal Magic cards — but were not allowed in standard Magic. The end result of this was that all the beginner-level cards kids bought turned out to be essentially worthless when they graduated to the next level.

For a long time I’ve been publicly advocating for the legalization of these sets. It actually simplifies things, as that would mean all white- and black-bordered cards would be legal for play, rather than having to memorize cryptic symbols to remember which are legal and which are not. And now it has happened: as of October 1st, Portal and Starter are legal in the formats I play.  I’m very pleased.

Another Magic post.  Wow.  I’m completely flabbergasted, blown away, amazed, impressed, excited.  What a wonderful mechanic.  What a wonderful card. What creativity. And Mike didn’t even mention the best part, which is that the discard happens at instant speed, which is just what my multiplayer discard deck is missing, to the point that I was considering maindecking Vedalken Orrery. It will be a fun, challenging card to play, trying to keep track of what I’ve seen in my opponents’ hands to know if I can safely activate Nezumi Shortfang if I already have one flipped.

Follow?  I mean, if you play Magic, do you follow? Otherwise there’s really no chance you could follow, so go ahead and ignore the rest of this post. Here’s how it would play out: I’ve cast a Nezumi Shortfang and used it when my opponent has one card in his hand. The player discards that card, and I flip Nezumi Shortfang (if you haven’t followed the link to the card yet, do so now.) Then my opponent gets back to two cards in hand, and I have a second Nezumi Shortfang in play. What does my opponent now have in his hand? If he has an instant, I can activate the Rat, and in response he can cast the instant. Then when the Rat’s ability resolves, he’ll have one card in his hand, which he’ll discard. The Nezumi Shortfang will flip and become a second Stabwhisker the Odious (great name), but under the new Legends rule, both Stabwhiskers will die as a state-based effect. So for the cost of having his hand forced slightly, he’ll change my one-for-zero into a much more favorable (for him) two-for-two. So I’ll have to be really sure I keep track of what he’s holding, knowledge I should have received from Duresses and so forth. But what if he’s drawn a card or two that I haven’t seen yet? I’ll have to make a guess based on what he’s played so far: what are the instants he’s likely to be playing, and and what’s the likelihood of him holding one. Even if it’s a Giant Growth, it would probably behoove him to Giant Growth one of my creatures so that his hand can empty and the Rat can flip.

I won ten of the 17 games of Magic I played tonight, which is cool, but of those 17 games, three were against the new deck my friend Nathan was proudly showcasing. I won all three of those games, which is not cool. I felt like a jerk — I always do when that happens. The first two times I played the decks I call Conduit and Mask, which are both among my top 3 best decks, but the last time was a lite Onslaught-block deck I call Flippy that happens also to be my only netdeck (I think it’s even unmodified), taken from an article by Mark Gottlieb.

Ah, there’s always a happy medium, isn’t there?  Three months after my post complaining about Wizards of the Coast’s promotion of Type 2 over Type 1 (I’m talking about Magic: The Gathering again, folks) I’ve converted most of my decks to “Type 1.5″.  This is Type 1, with the cards on the Type 1 “Restricted List”, a collection of severely broken and under-costed cards, banned.  This has mostly involved removing Sol Rings and Demonic Tutors, and voila, Type 1.5-legal.  I also have one “Extended” deck (which they could call Type 1.75, because it’s between Types 1.5 and 2, or Type 1.596 if you perform a proper linear interpolation between the two counting the number of sets allowed [oh, never mind]), and one Onslaught-block deck (which qualifies as Type 2 until late 2004.)  A couple of decks I kept at some even finer-grained hybrid that needs a better name than “Type 1.5 plus one restricted but non-Power card“.  My squirrels, for instance, kept their one Earthcraft.  My elephants are in this category for now, but as soon as I replace the Fastbond with an Exploration they’ll be Type 1.5-legal as well.  A couple of decks I’ve kept as juicily Type 1 as I can afford (my lone Mox Pearl along with a Sol Ring, a Mox Diamond, a Demonic Tutor, and so on.)  One is my fun five color deck that has morphed gradually from the deck I was playing during Mirage block, the other is a white and black deck of the sort that they’re now calling MaskNought but that I designed myself before it became the rage thankyouverymuch, except that mine is a lot more fun.

It seems that Type 1.5 is my natural settling place (or casual unpowered Type 1.)  I hate the degeneracy of competitive Type 1, which features turn-one kills, leaving the games decidable by a coin flip and forcing you to play Force of Wills (Forces of Will?) but I love its card pool.  So there.

May I note that this puzzle seemed much trickier ten years ago?  Here’s the answer, but if you play Magic you should have no trouble working it out.

By request, here is the Pearl Jam Magic the Gathering deck I designed, embedded in the email I sent to Mark Gottlieb who had the idea of a rock deck in the first place.

I was intrigued by your proposal of a rock-themed deck
from last June when I read the column this past week,
and went to work building my own.  I know I’m a bit
late, but what’s eight months between friends?  Or, in
this case, complete strangers?

The deck is Pearl Jam themed, with most of the
connections being to song titles.  It is as follows:

“Brain of Josh”

Type 1 deck

60 cards

13x Island (”U”)

11x Plains (Yield) *

4x Serra Angel (”Angel”)

1x Spiny Starfish (”Strangest Tribe”)

1x True Believer (”Faithfull” [sic])

1x Wall of Vapor (”Thin Air”)

1x Whipcorder (a combination of two: “Dissident”,

because he’s a Soldier Rebel, and “Whipping” )

1x Alter Reality (”Nothing As It Seems”)

2x Arrest (”W.M.A.”)

3x Boomerang (”Evacuation”)

2x Control Magic (”Not For You”)

3x Counterspell (”No Way”)

1x Moonlit Wake (”In the Moonlight”)

1x Plagiarize (”Black”) **

3x Sleight of Hand (”Sleight of Hand”)

3x Spirit Mirror (”Rearviewmirror”)

1x Telepathy (”Pry, To”) ***

1x Three Wishes (”Wishlist”)

1x Tidal Wave (”Oceans”)

4x Unnatural Selection (”Do the Evolution”)

1x Worship (”Immortality”)

1x Yare (”You Are”)

A few, the ones I marked with asterisks, need a bit of
elaboration.  Plains maps to the album “Yield” because
version #3 looks like the
album cover minus a highway and a yield sign.  Plagiarize is
“Black” because the chord progression is stolen
without credit from an obscure The Who song.
Telepathy maps to “Pry, To”, because constantly
looking at your opponents’ hands for {U} seems the
epitome of the verb “to pry”.  I know there’s a card
called Evacuation, but it doesn’t work in this deck
and Boomerang does, which I think is almost as good a
match.  I’m delighted with myself for three of them:
“Strangest Tribe” for Spiny Starfish, which it
certainly is; “You Are” for Yare, because surely there
was supposed to be an apostrophe in it (”Y’are”); and
“W.M.A.” for Arrest, because it is a song about an
arrest performed by a white power figure.  The deck
name, “Brain of Josh”, is a self-aggrandizing pun on
the song title “Brain of J.”  And before you say that
matching “Rearviewmirror” to Spirit Mirror is too much
of a stretch, consider that all mirrors are
rear-view mirrors. 

I’m sure you’ve seen the Unnatural Selection / Spirit
Mirror combo before, but I hadn’t until I discovered
it while researching this deck.  It’s magnificent and
works beautifully against creature decks.  The deck
concept is to slow down the early game with
countermagic and bounce, possibly protecting myself from damage, burn
and discard with the True Believer and Worship, until I can pull
out the killer combo.  Then I kill off all the
creatures for {1} apiece, unless I really like them,
in which case I take them for myself.  I then beat
them with the Angels and, perhaps, whatever I’ve
taken.

In my trials it won three out of four 3-player
free-for-all games.  Twice it won with stolen
creatures, once with a pair of Fangren Hunters and
once with a Pemmin’s Aura- (there’s your card name)
equipped Thornwind Faeries.  It lost to a creatureless
Vise-Prosperity deck.

Enjoy, and if you have a moment, let me know what you
think.  Thanks for the inspiration: it’s a lot of fun
to play with.

I’ve been playing a lot of Magic: The Gathering recently, building decks, trading, generally having a great time.  I’m playing with a couple good friends from my college days on a weekly basis, and sometimes going to play on the weekends as well, to places where I am considerably older than the average person in attendence (perhaps this should tell me something.)  I traded for a Jihad last weekend, and while I probably over-traded for it a bit, it’s nice to have this near-mint decade-old rare card, nice enough that I’m thinking about building a white weenie deck to exploit it.  I’m a playset (four cards of the same name) away from finishing two different decks.  They are both rares, one worth $0.80 apiece for each of the four, the other $11.00 apiece, and they are turning out to be equally difficult to find for trade. 

The other day I had a fun game with my friend Nathan, playing the Pearl Jam themed deck I designed in response to Mark Gottlieb’s challenge (if there is interest I’ll post the decklist.)  My deck was working out really well that game.  He went first and played a Coastal Tower, a land that comes into play tapped.  Then I dropped an island.  Second turn, his Tower untaps and he drops a plains.  I drop another island, and Boomerang his Coastal Tower back to his hand, leaving me with a 1-mana advantage.  Third turn, he drops an island, and then I drop a plains and Boomerang his island back to his hand; now I have a 2-mana advantage.  Fourth turn he gets back to two land and plays a spell, which I counter.  Fifth turn I drop a Serra Angel.  Sixth turn I drop a second Serra Angel and attack him with the first.  Seventh turn he drops a Serra Angel, but then I attack with both of my angels, forcing him to block or take 4 more damage.  He blocks and we both lose an angel.  He takes 4 damage from the other angel and is left with 5 land and nothing else on the table.

My win seemed certain.  But I still hadn’t drawn my deck’s killer combo, and the next turn he brings out a huge Mahamoti Djinn, leaving my angel woefully underpowered.  He then proceeded to kick the crap out of me, and I never drew my combo.  That’s the way of the game, I suppose.

That had to be really boring if you don’t play Magic.  But then again, you probably skipped down to this paragraph anyway.  If you did, go ahead and skip the rest of this post, as I’m going to be listing a new group of cards I’ve designed, to go with my previous list:

Fair Play
{2}{W}{W}
Enchantment
Each creature has “This creature can’t be declared to block a creature with power less than X, where X is this creature’s power.”

Reforestation
{1}{G}
Enchantment
At the beginning of your upkeep, you may return target basic Forest card from your graveyard to play tapped.

In the game Magic: The Gathering, there are different types of play, which can be simplified to “you can use (almost) any of the cards you own” vs. “you can use only the cards that have been recently released.”  These are called Type I and Type II, respectively.  (Yes, I’m simplifying things a bit.)  Wizards of the Coast now appears to have completely stopped supporting Type I.  It would be easy to see this as a money-grab scheme, and I have certainly thought of it as such before, but when one really, truly thinks about it, one sees that it’s the game’s great leveler.  A short illustration of what would happen if you set out to construct decks by purchasing cards on eBay, before considering shipping charges:

The cost to assemble, today, using the cheapest editions of cards possible, the Type I deck used by former world champion Olle Rade to defeat me in 1997: $2,435.23.

The cost to assemble my non-tournament-worthy-but-lots-of-fun-to-play Type I deck: $571.49.

The cost to assemble the deck used to win the 2003 U.S. Type II Nationals: $71.89.

That being said, I still only play Type I.  Why?  Because I love the richness of the environment, giving you thousands of cards to choose from rather than hundreds.  Also, I’ve spent a lot of years and a lot of money building up my collection, and it’s a terrible shame to see it all just sit in a closet.

In 1996, around the time that the Magic: The Gathering expansion set Mirage came out, I sat down and designed some of my own Magic cards.  I had been doing this on and off for a couple of years by that point; in fact, I had written a computer program called SetMaker (née MagiCard) to help manage custom expansion sets, print proxies of these cards, and so forth.  Today I found the old notebook from 1996.  I took the cards, re-phrased them in the rules style used today, and entered them into the great program Magic Suitcase, which (among many other features) will produce graphical proxies of Magic cards.  If you play Magic, please take a look and let me know what you think at  the QuickTopic page.  If they suck, I can always fall back to saying that I came up with them six and a half years ago.  (Note: Modified under good advice 24 Feb 2004.)

Crystalline Moth

Target creature gains phasing and “T: Target creature and Spectral Form phase out.”