DIMM033: Magic, The Gathering
Hi, I'm planning on streaming tonight around 3pm Mountain Time (the worst timezone), I'm committing to 3 streams and I'll see how I feel afterwards.
Magic: The Gathering
Anyway, have you heard of this new Trading Card Game (TCG) called Magic: The Gathering? It's very niche and obscure, I'm sure you haven't heard of it.
A couple months ago I walked into the library and they were playing MTG like they usually do. And the librarian who runs it asked me if I wanted to join. I said that well, I don't know anything about Magic, I've never even played a trading card game. But she convinced me to just try it out that day, and so I did.
...and I kinda love it?
What is it?
I've talked about how I like Deadlock a lot and I still do love that game, but gosh the way that Magic works is like what I like about Deadlock's builds, but jacked up to 1000%.
Magic: The Gathering has been around since 1997, and there have been a lot of different competing formats, but right now in 2025, there's standard, there's commander, and there are about 8 more that are not very popular at all.
The one that I play (and the most popular one) is commander. You have 40 health and you fight against 3-6 people with a 100 card deck. You draw 7 cards from your shuffled deck and you take turns drawing cards and using 5 different colors of mana (white, blue, black, red, and green) to cast spells to reduce your opponents' healths to 0.
In Deadlock, there are around about 150 items that you can combine into 10 slots. But in Magic there are 10s of thousands of different cards, and 100 slots. Your deck consists of 99 unique cards, and 1 special "commander" card that is like the centerpiece of your deck. The 99 unique cards need to be in your hand to cast them, but the commander is always castable at any time, and they can be revived from the dead for extra mana.
The cool thing about Magic though is that all of the "rules" I just stated can be changed based on the cards that you pick. There are some commanders that can be partnered with another commander, basically making two commanders. Some cards change the win condition of the entire game! Some cards let you have multiple copies of them in your deck. Some spells can let you take cards from another player and use them on your board. Many cards simply say to kill every creature everywhere; you're advised to have at least two of them in every deck. Some let you play cards that have been discarded and add in cards from outside the game. Some cards discard half of a player's entire library over and over again to eventually give them no more cards to draw.
The variety here is really what's cool about Magic to me. You can use basically any card that has ever existed in your deck, and it can still be amazingly good! They all interact in such interesting ways that the developers couldn't have even predicted. Cards like Demonic Tutor, Counterspell, and Lightning Bolt are some of the oldest cards in the game, and are still staples in their respective decks to this day.
The Art!
Also the art in this omggggggggg it so good. One thing that reminded me of that was the recent announcement of Riftbound, which is a League of Legends based trading card game. I don't play league, but some of my friends do, and they know that I have been obsessed with magic recently so they informed me. And my god I did not realize how good magic's art was before I looked at this. Riftbound's art is so boring and safe and corporate and lame! Whereas Magic's art style is so detailed and mature and cool. And while a lot of companies try and hide their artists away, in Magic, the artists are centerstage. On every single card that has ever been printed, right at the bottom you can see exactly who made this art and check them out. Looking at Riftbound, a lot of the listed artists are not really the artists, but the studio that hires the artists. That might make sense for them, maybe it is more of a team sport, but it is a lot cooler to just see that some girl just made this card and you can see her actual name and check out her other art.
Here are some particular versions of cards that I think look really good:
Fog
Aerial Extortionist
Foxfire
Airborne Aid
Animate Wall
Long-Term Plans
Aven Mindcensor
Wrath of God and Damnation
The patterns!
And that brings me to something else that's cool about the card design, you start to notice patterns in them. Anything that says the word "tutor" or has an image of a book being pulled off of a shelf is likely to be a card that lets you search for other cards. Cards with the word Llanowar probably has to do with adding extra mana, because they are related to the extremely old card Llanowar Elves. Anything with a Lotus will usually involve you getting 3 colored mana, which is a reference to Magic's most iconic card, Black Lotus (fun fact that I didn't know before playing MTG, but Black Lotus is not playable anywhere!) Anything that involves lightning will usually deal 3 damage to an opponent, like Lightning Bolt. Whereas a shock usually deals 2 damage, like Shock. Cards that say Fog usually prevent all combat damage, because of Fog.
The color of the spell is super important. So important that the 5 colors and their relationships are printed on the back of every single magic card ever made. The colors that are next to each other tend to work together, whereas opposites are more aggressive toward each other.
Certain creature types tend to be in certain types of mana colors, dragons are usually red, zombies and rats are black, sea creatures are blue, jungle animals are green, and angels are white.
There are certain versions of the same spell that get copied into multiple colors, like Beast Within, Generous Gift, and Pongify all replace something with a 3/3 green creature. However, Pongify only costs one blue mana to do it, while Generous Gift costs 3 white. But for that extra cost, it can remove any card on the battlefield.
Exploring my first deck
My main deck that I've been working on for a while is a blue-white bird tribal deck. Don't judge me too hard, this is my first ever deck, and I feel like I kinda dove head first into deck building before I knew how to swim, and while I wouldn't exactly recommend that, it really got me to just look at a ton of ards. The game plan with this one is to use Kastral, The Windcrested, which says that "Whenever one or more Birds you control deal combat damage to a player", you get to choose a buff, either getting to play more birds for free, making all of your birds more powerful, or drawing a card.
I think that this was a great starting commander for me because it looks really simple on the surface, but you can go quite deep into it. The cool thing about the writing on Magic cards is that they do not waste words. Any single word could completely change what you are doing. There is also a huge emphasis on what they don't say.
Originally I thought, ok cool, all I have to do is hit one person with one bird and I get one buff every turn. Hitting one person with multiple birds wouldn't do anything, because it specifies "One or more birds you control,"
And this is what I did for a while, until someone pointed out that it says "a player," and not "one or more players" like the birds stat. So if I could deal damage to multiple players, I could get multiple buffs. With 3 opponents, I could hit 3 players with a bird, I could get 3 buffs instead! I could pick one of each buff or whatever I wanted!
So this is now what I did for a while, and it was pretty fun this way, a lot faster. But one day, as I was playing magic with some people online, one of them mentioned the mechanic of Double Strike. Double strike is a way of dealing double damage, where it just deals your combat damage twice. It does the first strike of damage, then goes on to do the regular damage afterwards. This technically means that I am dealing damage to a player multiple times... Ohhh ok I see how this can be absolutely busted. If you have 3 birds with double strike hitting three opponents, you get six buffs. You can draw 6 cards every turn, or put 6 birds onto the battlefield for free, or make all of your birds deal 12 more damage every turn.
And that is how it took me about 2 months to fully realize the potential of this one card. If any of the words were slightly different, then that would completely change how I played with the card!
The Text on the Card
And funnily enough, this is actually a mechanic in the game, there's a mechanic called Overload which just changes one word in the text, and it turns cards like Cyclonic Rift from OK to one of the best in the entire game. There's also a mechanic called Cleave, which, for an extra cost, you can remove words from a card when you cast it, a good example is Alchemist's Retrieval.
Conclusion
Magic is really fun, and I think that more people should play it. You might think that oh, you don't have the money to buy all of the cards, but no! For one, if you have some money to spend on it, you can buy a pre-constructed (precon) deck for relatively cheap. And if you have no money to spend on cards, you can also use websites like mtgprint to format all of your cards in a big PDF that you can print out at the library. Then you just cut them out and play with them, that's what I do! This is called proxy-ing, and its a great way to play tabletop for very cheap. And if tabletop doesn't really interest you, there are also multiple online versions of Magic that you can play for free, like MTGOnline, Spelltable, and MTG Arena. The first two are all manual, whereas MTG Arena does all the calculations for you, though it's way more limited in its card pool.
Anyway yeah remember that I'm streaming tonight AAAA i'm scared but hopefully it will go well, me and cam have got a lot to do and I think it will be nice and chill to watch us try and make big machines in Create.