THE LOOTER PROBLEM MTG PRO

This is what keeps the tournaments new and fresh, but this also means that the bare minimum cost for staying current enough to be competitive is to buy a $85.99 box of cards every four months. You cannot just buy a deck you love once and play forever eventually your deck is going to be obsolete.

The problem with tournaments, however, is only the 'Magic' sets that have come out in the past two years are legal in tournaments.

THE LOOTER PROBLEM MTG PRO

If you get good enough to make the pro tour, you can even play 'Magic' for a living.Â The best way way to play 'Magic' (to be clear: I don’t mean the wisest way, I mean the most fun) is in tournaments where everyone pits their decks against one another to see which comes out on top. Without them, you won't win tournaments if you are running a black and red deck. If you want a card that can make black or red mana, you can buy that online for about $10-12 dollars each, and you will need four of them for your deck. It produces one black mana when you turn it sideways as shown by the skull symbol. So if you’re looking to get your four copies of a rare card for your deck, you’re going to have to buy a lot of $4 booster packs. You get one rare card, four uncommon cards and 10 common cards. See, you buy 'Magic' cards in randomized groupings of 15 cards called booster packs. That is true, but 'Magic' is a game that you have to keep buying over and over again. “But Mike,” you say, every game costs money.”Â In recent years, one player’s discovery took one card’s price from $1.00 each to $40.00 each.Īh yes, now we have arrived at 'Magic’s' problem: it costs money. You would think that strategies would be obvious, but as new sets of cards come out, it takes a lot of time and testing before the best decks start to emerge. 'Magic' is a game of discovery: you get to put a bunch of cards together to see how well they work together and then make tweaks over time to make it the best that it can be and to really make it your deck. In addition, if you have the Judge of Currents creature out, you'll also gain a life point, keeping you further from losing. Doing so lets you draw a card and discard a card, meaning you'll get better cards in your hand. The sideways arrow on the Looter's card text means that you can turn him sideways to activate his ability. Merfolk Looter and Judge of Currents both work well together if you are willing to have two different colors of land in your deck. And, with that new card in play, suddenly, a card that says “Each player draws one card and then discards one card” goes from being good for both of us to helping me more than it helps him. If I want to take that a step further, I could play a card that says “whenever a player discards a card, this card does 2 damage to him” to make my deck even more efficient. For example, if I like making a deck that works by making my opponent discard cards so that he doesn’t have anything to use against me, I could make a deck that contains a lot of spells that force him to discard cards.Â This is what makes 'Magic' great: you choose how you want to win the game. Damage from creatures is usually how a player wins a game, but it’s not the only way to win a game. In later turns, I will be able to play more land to the table (if I draw it into my hand!) and play more powerful spells, but if I don’t have a good variety of spells at a wide variety of costs, my opponent will be able to beat me before I can even get enough lands to the table to cast my spells.Īs players play creature spells, they will be able to use those creatures to attack their opponent and also to defend against the other player’s creatures. Because I am only able to play one land card per turn, I could only play a card that takes one land on my first turn. I could fill my deck with the most powerful spells in the game, but that alone won’t win me games. Players also maintain a hand of cards which are not pictured here. Since the opponent's creature is turned sideways, that means he will be unable to block, and the player's creatures (in front of his lands) will be able to swing in and deal some damage. So far, this turn, he has used his plans and two forests, which we can tell by seeing that they're turned sideways. The player playing the green/white deck has his lands closest to him on the table. This game in progress shows how players arrange their cards on the table in front of them.

The looter problem mtg