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PaperclipPerfector  8mo ago (text post)   27788 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 18, 2023

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Funny enough, the most valuable MTG cards are never played with, to the extent where it's legal to use fakes (proxies). Unless I've misunderstood it and you have to own a Black Lotus to enter a tournament with a proxy of one.

You must own a Black Lotus to enter a sanctioned tournament with one. And it must be damaged during the tournament for the judge to issue a proxy for it. You can’t just make a proxy.

That said, casual game? No one cares.

They are illegal in sanctioned events, which is why sanctioned vintage events are extremely rare. The only real sanctioned vintage is in the online version where the cards are 2 orders of magnitude cheaper.

There are unsanctioned tournaments, but I hear they limit the amount of proxies allowed. No point in showing up with your deck worth more than the per capita GDP if you get smoked by some kid playing a bunch of lands with ancestral recall and black lotus written on them.

In MTG do you win other people’s cards if you beat them? I always thought TCGs operate best with that system, to add a little real risk.

That sounds like it would transform the game from "no one would play any card worth more than $1000" to "no one would play any card worth more than $1". Of course, for cards at that level market price depends on play viability in the first place, so...

Okay, MtG rules are my wheelhouse, including early ones as well as current ones. Hyperion is more correct than not, but not quite there.

Very early in the game's history there was an "ante" rule where each player was supposed to set aside the top card of their deck at the beginning of the game and the winner kept all the ante cards. As he mentions there were even a few cards that interacted with this, say by forcing the opponent to ante an additional card, or anteing one yourself as an extra cost for a very powerful effect.

It was dropped very early on, not so much due to "playground fights" as because it (a) was incredibly unpopular, and (b) raised concerns about gambling laws in some jurisdictions, or at least WotC was worried that it might. The latter was the main reason WotC cited for removing it. It is still in the rulebook but is very heavily deprecated, and the use of ante (and the cards that directly interact with it) is banned in all sanctioned tournaments and has been for something like 95-97% of the game's history at this point.

I don't think it was framed as optional in the earliest rulebooks, though in my experience it was treated that way in practice. It certainly is optional now, and the clear default is to not use it. Though it's redundant, the rulebook also bans it where prohibited by law.

Well, the idea is to even the playing field somewhat. If you have an expensive but powerful card, you can play it, but only if you are willing to risk the possibility of losing it.

Yeah but if I've got a deck of 60 cards and I'm against a fast burn deck and I've got GAMEWINNER9000 (RRP $10,000) which instantly wins me the game if drawn in my deck, I haven't actually got that big a % of actually pulling that card in context of a single game.

Richard Garfield, patrilineal descendant of James A. Garfield never expected anyone to buy more than a dozen packs of the cards. So, when they did they had to fix the rules. Magic as Richard Garfield intended, where you can draw 3 cards for one blue mana.

They originally had that as an optional rule in MTG but all the playground fights caused it to die out. There were even ante cards printed; but, they, along with the skill cards are banned even in Vintage.

It appears that an "ante" rule exists, but is not used in official events.

MTG did have a rule like that initially. It was called "ante", but didn't last very long. From a wiki:

The last card to mention ante was Timmerian Fiends, printed in the 1995 Homelands expansion. Ante is strictly forbidden in DCI-sanctioned play and is only allowed in unsanctioned games where not forbidden by law.

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