A Game of the Same Name
You may notice a couple of things about this list: One is that it isn’t, generally speaking, the most intensely geeky list ever. Aside from DungeonQuest and Magic, any of these games could be played at your average family game night.
And that’s okay. It may have been nice to play something a bit more gamer-y but we did that last year; one of the things about hard core games is that they tend to take up huge blocks of time. When a single game of Warhammer can last up to four hours and your average dungeon crawl in D&D takes five hours at least, you’re looking at a whole lot of time burnt on something that you could play on any random weekend. In my case at least I don’t go to cons looking for a bunch of new people to play with and while I don’t necessarily mind playing with strangers, unless I’m in a tournament or something there isn’t much I couldn’t do any other time except play a whole bunch of different games. So that’s what we did.
The other thing you may note is that I have Magic up there.
This is significant because it marks the first time I’ve picked up the game or spent money on the cards in over eight years. The last time I tapped a land for some mana was when I was 19 or 20… but back then it was on. I calculated my deck in those days to be worth upwards of $200, and that was when cards that are nearly unheard of today (Moxes, Black Lotus) were the hot commodities. Current drool-inducing cards (some would say the ones that broke the game) like dual lands were certainly not commonplace but were more or less readily available for the right price. I did a lot of trading and single-card buying to build my deck into the library-crushing machine that I wanted it to be.
It was fun but let me tell you a simple, perhaps obvious fact: It was darned expensive. And it was relentlessly expensive. Each new set that came out offered a new opportunity for deck tweaking and scavenger hunts to find the perfect rare card to squeeze into a deck. It was neverending and after a while my wallet and my patience were stretched so thin that I couldn’t stomach it any more. As fun as playing Magic was, it didn’t work on a casual level. So I made the decision to stop and when I stopped, it was for good.
Sorta.
What drew me back to the game was basically an idea that had been around for a long time but had at some point evolved into a type of game that gave the flavor of playing Magic including deck construction and actual facing off versus an opponent but without the massive financial committment to building the best deck ever. And it even introduced some of the stakes that were originally designed into the game that had been all but cast aside during my deck-obsessed heyday: The ante.
The structure is called Type-P or Permanent Sealed Deck. Sealed deck tournaments have been around for a long time and usually involve each player grabbing a starter pack and any assortment of booster pack combinations the tournament coordinators wish to grant. Each player opens their new card packages at the same time and is given a finite amount of time to use the cards they got to build a competitive deck. Sometimes a trading option is introduced, sometimes not, but the end result is that it tests your ability to identify quality cards and puts your deck-building skills on display since you have to sometimes get creative in order to make a reasonable deck when the pool of cards to draw from is severely limited.
What Type-P does is try to take the flavor of the sealed deck and use it for longer than a single-sitting tourney. So there are standard Type-P decks which consist of an initial pool (or “universe”) of cards that is applied to all of these types of decks. There are of course certain rules and restrictions about what kinds of cards and how many of certain types are allowed but generally speaking the idea is to create a deck from a smallish number of initial cards and then play that deck against other similarly constructed decks for ante.
Each time you win, your universe or pool increases by one. When you lose, your overall universe decreases. You track your decks’ total cards which works to create handicaps for the games. For example if the initial universe for a P-Deck is 98 cards and you win twice your universe should be at 100. If you play your 100 card P-Deck (which doesn’t mean the actual playable deck has to contain 100 cards, only that you have 100 cards with which to build that deck) against a P-Deck that has lost a bunch of matches in a row and is pulling from a universe of maybe 89 cards, you theoretically have a significant advantage and therefore handicap rules apply (usually to the manner in which ante is settled at the end of the game).
This works brilliantly for people like me who enjoy the gameplay and the deck construction but don’t want to be involved in the collection aspect which is what generally drives the expense. And in a way using Type-P rules you get most of the flavor of Magic without all the headache of trying to either luck out and open a pack with just what you needed or going out and spending as much money on a single deck addition as you might on dozens of randomly packaged cards. Plus there is enough flexibility to the Type-P rules that as long as you have a pool of potential opponents who all agree on the base universe size you can expand the play style into any realm you want.
For example we all created standard Type-P decks for a registered game we played in for several hours. But that required that seven of the cards we had just purchased had to be randomly taken out of our pool to level the playing field for other P-Decks that used different types of starter and booster packs as the base. Those cards then became essentially useless unless we decided to start collecting again which I had no interest in doing. So instead we went out and each purchased a Fat Pack which included about 130 cards instead of the normal 98 and added our seven pulled from the original P-Decks for a starting universe of 137. So long as we play against other people with 137 card starting universes, it remains equal.
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