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https://tappedout.net/mtg-decks/budget-beginner-teaching-decks-1-green/
https://tappedout.net/mtg-decks/budget-beginner-teaching-decks-2-red/
^^ the two decks I used, I played green and the ai was red. Still getting the hang of this game but with over like 50k cards in the library and endless combos it's so deep. The AI is quite smart on Forge too. I've never played MTG in my life so this is all new to me.
Oh hell yeah, nice. I just rediscovered my love for mtg after not playing for decade(s). There's a seemingly endless amount of depth to the game. I have barely touched a video game for months now because I have been spending all my game time working on decks and planning builds or just looking up cards. There's just so much strategy and mechanics to chew on.
I just wish it was more affordable. I forgot how expensive it is
Forge is free and open source if you're looking to play against an ai and test things out.
That's awesome. I'm going to check that out. The only digital mtg game I've tried was arena. It was ok.
Forge is pretty neat, it's part sim and part game, it's even got a quest mode.
Buy or make proxies, don't play with pretentious assholes that refuse to play someone with proxies because of x, y , or z, make them distinguishable from a real one so you don't get accused of x, y, or z , and have fun. There's no reason to drop thousands on cardboard, ink, and glue.
Edit: also MTG can become an easy allegorical teaching tool for flaws of capitalism, and may or may not be used to radicalize those who are reachable through gameplay and them realizing 9/10 times it's a pay to win game.
I've been trying to use it as a teaching tool and I've had minor to no success so far. One guy is already off the lib train and another two are Reddit gamers but I'm doing my best lol
get into Pauper then. Commons only, top tier competitive decks are usually less than $100, and that's assuming you even want to get competitive.
Pauper is cool but a lot of the interesting card interactions for me start at uncommon and above 
I play mono red so any card with more than 8 words of rules text is bullshit to me
Yeah the game costs a lot if you're trying to do everything. For the best bang for your buck I'd look at trying Commander with one of the pre-built decks and buy singles to upgrade. Either that or get into Draft. Constructed formats are the real money pits.
Commander is great. That's a new format for me so I just started playing. I started with a precon and have been building from there. I pretty much exclusively play commander now lol
Congrats!
It would be so cool if hexbear could host https://github.com/Cockatrice/Cockatrice
This is cool, what games are supported or is it for any game?
Primarily magic the gathering with a lobby, matchmaking, draft modes
That green deck definitely does pretty much cover all of greens strengths. I think enchanting lands have fallen out a bit and creatures and cards that allow you to fetch lands from your deck and put them directly into play are a bit more in favor now. This is an excellent deck to teach people what green cards typically do. I'm going to check out the other one later, but I assume it does the same thing but for red.
It's part of a series of teaching magic to newbies via colored decks so yeah.
That's very cool. I'm definitely going to try and build that deck to help teach new people. Thank you for sharing!
As someone who just shelled out for Fallout X MtG cards, welcome to the fold my friend
I just got the mutant menace one. I really wanted to get the dogmeat one too but my wallet is already angry with me lol
I had some birthday money laying around, so I splurged and got all of them, plus a booster box
Yeah, maybe not the best investment
Magic cards bring me a ton of joy so that definitely sounds worth it to me.
50k cards
Wut
Game has been around since I believe 1995 and is very popular.
But how the fuck can you balance a game with 50k cards
That's the neat part! You don't!
49k of them aren't good enough for competitive play, and of the 1k that are there's enough give and take to keep lots of strategies viable.
But at the higher levels of competition you are dealing with a card pool of maybe 100 unique cards played across many decks. Much easier to manage!
So basically Gwent but with waaay more forgotten cards
There's definitely a lot of trash cards, but there's way more than 1k cards that regularly see play at tables. There's a ton of different deck archetypes and so some cards are better in certain decks than others. I think there might only be 1k cards at the very top level of competitive play, but those decks are worth thousands of dollars and are just not realistic for most players. It's kind of a completely different game once you get to that level.
Imagine paying for cards lmao
The community is generally cool with people having some proxies in their deck (10-15) but unless everyone in the pod is playing with all proxies, having an entire deck full of proxies is kinda frowned on (I would not be comfortable showing up with an all proxy deck to a non-proxy game).
There are proxy events and formats and those are fun. There's a lot of two turn wins and infinite combos in those, but playing with all high power cards is great.
Proxy Vintage sounds like so much fun
It's great! Sometimes it can result in some really annoying and frustrating games. There are some cards that are just broken and can result in some games that are really toxic for other players, but that isn't that often, and really only happens if you're playing with someone who is kind of an asshole anyway.
I think there's more than 100 at the top levels of competitive play.
Yeah I might be off by a zero here. I'm just thinking if a player comes to me, says they want to play serious Modern tournaments, and wants to know what Red and Blue cards they should know, off the top of my head:
Counterspell
Murktide Regent
Spell Pierce
Force of Negation
Preordain
Subtlety
Ragavan
Lightning Bolt
Dragon's Rage Channeler
Uhh... Flame Of Anor?
That's 10 cards. There's others, but if you want a competitive Modern deck in Blue/Red the Murktide deck isn't far off from this list + lands.
Maybe the truth is somewhere in between (radical mtg centrism). There's tons of different decks on moxfield using tons of different cards, but the card pool does shrink the higher up you go, depending on the format.
I don't know I'm just a newb but so far the decks I've played against each other seem to work.
One of the big things in Magic is formats, releases of new cards are called sets and those sets can be legal or illegal depending on which format you use
The most basic format is Standard, which means only the 4 most recent sets are legal to use in your deck, another popular format is Modern which allows every set after the 8th Edition to be played
There are exception (notably ban lists) to these
Formats are easier to balance than the entirety of the game since release (although the devs frequently fuck up the balance)
If you want more info : https://mtg.fandom.com/wiki/Format
Standard rotates every three years now, which is kind of nice. It used to be too short IMO.
It can be double edged tho, if the sets are whack you're kinda stuck with it
I dont follow competitive Magic too much these days, but I remember the community was seething about Throne of Eldraine at the time
They introduced a new format (pioneer) that seems to be about the same rotation that standard used to be (~4 most recent sets). I very recently just got back in so I'm still learning about a bunch of the stuff I missed. I think those format changes just happened.
Kiln Fiend my beloved
i disagree with a lot of choices made in the linked decklists, but glad that you're having fun :)