Magic: The Gathering

I’m not sure how to review something that’s technically thirty-some years old and also releases a new set every few months, so I’m going to review it the way I actually experience it, which is as a limited-format habit more than a constructed one. Draft a pack, build on the fly, play the same afternoon, done. That’s the version of this game that still gets me excited, an even playing field where nobody’s opening a binder of rares I don’t own.

Constructed is where the whole thing gets complicated, and where I part ways with a lot of the die-hards. The card pool is so deep at this point that building an original combo deck nobody else has thought of is its own genuine puzzle, and I get why people describe that deck-building process as the actual game underneath the game. But the economics of it are what they are, cards and more cards to fix a weak spot in a deck or chase a stronger one, and I’ve watched more than one friend phase the hobby out entirely once the math stopped making sense to them. I don’t blame anyone who quit over it.

What keeps me coming back after this many years is genuinely the depth, somebody once put it better than I can, that Garfield didn’t just make one game, he made a template for an almost infinite number of games depending which cards happen to be legal in whatever format you’re playing. I still find myself squinting at rules text on modern cards though, the templating keeps getting denser and the type on some of these commons is small enough now that I want the physical card at arm’s length under decent light before I trust what it’s actually doing. That’s a minor gripe against a design this foundational. Every deck-building game on my shelf owes something to this one, whether its designer admits it or not, and thirty years in it’s still teaching new players the exact same lesson it taught me: the deck you build is more fun than the deck you buy.