Nerd Corner 2: How to Magic the Gathering
Lili Jones | April 4, 2024
Welcome, traveler, to Nerd Corner: a column that serves as an introduction to nerdy topics of all kinds.
Today you engage in epic wizard battles, games of wit and strategy and strategically crafted decks of hundreds of illustrated cards. This is Magic: The Gathering (MTG).
Magic: The Gathering is a trading card game, somewhat similar to Pokemon. Players collect various cards and compile them into decks which have specific attributes depending on how that player wants to engage with the game. Collecting, trading and organizing cards can be equally important to actually playing the game.
There are over two dozen formats for playing MTG listed on the official website, which depend on how many players you have, how cutthroat you choose to play and how much time you have. Most MTG players on Warren Wilson College (WWC) campus play a popular casual format called Commander.
“Commander is a 100-card deck with a card that you have as your commander which is placed separately and you bring it in at any time,” said Hyacinth Cox, a sophomore student on the Print Shop Crew.
“I play a black-white deck based around sacrificing my own creatures,” Cox said. “A lot of them have benefits when they die. Or trigger benefits from other cards when they die. And my commander has an ability that doubles any ability triggered by a death. So it basically takes those cards and just amps them up to an absurd amount, which is quite enjoyable.”
Each deck tends to have a theme like the one Cox describes above. “Colors” form the basic strategy of MTG, representing the ideology, element or playstyle of each card. For example, Green cards often represent nature, wildlife, spirituality and tradition. Thus, many green cards “get big and strong and smash things” according to Nora Ellis, a sophomore on the Garden Crew who plays magic regularly with an informal group on campus.
“There's also blue and red and black,” Ellis said. “Red is aggression, mountains, fast. And then the magic is very like — it burns, that's why there's a lot of burn spells. And then, blue is — I think probably wisdom and kind of — I hate blue players. They like to counter my spells.”
All of the five colors: White, Blue, Black, Red and Green, have unique and interesting dynamics (except for blue, apparently), and can be combined with colors with similar ideologies to bring out the best attributes of one another. Ellis, for example, often plays green and white, which represent nature and life respectively.
Each card has at least one color, and in order to use the card in the game, you must have land cards. Land cards represent terrain, and correspond to one or more colors. They act as the main resource in the game and produce mana which you need to cast spells. If you have a green card, you must have a green mana-producing Forest card to use it.
Concerning card collecting, it can get expensive. Many MTG players who do not have disposable incomes to spend on hundreds of cards use something called a proxy — essentially a stand-in for an official card, often printed out.
“It's a fairly accepting environment with proxies here on campus,” Cox said. “We're fairly chill about it because everybody understands the game's expensive. Proxies are a really great way either A) you didn't think to bring your cards with you, or they’re in storage or what have you, or as a way to introduce new people to the game who might not want to make like the $60 –$100 investment that it would be to build the deck to be able to play with other folks.”
The financial barrier to getting into MTG is usually not an issue, especially if you are just curious to learn. Veteran players are usually more than willing to teach new players how to get into the game.
Samantha Jameson, a freshman on the Queer Resource Center Crew, gave advice to people curious about MTG: “Have a friend.”
“Especially if you can find a friend who knows more than you, just have someone to play with,” Jameson said. “Also have someone who can, like help you in learning interactions, how the cards work, [that] kind of thing. Also, just YouTube is a cool thing. There's so much good, helpful content out there about learning different things, or finding decks.”
Cox also welcomed anyone at WWC thinking about trying MTG to reach out to the informal group that plays multiple times weekly on Cowpie Patio.
“For one, contact one of the people that's probably going to be mentioned in this article and ask to get added to our Discord server,” Cox said. “We've got a group on campus that plays quite regularly. Yeah, I'd say that's best for if you're on campus. If going into Asheville, I'm not too familiar with the local board game and local gaming store stuff, but I'm sure there are definitely a couple that probably host Friday Night Magic.”
The game store in Asheville with the biggest focus on MTG is Gamer’s Haunt on Merrimon Ave. Wyvern’s Tale, also in Asheville, sells Magic cards too, but their main focus is on other games.
If you’re interested in playing Magic: the Gathering, whether you’re a new player or old, you can reach out to Nora Ellis, Jasper Everingham, Hyacinth Cox, or Samantha Jameson to be added to the unofficial MTG group on WWC campus.