Anyway, one thing that distinguishes Magic from other games is that it keeps changing: every few months, there’s a new set released, which changes the relative effectiveness of various strategies. You have to keep experimenting and learning in order to continue to do well; figuring out what the best deck to play at a tournament basically requires Doing Science, and it can—and does—go wrong in all the same ways that real science goes wrong.
Agreed, but I think that a strong point against Magic is the large amount of money that it costs to build a competitive deck. I enjoyed playing it for a few years, but eventually ran out of steam (partially for this reason, partially because I especially enjoy B/W control, which wasn’t so good anymore.)
Hardly at the same level, but I wonder how much can be gained just by doing something like switching from Chess to something like Chess960. (Hardly at the same level because it’s just a one-time injection of randomness; if people had been playing that all along, there still would not be new chess expansions released every few months.)
Magic: the Gathering is good.
I think that some explanation of how you thought that playing M:TG was ‘good’ would be more useful as a comment.
Sorry.
Anyway, one thing that distinguishes Magic from other games is that it keeps changing: every few months, there’s a new set released, which changes the relative effectiveness of various strategies. You have to keep experimenting and learning in order to continue to do well; figuring out what the best deck to play at a tournament basically requires Doing Science, and it can—and does—go wrong in all the same ways that real science goes wrong.
Agreed, but I think that a strong point against Magic is the large amount of money that it costs to build a competitive deck. I enjoyed playing it for a few years, but eventually ran out of steam (partially for this reason, partially because I especially enjoy B/W control, which wasn’t so good anymore.)
Yeah, Magic is ridiculously expensive when compared to many other games. :(
Hardly at the same level, but I wonder how much can be gained just by doing something like switching from Chess to something like Chess960. (Hardly at the same level because it’s just a one-time injection of randomness; if people had been playing that all along, there still would not be new chess expansions released every few months.)