How do I become faster at playing Magic: The Gathering?

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That happens to me all the time when I play. I'll have cool spells in my hand, and I'll end up wasting them and topdecking, instead of saving them for later on. Having a Spellbook http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/ ... eid=191338 can rectify this problem somewhat, as it somewhat suppresses the urge to play a card just to get it out of your hand, though it isn't an infallible solution, especially against a Red deck due to all the artifact destruction.



I think I sort of know what you mean. I've played on and off for years, casually and in tournaments, and in a lot of ways I still feel like a "beginning" player with very little skill. I have experience, but virtually no skill, and most of my NT friends are much better than me, even though a lot of them haven't played for as long as I have.

I want to play Magic, and I want to enjoy Magic, but I feel like I'm too stupid for it. I'm not good at strategizing or solving puzzles, and my math skills are weak.

On a related note, I've noticed that a lot of my Magic-playing friends either played Yu-Gi-Oh before they played Magic, or they play both. I tried Yu-Gi-Oh once and I could not make any sense of it. I kind of want to learn it just so that I can have a wider pool of people to play with, and maybe so that it could inadvertantly help my Magic skills (though it may end up having the opposite effect, like what I've noticed can happen when I switch between games in other genres that rival one another ). The thing is, I grew up having a poor image of Yu-Gi-Oh, as my dad denounced it as a cheap knockoff of Magic, and being that it targets children more than Magic, I've also heard tons of stories about people cheating at it.

I dunno, would anyone recommend that I try Yu-Gi-Oh and other competing CCGs? Or should I just focus purely on Magic?

AH! This i can actually help with! Yu-Gi-Oh is a card game that has rules and little timing sequences for card effects that make the game a little complicated. Not to mention, there is an extensive ban list that is changed every 3 monthes that can make or break decks. Last bad point, no matter how good or fun your deck is, it will never beat a top tier deck that pretty much plays itself (at the moment of writing this post, these decks include "Hand Artifact Traptrix", "Noble Knights" and "Prophecy"). The only redeeming feature about this game is that there is a snazzy little website known as "Duelingnetwork.com" where you can sign-up, Sign-in and play with access to litterally any card in the world making the game incredibly cheap (considering the site is free to begin with) but other than this, it's a sh***y game that is rather boring. It's sad that "Duel Masters" never really got going :/ I enjoyed that card game :/

So, stay the hell away from Yu-Gi-Oh then. Got it. Mind you, the ban lists wouldn't really apply for casual play, which I am more interested in.

it really depends on who you play with :/ if you play with friends who aren't all that into competitive play then yeah, playing as if there is no ban list is ok but if you do play against that 1 friend who follows the ban list, be ready for butt hurt and 1001 Inzektors, Samurais, Burns + Reverse Burns (agreed, this hasn't got any banned cards but are damn right annoying as you can't do anything against them and you'll just lose lifepoints for virtually no reason), a really REALLY broken Exodia deck that uses a f****d up Dark World draw engine that requires banned cards to work, Yatagarasu that says "Your turn is Invalid" and lastly, the dreaded Thousand-Eyes Restrict insta win deck that basically says "Boss creature? what boss creature?".

Yuo'd understand after reading the effects of each card and having a game against them. They are boring as hell to go against as you pretty much never have a field and can never do a thing.

I'll agree with that statement.


I used to play Yugioh awhile ago, aaaaand..... yeah. It's just got too many bad points. Lots of really strange rules and mechanics, unbalanced cards everywhere, and a tendancy for there to be alot of literally useless cards (like super-weak monsters that have literally no effect at all, having only flavor text... when I played, there were LOTS of these. EVERY one of them worthless.), and.... yeah, it was a pretty messed up game.



One thing I might suggest is to indeed pick up Duels of the Whatever 2014..... and then mod the hell outta it. Apparently there's huge blobs of mods for this game, adding about 10 zillion cards (and these seem to actually be recent, for now), proper deckbuilder, and so on, and I'm told that you can hand any deck at all to the AI for it to use.

The game is designed for beginners to start with, so that + mods mean that it might be very good for practice.

As for the AI..... someone I know tells me it's "amazing", but I've heard that one before only to absolutely obliterate it myself, in whichever game it is. But we'll see. I'm probably going to grab it myself for the heck of it and experiment with it a bit with the mods.

If you buy it though, buy THAT one, dont buy 2015. All I hear about that one is bad, bad, bad.