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I've heard that it's more expensive to get into Magic than it is 40K. I don't get it! Cards seem inexpensive to me.
What am I missing? I'd really like to know, I'm playing the video game now and I really enjoy it. Wouldn't be opposed to physical collecting.

Chase rares and mythics. Outside of a draft you need to buy them. Standard deck costs $300 dollars+, legacy or modern much more. If you don't have the 'required' cards it is hard to compete and you often loose to inferior players with superior decks which is frustrating.

If you want to play magic play casual like EDH/commander

Phototoxin wrote:Chase rares and mythics. Outside of a draft you need to buy them. Standard deck costs $300 dollars+, legacy or modern much more. If you don't have the 'required' cards it is hard to compete and you often loose to inferior players with superior decks which is frustrating.

If you want to play magic play casual like EDH/commander

Wow, I have a LOT to learn about this game. Always looked like grown up Pokemon to me when I was young. I think if I get into it, I'll have to take a casual route lol. The whole thing confuses me when a starter deck is a little over £10.

Yeah but most of the starter deck is chaff aside from the 2 rares that are included. High end cards like planeswalkers can be £35-£50 a piece.

If you're ever around southampton I can bring a couple of decks, meet up with your and show you how to play.

A good standard deck will cost mid one hundreds to high three hundreds. Generally the latter

Legacy/Vintage and Modern can get super ridiculous and to play limited costs quite a bit.

Starting out i would actually recommend getting an event deck instead of a starter. Far better and often contains some very handy cards to have. (e.g the blue-white avacyn restored human event deck has got four fiend hunters, three O-Rings and a couple of glacial fortresses.

EDH is my favoured format. Multi-player interaction and diplomacy is fun and the pool of viable cards is much larger.

My standard deck, cost me 30 quid.

Competes well, goes 3-1 4-0 at fnm's regularly.

if you can work out a silly theme deck, and spend some time getting a synergy going.

Davylove21 wrote:Always looked like grown up Pokemon to me when I was young.

That's actually kind of funny, cause the better Pokemon TCG cards demanded top dollar back in the day(when WotC had the license).

Platuan4th wrote:

Davylove21 wrote:Always looked like grown up Pokemon to me when I was young.

That's actually kind of funny, cause the better Pokemon TCG cards demanded top dollar back in the day(when WotC had the license).

I never played Pokemon, I just bought tonnes of boosters and hunted shinies, like everyone.

Phototoxin wrote:Yeah but most of the starter deck is chaff aside from the 2 rares that are included. High end cards like planeswalkers can be £35-£50 a piece.

If you're ever around southampton I can bring a couple of decks, meet up with your and show you how to play.

MtG seems really well supported for a niche game and the people who are into it all seem to want to spread the word. It adds to the appeal considerably.

Unfortunately, I'm only in Southampton when I can get tickets to a match. Last time was the draw with the Skates

I am looking to get into this with my son, i went to my local gaming store and was given two quickstart packs with 30 cards in each, and i managed to get a 2012 builders kit for just over £10, its handy that a few guys at my work play, and they are happy to chat and give me pointers, the local store is good too as there are some hardcore players but alot of people who just play for a laugh and the fun of it.

I have also bought the PC game and am thoroughly enjoying it, and i think i should have started this alot sooner!

The PC-Game is a great tool for players to learn the rules. Especially things like the phase order.

And the Deck Builder Toolkits are great value and have some fantasticly useful commons in them. (well at least the last ones did. I havent gotten one of the new ones.

It's getting to a point where a lot of standard players will be playing nigh-on-unbeatable "net decks", and if you don't have hundreds to drop on a deck you simply won't be able to compete. Best sticking to Pauper (commons only), which is a lot of fun as long as you can find players to play.

it really depends if you want to play competitvly. I bought a starter deck and a few boosters and left it at that. I have good deck that can match the ones that my mates have :3

that being said, like with any TCG, a tourny deck will cost you a hell of a lot if you plan on winning

I haven't played Magic in ages, but I understand that if you want to play competitively, it can get stupid expensive.

But, if you want to play casually (and that's all me and my freinds ever did), it's dirt cheap.

I've got a red-white humans standard deck built entirely from stuff I've drafted and swapped for, no mythics, and I've been in the final at a few events with it and trashed decks worth a lot more on paper (usually full of Swords of X and Y or Planeswalkers). Haven't bought anything specifically. There are a couple of especially rare lands (Cavern of Souls) but aside from them the whole deck could be bought for under £50 from a dealer. I don't even need the Cavern of Souls because no one seems to be running counter spells down this way.

That said, Commander is a lot of fun and you only need one of anything which makes it a lot more varied and easy to get into as a casual game. Also there are a lot of really slow difficult cards that come into their own in Commander games which means they are pretty cheap because no one would use them normally. 'Tunnel Vision' is one particularly hilarious example with all the cards that send stuff to the bottom of opponents' libraries...

Don't forget. All the cards will get rotated out of the tournament making it the most expensive game to play of all hobbies if you go competitive.

There's a couple of tournament scenes.

Every quarter there's a new set (summers are a new core set, the other 3 quarters comprise a "block" which will share story and theme between them). In the fall, there's a rotation, and the previous core set and second most recent block of 3 sets rotate out of the "Standard" scene. Keeping up with Standard can be expensive, if the current top decks require chase rares and mythics. Sometimes they don't, but often they do. You can "okay" to "reasonably" well with offbeat decks that cost in the ten to fifty dollar range. I've stopped playing Standard, not so much because of the cost, but because I haven't the time to keep up with an ever shifting scene.

There are also two "Eternal" tournament scenes. Legacy is "almost every card ever printed" with a couple handful of banned and restricted cards. Top end Legacy decks are, as mentioned, CRAZY expensive to buy (some upwards of $1000, though most are in the $300-500 range). But once bought, you generally do not need to change them again, ever. I don't even think about playing Legacy.

Modern is a "new" tournament format that's only a year or so old. It's list is "everything that's been printed with the new border" (ie, since 8th edition Core set and Mirrodin Block). Competitive Modern decks can be a pretty expensive, mostly because the good land cards tend to be disproportionately expensive. You're unlikely to hit the $1000 mark, but $500 isn't out of the question for the most uber-competitive deck worth of cards. You can compete fairly well with decks in the $50-100 range, as unlike standard you have access to multiple years worth of "good, but not great, until you combine them together" cards. Most of my competitive decks check in between $100 and $200, with one very competitive deck that could be built for under $20.


Finally, there's "organized, but usually not tournament" formats. Commander has been mentioned as one. Frankly, I'd rather play Commander than anything else. For one, it's almost always a multiplayer game, which leads to a lot more social interaction and politicking, which makes for a more fun game. For another, it's a mostly unrestricted format in terms of what cards you can use, but it's restricted in that you can only have 1 of any given card (except basic lands) in a deck. That means that you've only got to hunt down one copy of that ultra-expensive card, not 4 copies.

Commander decks range a lot in price. You can buy into commander with the pre-built decks for as little as $30. Hell, there's legitimate decks that use 1 legendary creature and 99 lands. In practice, most of my decks would cost about $200-300 to build from scratch, tending towards the lower side of that. You can go over the top; I've seen decks that were worth almost $2000. I've also seen that deck lose regularly to decks worth less than $100.

People playing net decks have killed MTG. I miss the good old days of having to trade into 4 of a card instead of dropping £20 on the internet and having them a few days later.

If you can find players or a tourny, I like peasant magic myself....

Type I is for old vets only. Single cards can go for $1k or more.

What i did to get decent cards when i started out with Magic was "Hate drafting" whatever looked like it would be a pain in the arse to fight against id pick it (kinda a dick thing to do) but in doing so ive managed to make about........ 10 decks from doing so (plus picking up the odd box of cards)

I only like to play casualy though so i dont spend hundreds on a deck just so its nigh unstoppable.... with that being said though i do have a Dragon deck (which would have cost arm arm and a leg and probably my left nut) that thankfully cost almost nothing to make, luckily i found a dude who collects shiny cards so he traded anything and everything dragon related just for the shiny cards i had

It depends on your area. If you have a lot of competetive players near you, it can be more expensive as you want to try and beat them after getting your face smashed into the table a few dozen times. If you play with casual players with decks built for fun play, then you can enjoy the game for a relatively low cost. That doesn't mean that you can get a cool themed deck for cheap if the cards required are expensive. I went into the game with skepticism, but met cool people playing.

Actually, Magic is extremely cheap if you print your own cards.
I have been doing it for years, and with current ink & laser printer technology, they look virtually identicle to the real thing.
There is no reason to spend hundereds of dollars on pieces of cardboard.

You can't use them in an official WOTC tournament, but I don't care. For casual play with your friends, they are da bomb.

The most fun way to play magic is with an 800 card cube. Each card is selected from the best rares ever made for the game, from
Unlimited to Current. You shuffle them up and draft everyone 3x 15 card boosters. Everybody can use as much land as they want.

Everyone is on the same footing, and it is amazingly fun!

http://www.cubedrafting.com/view-the-cube/

Darklight wrote:Actually, Magic is extremely cheap if you print your own cards.

In that same sense, Wargaming is much cheaper if you cast your own models...

The CF wrote:

Darklight wrote:Actually, Magic is extremely cheap if you print your own cards.

In that same sense, Wargaming is much cheaper if you cast your own models...

Not really. It is a much more involved process. A lot of wargame models can't be casted with the typical home setup, because
of detail and complexity.

Also, from what I have seen, people just waste a bunch of time and money trying to cast. The casts come out $hitty, and they end
up buying the originals anyway.

Just like any game with many different sets and ongoing releases, it sort of depends on your perspective and desire to be a completist to some extent.

In THEORY (note the sarcastic emphasis on my part), the Standard format, which seems ostensibly placed to be the primary mode of gameplay appeal, should be financially accessible. However it's not even remotely that cheap if you'd like to have access to all the good cards (many, not all, are Rares or Mythics) - these rarer cards get way over-priced quickly and what's most damning about the M:tG model is that it's the players themselves that create the demand (assisted, unfortunately, by retailers also). :(

Once I started realizing that AND that the sets just...keep...coming...I realized it's just way too expensive to bother trying to play. It's too bad as it is a solid game and is one of the few left that has massive appeal and support by its parent company. That was part of its appeal to me, in the first place, but eventually the cost just killed my interest. It's (the cost) pretty ridiculous (in my own opinion, ymmv) if you'd like to have access to complete sets. :(

Makes me sad but that's life.