That’s the good thing about MTG. A first round kill is theoretical possible, but buying the cards costs you several k. Also the card needed for this is banned in almost every playmode.
Are you arguing a high price point for MTG is good? That’s laughable. A game should be balanced by play skill. I play cEDH which has turn 1 wins but they’re infrequent and I never expect my opponent to actually own the cards. I want to play opponents, not their wallet. Some formats are financially restrictive and that just plain stupid.
That’s why I also mentioned that those cards are banned in almost every format. Of course, skill is better than money, but because of the complexity of mtg having a good deck makes a huge difference. Also just so that you know. For a round 1 kill in mtg you need to draw the black lotus(which you are only allowed to have once in your deck), the card channel fireball, one red mana and a shock. You need to draw all this cards in order to insta kill your opponent. It’s very powerful, but also very rare.
At least you’re onboard with skill>money. Your example is referring only to Vintage though. There are plenty of turn 1 wins in any of the Eternal formats, there have also been turn 0 wins (win in your opponents first turn upkeep). Even in Vintage, there are many more ways to turn 1 win, without Black Lotus. In cEDH turn 1 wins are uncommon but there are plenty of decks where they can occur but to your point, it is very rare. cEDH has the added benefit of 3 opponents trying to stop you but even then early wins happen. The banlist being built around casual Commander but used for cEDH doesn’t help.
Yeah, though round 2 kills are still somewhat common in certain formats. But yeah round 5+ is much more common.
The first time I played MtG, my friend who was teaching me let me go off with the token deck he lent to me. I ended up making so many creature tokens I was just writing them down on a piece of paper. It was in the hundreds. And then when I swung my massive army at him, he Uno-Reverso-d me and basically killed me with my own creatures. I think it’s still the most brutal way I’ve lost a game of Magic and I absolutely loved it XD
IIRC there are infinite token combos and if you are using one, you can just establish the loop and then claim the amount you want, so you don’t have to go through the process a billion times.
This also works for Magic The Gathering.
Generally for certain decks that have the value of a car and only in certain formats.
Yeah, there are turn one kill decks, but they generally don’t exist in the formats most players play and WotC will ban cards if they do show up.
I’d disagree. I keep up with both MtG and YGO (MtG as a game I like and YGO as a horrified observer), and the two games are not even close to equivalent here.
In YGO’s one official format, the oft-quoted statistic is that games don’t usually last more than 3 turns - those 3 turns being half the length of how MtG usually measures turns - Starting Player, Non-Starting Player, Starting Player, game. The interaction relies on your opponent having the right disruptive tool to slow down your combo.
For MtG, the only formats that are really like that are Legacy and Vintage, formats that are generally incredibly expensive to play in paper and definitely not where new players are gonna start. Even Modern, the next oldest and thus powerful format, has games that typically last at absolute least 3 turns for each player (twice the YGO standard) and most of the time last much longer. Then Standard, where new players are expected to start, has so much less combo “I win the game now” potential specifically because it’s a bad feeling for new players and the creators don’t want the format to be that fast. I can’t find a great source on it, but winning a Standard game anytime before turn 5 is notable, and usually means your opponent didn’t do anything.
That was basically how it went down when my friend tried to teach me how to play Go
I truly want to love the game.
But Konami not only power crept the game out of control, but they also make their own dumb decisions on top of that.
This also goes for OCG and TCG. Master Duel is even worse because it’s actually losing players too.
Reminds me of this skit! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DXTt8MBTX2o
Honesty I find it so dumb when someone is teaching someone a new card game, and they use a super powerful deck and absolutely wreck them.
Like what are you trying to prove.
There was one time I did that in Pokémon, but only because my friend had never played and was convinced in a joking way he could beat me if I played with my good deck, so to go with his joke I thrashed him with my good deck and then we laughed about it.
It’s like these people can’t stand to lose to the point they have to protect their fragile egos from a newbie.
If you play with a new player use balanced beginner friendly decks like the Pokémon battle academy decks or the MTG starter decks.
I had this happen to me a few years ago. My friend was dating this older woman who had a teenage son. We went to her place one night to play games. We all played Yu-Gi-Oh when we were younger and brought our old decks/cards.
Turns out the teenager played also but collected more recent cards, think it was XYZ at the time. We decided to play against him and he destroyed us in two turns, we had no chance. My Mirror Force, Magic Cylinder and Harpies Feather Duster were no use 😭😭
I always feel bad for TCG because the more you learn about them the less fun they are. I should be enjoying a variety of cards but instead I’m reducing the amount of luck and bad draws by just putting duplicates of every useful card to the max value I can
I used to play magic with my friends when I was in school and we made the mistake of actually going to the game shop and trying to play with people there. We all got demolished by the tryhard dudes there because we just made decks with cards we thought were cool and they all knew the meta gaming stuff. On top of that they were assholes about it. We never tried that again.
I did manage to win one game with a combo I had that allowed me to generate an infinite number of 1/1 tokens but that was sheer luck.
That’s where casual commander and limited in MtG shine. In commander, no duplicates, and playing casual with known playgroups can let you just have fun with weird combinations of cards. And in limited you just have to play with what you open or draft, and try to make it work, which is a fun challenge.
Both great options I used to recommend. I’m sure you can try hard 100 card decks but I think at that point people are more willing to be annoyed at you for not having fun in such a format
I’m sure you can try hard 100 card decks
That’s called CEDH, and it is very competitive and toxic. That’s why I specifically mentioned casual commander.
This is not even exaggerated, FTK (first turn kill) and OTK (one turn kill) are totally common. Back in the day of Yu-Gi-Oh, our group of friends occasionally using those “imbalance” or “META” decks to duel each other to have a little bit of fun and have some laughs when we feel “burn-out” playing with regular decks.
Besides FTK and OTK, there are also decks that’s just built to “annoy” the opponent lol.
Like completely locking the play field so no one can really do anything but skip their turns.
Locking your own field so the opponent cannot attack you, they can summon the strongest cards in their deck to just sit there and slowly fill up their own field.
Summon tons of token cards (disposable) so your opponent wasting all of their attack without doing any damages.
Make your opponent burn (discard) all of their decks.
Insanely fast regenerate LP (life points), so unless your opponent can kill you in one turn, you’ll just keep getting your LP regenerate.
Suicide deck to kill you both so the match end in a draw. (Robbing your opponent of satisfaction).
I always just assumed they were making shit up as they went along on yugioh
They were. The game came later.
I have a MTG deck that’s pretty much like that, but if you don’t get lucky with the cards, you’re going to lose pretty quickly. It’s all based around an artifact that reduces cycling costs.
Wishing Well was a classic of the genre.
That one was part of the strategy, but the main card was the Fluctuator, and another one I can’t remember that let you search your deck and draw a swamp for each creature in your graveyard. Then a spell to do X damage per swamp tapped.
I used to play Yugioh when I just came out in my country, along with the anime. I was curious about getting back into it a few years ago, saw all the confusing bs going on, and noped tf out.
You forgot to teach the newbie the part where if they do interact with your turn 0 win, you rage quit because “wow dude your threat assessment skills need some work.”