Comic Strips

That's an expensive one turn kill. About 2.500€ going by cheapest listing on cardmarket. Of which Channel and Fireball contribute about 0,04€ to the grand total.

Look, if you had lotus, fireball, mox, and channel in your opener you deserve to win that game

A 4-card combo sounds pretty difficult to pull off. Also, 3 of those cards are banned or restricted, depending upon what format you're playing.

I played in an "illegal deck" tourney many years back, probably around Fallen Empires release, so the card pool was still relatively small and power cards weren't commanding the premium they do today. The rules called for a minimum 40-card deck but no limit or restrictions to any cards. I played decks that were literally just lotuses, mountains, channels, and fireballs and i frequently lost first turn. The deck i always think about from that tourney was composed of time walks, ancestrals, timetwisters, lotuses, sapphires, rubies, and ball lightnings. He would just keep gaining cards and playing more lotuses etc, take extra turns, throw a ball lightning at you, end turn, rinse and repeat. At least it took a minute to lose the game against him, lol!

I had a crappy deck loaded with Llanowar elves, giant growths, and the 1 berzerk i had. I only found out about the tourney after i got to the show, so it was just slapped together onsite with whatever i could find from vendors. It didn't matter in the end--the deck didn't stand a chance...but I'm glad i played--even if only to see some of these stacks of rare cards getting shuffled game after game without sleeves ಠ_ಠ

Fuck pub stompers. I can only imagine their little brittle egos not being able to handle playing a weaker deck against a beginner.

I hope this hasn't ruined all the interest in the game for you

They probably didn't really have fun either, at that point you don't play to have fun, the fun stopped for them a long time ago. The only thing left is the hollow thrill of owning competitio to stoke your ego and not feel like a complete looser who spent thousands of dollars and countless hours you'll never get back taking a children's card game seriously. Real friends that actually care about other people know how to hold themselves back so everyone can have fun (until the shit talking starts from that one mf and you gotta take the gloves off)

Alternatively, allow everybody to use proxy decks. Then they can have their fun with their decks and you have enough forepowers to fight on fair footing

Unless the problems is also that you are not that experienced at MTG, but since you said you know how to play, this could be an alternative

But in any case, yeah, they should have taken into account everyone else's fun, for sure

I know some really good MTG players but whenever I play with them they bring multiple of their good decks(and more casual ones also) and are always happy to share.

I have some friends like that, and we play commander so pay to win is always a thing. My GF and I have a precon each and we talked with those friend and now all of us have a precon te be in an closer level than “rat infinite combo vs hobbits precon.”

With some time we have improved our main decks to be more capable of standing. But we are not close yet xd.

You did the right thing talking to them and saying that if they don't chill out it will be not funny for half the table.

When I was a young lad my friends' brothers were regularly part of our matches and would absolutely stomp us every time because they actually had jobs to buy individual rares to complete their decks, or would constantly dupe us out of any good rares we'd come across with the booster packs we got from our weekly allowance by offering a whole bunch of shitty rares and making us think it was a good trade, or doing the same thing to get us to put them up as ante for a round before stomping us and collecting their winnings.

Absolutely predatory. There should be laws against the shenanigans they pulled on us.

Also, we'd all play these big "fast mana, fast draw" games sometimes where you always draw till you have 8 cards, and could play every land from your hand during your turn. Sometimes there's be like 6 people playing at the same time. They'd build these "suicide" decks with cards like hurricane that did X damage to all players, and pair them with protections to absolutely slaughter the entire playing field before we could even get anything good into play. Absolute psychopaths.

Still some of the best times of my life.

You beat me to it! Only thing I thought of when I read this.

A classic :)

Screw the rules, I have money!

Ignore the other person, and save your sanity. Just ignore MTG altogether.

MTG Arena has some lower power game modes that are nice.

"Jump in" where you get to pick two half decks and combine them to make a weird deck. They even have "Jump in" with lord of the ring cards. "Draft" Where you you make a deck by picking cards out of like 8 packs, so your deck is always going to be unique and janky and lower power, since it's not the best combo cards from 10 different packs. "Starter duel" Where players pick one of 10 decks to play against each other, and the decks change.

This is why so many people play drafts at local game shops. It achieves two things: 1) you get experience playing the game with a limited number of unique cards and everyone has similar chances of getting the cards they want and need and 2) you build your collection by keeping the cards you drafted and winning additional packs if you won any games. There are plenty of people at these shops that would be willing to help you with deck building too.

When I was a Pokémon Professor for our local meetup, I kept two sleeved decks that were just off-the-shelf, specifically for teaching new people. I’ll never understand bringing the same brutality to a teaching game that you would to a world championship..

I was about to object, because objectively the vanilla Fluxx is considerably easier than MTG, but I must recognize that other thematic variants of Fluxx easily become this. It varies, but things can get complicated with special abilities in the Keepers, elaborate Rules, considerations about Creepers, weird Surprises, and very carefully worded Ungoals.