I started playing Magic for the first time around 4th Grade. I remember taking the bus back from after school with a friend of mine, and we were puzzling over what the “X” in the mana cost of Disintegrate could possibly mean. A random kid who overheard us talking and knew about the game explained that it was a variable, and “X” could be as much as you wanted it to be, or more accurately, as much as mana as you could pay for it. So if you had 21 lands, you could deal 20 damage to your opponent's face? Amazing. We had instantly found our new favorite spell.
As you can probably tell from that little anecdote, my friends and I really knew nothing about the game. Everything to us was a creature beat-down fest. Burn was used, except in very rare occasions, to deal damage to a player, not as removal. Spells like Wrath of God were just unplayable. I mean why would you play something that killed “all creatures” and not just your opponent's? And you can just straight up forget about notions like ordering triggers, responding to effects, or using the stack (which actually didn't exist when I started playing).
There are moments when I yearn for this time before time, when everyone's boards were just massive lines of creatures that were unencumbered by the fear of board wipes; when instants were played as sorceries (unless they were counter spells) because why would it matter?; when enchantment destruction, artifact removal, and walls were all main deck necessities. And when I play casual Magic, this is the state I try to return to.
I don't want to play powerful cards in a casual deck (though if you look at my casual decks you probably think I'm lying, but playing against other high-power casual decks requires me to make some concessions unfortunately). I also don't like getting my casual play critiqued. When playing competitively or testing for competitive play, I definitely value the opinions of other plays and want to know if I made any mistakes, but when I'm playing a deck that's supposed to be fun I go on auto-pilot, and I don't really care if I make mistakes. As far as I'm concerned making optimal plays is for competition. If you happen to make them in casual play, that's fine too, but I personally don't enjoy having my decisions questioned by other players during games that are just supposed to be for fun.
Over the last week or so, since I started posting this series of articles, I've had some debates with other friends of mine on the topic (and you can get some of their opinions in the comments on previous posts). Conta made the excellent point that the power-level of a casual deck should really just be determined by how willing your friends are to play against it. If everyone in your crew is okay with you rocking four copies of every restricted card, then really that's fine.
Ultimately I think his assertion is correct. Casual is really what you make of it, and as long as you and your friends are having fun that's what is most important.
However, for me the fun lies in trying to make decks that are far from being playable in any sort of competitive format, that play cards that don't see competitive play (bonus points if they have awesome art too), and that are generally built around themes (my Elder Dragon Highlander deck only runs creatures that are Angels). I think casual should be a format that is about creativity, doing wacky things you don't normally see, and showing some love to those cards that are just not good enough to cut it in a competitive environment.
Again, I can't tell you how to play your casual games. That would sort of defeat the point of the whole idea. If the fun for you is playing really overpowered decks, then that's cool. There is only one cardinal rule to playing “casual” Magic, and that is to make sure everyone involved is having fun. If you've found that this isn't the case for you and your friends, maybe you should try some of this advice. Hopefully it'll help you out.
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I think there's always a battle between having fun and trying to win, since even in casual play it's no fun to lose every game. I think maybe the way to deal with this in a league setting is to restrict deckbuilding, such as allowing only 1 of any nonbasic land card, or forcing everyone to win some other way than reducing their opponents life total to 0, or to make everyone win using an infinite combo, etc. Now that I list these, it might be a fun idea to run a league where every week you introduce a new crazy rule like the above. This way people would have to spend their time making clever, fun decks, and wouldn't spend all their time fine-tuning.
ReplyDeleteYeah, some of my casual decks get more tuned or power-heavy b/c I don't like losing all of the time. Those rules sound really funky, and I think that could be a lot of fun, forcing people to constantly design different decks.
ReplyDeleteBut we started a limited league a little while ago, and it sorta fell apart b/c no one has time to make a committment like that anymore. Maybe someday...