<story><title>The Curse of the Black Lotus – How MtG Avoided Becoming Beanie Babies</title><url>http://www.npr.org/templates/transcript/transcript.php?storyId=392381112</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>columbo</author><text>I can only speak to MtG when it first came out, I&amp;#x27;ve been out of the loop since eh since when 4th edition started or so. MtG exploded because it was (and I hate to use this term): hackable. You could build creative exploits into the game, at our local shop there was a no CoP rule (no circle of protection) because they were considered too unfair; in hindsight this was a ridiculous rule.&lt;p&gt;Very few games embrace the unknown dynamic nature as well as MtG did. They would introduce cards that could be mixed with past-future cards almost on a whim, creating moments of pure frenzy as people managed to build systems that seemed indestructible.&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s crazy to think how much some of these cards are worth now:
&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.mtgprice.com/sets/Beta/Savannah&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.mtgprice.com&amp;#x2F;sets&amp;#x2F;Beta&amp;#x2F;Savannah&lt;/a&gt;</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>ertdfgcb</author><text>To expand on Magic being &amp;quot;hackable&amp;quot;: The game is this way because every rule of the game can be changed by a card. There are no set in stone rules in the sense that they will always apply the same way no matter the gamestate - there are cards that say &amp;quot;You can&amp;#x27;t win the game&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;End the turn&amp;quot;, &amp;quot;Skip the upkeep phase&amp;quot;, etc. The game isn&amp;#x27;t just about playing by the rules effectively, it&amp;#x27;s also about changing the rules effectively and dealing with how your opponent is doing the same. I think a related reason the game exploded is the fact that design (deckbuilding) is an integral part. Having a hackable game is great, but if the hackableness is random it&amp;#x27;s not that exciting. It&amp;#x27;s when you can design an exploit (deck) and improve on it that it gets really exciting.&lt;p&gt;To me, the main reason Magic is fun is the variety of skills and approaches it encourages. You can play it as several different resource management games: there are at least 4 important resources to manage (time, mana, cards, life) and you can win by focus on getting one or more of these resources more or by preventing your opponent from having&amp;#x2F;using any resources, and all of those decisions have major impacts on your play and deckbuilding style. You can also play it as a game of assembling your crazy exploit of the rules fast enough to win (combo decks), or you might even be able to exploit the rules so hard you&amp;#x27;re essentially playing a different game from your opponent, so you have a completely different win condition to achieve (legacy Dredge).</text></comment>
<story><title>The Curse of the Black Lotus – How MtG Avoided Becoming Beanie Babies</title><url>http://www.npr.org/templates/transcript/transcript.php?storyId=392381112</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>columbo</author><text>I can only speak to MtG when it first came out, I&amp;#x27;ve been out of the loop since eh since when 4th edition started or so. MtG exploded because it was (and I hate to use this term): hackable. You could build creative exploits into the game, at our local shop there was a no CoP rule (no circle of protection) because they were considered too unfair; in hindsight this was a ridiculous rule.&lt;p&gt;Very few games embrace the unknown dynamic nature as well as MtG did. They would introduce cards that could be mixed with past-future cards almost on a whim, creating moments of pure frenzy as people managed to build systems that seemed indestructible.&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s crazy to think how much some of these cards are worth now:
&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.mtgprice.com/sets/Beta/Savannah&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.mtgprice.com&amp;#x2F;sets&amp;#x2F;Beta&amp;#x2F;Savannah&lt;/a&gt;</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>MichaelGG</author><text>Yeah I tried to get back into it a couple years ago, because it is a cool game. But it was just simply no fun to play; it&amp;#x27;s obviously a game that mainly relies on being able to spend a lot of money buying power. Even at a tiny little shop, everyone had these insane combos and whatnot. Really impossible to win against without investing a lot.</text></comment>