Gaming Cycles

Lately, I've getting back into my old hobbies once again, which are to put it generally, Books, Photography, Gaming, and Anime. (Though not necessarily in that order, and sometimes mixed together). All of those hobbies have separate divisions -- within Books, for instance, there's fiction, non-fiction and comic, while Gaming encompasses board, video and card. Recently, I've been playing a lot of card games, or more specifically, Magic: The Gathering. There's been a bunch of competitive events, and my friends have been attending them. I haven't really felt my skills at the competition level, so I've been helping them practice, which has re-ignited my interest in the game.

Way back in 1994, I played my first game of Magic: The Gathering. On a whim, I picked up a couple expansion packs of The Dark, and a revised starter pack and started to play with the people in my dormitory. It was great back then, because it was one of those games that didn't take at all long to play -- you could cram in a game or two during a study break.

By 1994, collectible card games were all the rage, and a collector's market had sprung up overnight -- Moxes and Black Lotuses were a ridiculous $20 - $25 back then, a price that was unfathomable to me for a piece of cardboard (these days such cards fetch upwards of and average of $350). Every game company had their own CCG (collectible card game), and some game companies made a shift in strategy from other types of games to doing primarily CCGs. The whole CCG market in those days reminds me of the shift that has occurred in the MMO marketplace, where companies are licensing existing properties to make games, which make money in the short-term, but lose money in the long-term when the novelty of the property wore off.

In MMOGs, a big criticism of the genre is that the more time you spend on the game, the better your character tends to be, not necessarily because one is skilled, but that one can maximize the relationship between the flat monthly fee and the time they can afford to spend playing. This has given rise to a slew of third party merchants, from those who offer to level your character up, to those who would sell you in-game items for real world cash, to those who exchange game money for real world cash. While I think that paying real-world cash for in-game items defeats the purpose of playing the game, it is a business model that can only work outside of the United States. Doing baseline calculations 2 years ago using the WoW gold to real world money exchange rate, I surmised that the average gold farmer makes about 30 cents per hour -- hardly good money.

In CCGs, the criticism is that creating a collection of cards to be competitive is expensive. This has always been true from the beginning (and why, I, as a poor college student had no more than a few hundred Magic cards), eBay has changed this landscape considerably. The old way of acquiring a collection was to buy several boxes of boosters, and hope for the best. You'd then fill out your missing cards by shopping at gaming stores or at conventions or trading with people. Now you just go to eBay and buy the cards you want. Still, a competition set will cost on the order of several hundred dollars, depending on the size of the set. True competition play hadn't really been established in the early days of CCGs, and policies for deck construction hadn't really been defined yet. I always considered it an accomplishment if I was able to have one of every card in a set, and now to be competitive, one should have four such sets. Magic isn't a cheap hobby by any stretch of the imagination (well, if you want to be competitive/pro player -- if you just want to play and have some fun, it doesn't need to cost anywhere near that much).

With all of these drawbacks, why should I be entering into the fray of Magic: The Gathering again?

I'm pretty sure I've been seduced by the siren song of nostalgia. A few months ago, they released "Time Spiral", which had an interesting marketing gimmick: as part of the set, they'd include "timeshifted" cards, which were older cards from past sets that would be reprinted with the original art and card frames. There were old favorites in there, old cards that hadn't been seen in a set for over 10 years, which I thought was an excellent way for players to get interested in Magic again. Their followup to Time Spiral was Planar Chaos, in which they re-released cards with the same functionality, but in different colors. In their final set of the Time Spiral block, Future Sight, their timeshifting gimmick had more to do with possible future cards with a new card layout (which doesn't really entice me as much as the other two gimmicks).

In both MMOGs and CCGs there seems to be a certain amount of start-up cost -- for a MMOG, you've got a computer, you've got the DSL line, there's the monthly subscription fee, while for Magic, you've got the cards. Of course, the nice thing is, with Magic, after you're done, you can always sell the cards. With MMOGs, the selling of virtual property is a little more difficult (but still doable, unless the MMOG is totally shutdown).

It seems that Magic (and probably MMOGs as well), for my gamer generation has taken the place of a weekly poker night or a Saturday morning round of golf.