Saturday was our second biannual yard sale for the year. We made almost $40. Most of what I contribute is old VHS movies that I have vowed to never watch again. The only VHS I'm holding onto is what I would consider collector stuff, like the Twin Peaks box set, Red Dwarf series 1 through 7, and my extra rare copy of The Compleat Weird Al. VHS offends me.
This being Clark's first yard sale, I imagine he was mightily confused. Why are we all in the front yard? With all this junk? Isn't this where we keep the car? He took his naps like a champ, though, so we were able to manage the yard sale business and entertain regularly scheduled Clark guest appearances.
Well, Rhon was. I spent most of the time playing Magic with Matt, my gamer next door. He's going into ninth grade, I think, and he occasionally gets down to the comic store for Thursday night open Magic tables. After having playing Magic hardcore for a couple years, it's fun to see the game again from the outside. Matt shows me all these crazy cards that just came out, most of them far more complicated and feature-packed than the 1995-1998 era I'm familiar with. In those days, we were thrilled to have a creature with flying AND a pumpable attack. Today, you get jerks like that for nothing. The big guns today fly, don't tap to attack, come back to play even after they die, plus give you life every turn.
Matt's current deck is a white life-gaining affair. At one point he had himself up to 50-couple life. I played a pair of my old decks, my Goblin deck and my black/blue Vampires and Air Elementals deck. They're quite old; you'd be hard-pressed to find a copyright date within the last five years on these cards. We played about a dozen games, probably a third of which were really good, even matches.
That game where he got up above 50? I did 70 damage to him on the next turn. Mogg Infestation + Fork (on the Infestation) + Mogg Infestation again + Kyren Negotiations. 70 Goblins. He doesn't pull out a lot of cards that protect against direct damage... I don't know if his usual playgroup concentrates on creature damage instead or if the game itself does these days, but it leaves him wide open for my Negotiations, Goblin Bombardment, and/or Goblin War Strike.
My Goblin deck has a Coat of Arms in it and two Mana Flares. Both of those can get risky since they help your opponent as well, but it's usually better for me to play them than to avoid them. In our final game, I had both Mana Flares and a ton of Mountains on the table... so I only had to tap one land to generate a fresh Gobbo with the Goblin Warrens. He actually had me on the ropes on this one because he had some big 5/5 flying artifact dragon thing, plus some awful enchantment that taps all red creatures and keeps them from untapping. I was down to 3 life before the math turned in my favor and I could generate enough Goblins to feed into the Bombardment to kill him.
Midway through the day, he changed his deck and added a bunch of those little goons that have Protection from Goblins, so that was good fun to figure out ways around them. He also has this cool double sided fox wizard dealie, who starts out as a cheap creature, but when you hit 30 life, he flips around to become an enchantment that prevents all damage done to your creatures. Hilarious, but that guy earned a big red target on his chest whenever he showed up.
My black/blue deck didn't fare as well, but it's sort of a slow starter. It uses the old Nettling Imps... either in conjunction with Twiddles and an Icy Manipulator to kill enemy creatures, or as forced food for the Sengir Vampires. Probably needs another Icy in there somewhere. For some reason, I kept a Nevinyrral's Disk in that deck for years, but it's out now.
As intrigued as I am about the new cards, I just don't think I could buy into Magic again. It's still a good game, but there's so many other games out there that I'd rather sample from the rest of the shop. And I just can't care about the Magic storylines. I know it's been a while since I last looked into it, but for years they kept pumping out generic fantasy nonsense, and the new cards don't look much different. (Plus, I hate the new card templates.) Certainly, I still play games that also have average theming and plot - Pirates, for one - but I think I would be forcing myself to enjoy what Magic offers. Also, the card pool is intimidatingly enormous... I have trouble deckbuilding as it is, I really don't want to have to think about a decade of cards. The alternate is to pay attention to the current tournament scene and only build decks with the latest couple expansion sets, but I don't really want to keep track of that either. I'll stick with smaller, failing games, I guess.
Speaking of that, I bought six boosters of the new Marvel Vs. expansion, the Avengers and quickly realized that is enough of that. I do not care about any of the teams included in this set. I guess I would build an Avengers deck or maybe a Kang Council deck, but Masters of Evil? Squadron Supreme? I had the same issue with the Marvel Knights set. More dopey teams featuring minor league characters. With the Green Lantern set, I went straight to singles and bought enough cards for a GL deck... no Anti-Matter goofs, no stupid gormless Manhunters. The Vs. team needs to stop digging up new awful obscure teams and return to the name brands that have characters people know and like. Once they do a Justice League team, who's left of any importance across both universes? The Watchmen? Doom Patrol? Speed Force? Vertigo? Infinity Watch? Starjammers? Howard the Duck?
