A Magical Break

As I've stated before, I'm a big fan of the collectible card game Magic: The Gathering (or MTG for short).

Well, this past weekend, I got to play a LOT of MTG. There was a four-player game with my wife, Stephen, and my friend Bill that we played on Thanksgiving. When Mary plays Magic, it makes me happy since she's putting time in a hobby of mine, one of my favorite hobbies, at that.

I like playing random Duel Decks, which involves taking the 16 (out of 20) Duel Decks that I own and rolling to decide which deck a player uses. We added the four Planechase decks (borrowed from Andrew) as well as the Planechase cards for a variation to the game.

Gotta say, it was a long, but fun game. Of course, my kids needed attention from time-to-time. As the game continued, there came different times when one of us could have been taken out, but it didn't happen as it was good to keep in the competition. However, there came a turn when Mary played an enchantment that was able to remove some of our creatures.

 Then...with that enchantment, she played a sorcery that caused her to lose her 7 or 8 creatures and replace them with 4/4 creatures, thus doing 4 damage per creature. She killed all three opponents in one turn.

And with that, the game was done.

I got to play a few games with Stephen over the break, which was nice since I don't feel like I get to play enough. I can't remember too much from them, except our last one-on-one battle. But that was more of a standstill.

On Saturday, Mary, Stephen, and I played a 3-player Planechase with Random Duel Decks. For the fourth time (so it seemed) for the break, I ended up with the Demonic deck, while Stephen had its Divine enemy. Mary had the white/green Aura deck from Planechase. We started off here:

And hated it until we finally left. Then, at every turn, the creatures kept leaving the battlefield. That was until Mary rolled the planar dice and took us to this place:

And then it was on. We had a bunch of creatures able to attack on the battlefield. And I was scared of all of them. I couldn't decide which creature I feared more between these two:

Stephen had Reya, while Mary had Krond. Both were scary. Thankfully, Mary killed Stephen's Reya and Stephen attacked Mary, taking her down to 11 life. At the beginning of my turn, Stephen had two creatures (one was Mary's he'd 'stolen'). I had like six mostly flying from Orzhova's trigger still. I drew Corrupt.

With that (and 12 swamps) I was able to kill Mary. And with my six creatures (four flying), I was able to kill Stephen. That was twice in the weekend where the game came down to one lucky draw in a multiplayer game where, at the beginning of the turn, all players had still been active.

Magic is an awesome game. A player can be on the verge of losing, draw one card, and take control (and a win). I'm absolutely addicted to the game, but I enjoy it nonetheless.

Alien abductions are involuntary, but probings are scheduled.