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Shufflingdead > Articles > Guides
A Complete User's Guide to Magic: The Gathering
Magic: The Gathering is a card game in which players build a deck filled with creatures and spells, then battle one another for domination of the magical world of a nerd's dinning room table.
Part 1: Building a Deck
Before entering a game of Magic, a player must first get himself a deck of cards to battle his evil nemesis. There are two ways of doing this, you can go to a place that sells the cards, slam a bunch of money down and get the guy behind the counter to build you some kind of invincible super deck, which I consider cheating, or do it the old fashioned way and actually build it yourself.
To build yourself a deck all you've got to is buy a couple starter decks, a bunch of booster packs, scour the ten cent bins for cards you might want to use and pick out a few singles from the binders of decent cards that the kinds of places that sell this stuff have. Once you've got a nice big pile of cards it's time to start constructing a deck of your very own. I suggest doing all of this buying before learning anything about the game or deciding what kind of deck you want to make. Magic is like crack, every card you buy is a new high and you must get fully addicted to buying cards long before actually playing.
 | A creature of unbelievable strength and power. |
There are five colours in the game of Magic: red, blue, green, black and white. Everybody plays one or a combination of a couple of those colours. What you must decide is what kind of deck you want to have:
1. red - hit people with direct damage by throwing meteors and fireballs at them
2. blue - counter everything everybody tries to do
3. green - pound your opponents with massive and powerful creatures
4. black - play a couple rats and win by complete luck
5. white - gain unimaginable amounts of life and hope everybody kills everybody else off
The only thing to really keep in mind while building a deck for yourself is that the key to winning a game of Magic is to be as annoying as is humanly possible. If you've got cards who's wording is so complex it will take an hour for a veteran player to understand, then you know you should put it in your deck. If you've got creatures which have abilities such as "tap to make all opponents lands screaming children who bite their controller’s during their upkeep and shit on them" then it's probably not annoying enough to put in your deck. If it says "tap to make all opponents lands members of Green Peace who take off their clothes and protest whaling every turn" then that's just about right.
Part 2: Playing
The story behind Magic is basically that the players are supposed to be some kind of wizards who are at war with each other. So you've got yourself a deck and managed to scrounge up a couple wizards who are actually willing to still get hit with fireballs and eaten by giant slugs and now you want to know how to play and actually win. Well, as I said before, it's all about being as annoying as possible. Use every ability of every card you have every chance you get. If one of your opponents is damaging another one of your opponents, prevent the damage if you can, just to annoy the one doing the damage.
Memorize every nuance of every rule. Make sure everyone faces the punishment for every tiny mistake they make. If they tap some mana and then decide they don't want to use it, don't let them untap it and make sure they take manaburn for doing so. At some point you or one of your opponents will, out of complete luck, get a card which will destroy everybody else, the card will get played and somebody will win.
Part 3: Accepting Victory and Defeat
There is no such thing as accepting defeat in the game of Magic. If you lose, it's because you couldn't get any mana or your opponent is cheap or a bitch or a cheater. To accept victory all you've got to do is jump up and down and scream at all the losers about what big losers they are and laugh maniacally at how truly cool and awesome you are. Because, you know, anybody who can win a game of Magic is also a winner at life.
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