Various upheavals in my professional life have caused me to neglect both this blog and my contributions to read/RANT. I finally got off my ass and wrote up a review of Captain Marvel #5 at the sister blog, so I wanted to throw something up here to prove that I'm not dead yet. Sure, I probably lost whatever readers I had in the hiatus, but what's the fun in not toiling in obscurity? Calvin's dad would claim that it builds character. So why stop now? I'm going to start a bit fresh here. Missed a bunch of previews (I hear that this Hulk fella might be pretty good...) and left some strings hanging, but there's not much I can do about that now.

Oddly enough, I want to talk to you folks out there about Magic. Not Joey Q's Spider-Man marriage altering unexplainable Magic, but the original cardboard crack, Magic: The Gathering. I haven't played Magic in years. I bought some packs of Tenth Edition a little while ago on a nostalgia trip, but I haven't played the physical game in an extremely long time. I was surprised when my WoW playing buddies at the local store were planning to bring Magic decks this past Sunday. So, of course, I decided to bring my own, slapping together two mono color decks. I went with mono Black discard, because it's what I used to play 12 years ago (the concept that that was 12 years ago frightens me), as well as Mono Blue. I didn't exactly have playsets of the cards anymore, so most of my stuff was relegated to one-ofs and two-ofs. And considering when I played the game, my decks were pretty much only legal in Vintage. We played a bunch of games yesterday, and it was one of those odd situations where a good chunk of the cards in my decks were out of print and thus unrecognizable to my friends that started playing long after the days of Ice Age and The Dark. This of course means that I didn't recognize their cards either, which made the games a bit longer than expected. Still, it was a hell of a lot of fun.

The glory of Magic that makes it such a great casual game to just dust off and play is the ridiculous amount of stuff you can have happen out of nowhere. Here's some examples.

• The first game I played with my Black deck involved using a swamp and Dark Ritual to drop Underworld Dreams (IQ in enchantment form) on turn one, which absolutely wrecked Bryan.
• At the end of his turn on four, Mage Dan (so stated due to the multiple Dans in our play group and his affinity for the Mage class in WoW) had seven cards in hand. A Cursed Rack and Mind Twist later, he had no hand on turn five without playing a single card.
  
• The Rack is a ludicrously powerful card.

I also had fun with the Mono Blue deck, but in a different fashion. I had two different games that went to turns 25 and beyond, one against a crazy Green enchantment deck, and the other against an equally crazy Blue/White ping deck that had so much defensive tactics it was crazy.

So what was the point of this little excursion? Well, I've realized that Magic is one of those games that will always be there. VS is my game. I think it's a better overall game than Magic. That'll never change. However, the casual pick up and play aspect of Magic is really enjoyable in its own right. I'll never go out of my way to buy cards or play in tournaments, but every once in a while when WoW or VS gets tedious for a week, it's nice to bring out the old guard.

I also wanted to mention that every card previewed so far for Marvel Universe has been pretty much crazy. When you look at previews and have to think of what isn't a money rare (which for me is basically just 8 drop Hulk and The Great Arena so far), you're looking at some good times. Good times indeed.