When I started playing around 1996, my nerdy-ass self had a great time collecting the cards and devising tactics. But my tiny allowance made it difficult to be competitive, and I grew frustrated after losing all the time to friends with bigger allowances and better cards. Moreover, I didn’t know about the non-constructed formats — ways of playing Magic where all players pull from a random distribution of cards — in which the game becomes more about luck, improvisation, and creativity, and less about the ability to buy into tried-and-true winning decks.

Also, I’m pretty sure that around that time I became deeply interested in girls and downright obsessed with doing things to impress them.

But anyway, now that I’m generally interested in impressing just the one girl, who is mostly amused and only a little embarrassed at my endless parade of geekouts, I’m back in the game and having a blast.

Some notes on my relapse:

M11 Pre-Release Tournament. The new core set, Magic 2011, came out mid-July, so the wife and I decided to play in a sealed deck prerelease tournament at Cards and Comics Central in San Francisco. We each opened up 6 packs of the new Magic 2011 set and built decks from there. I went in wanting to go blue/white, but ended up with solid creature removal cards in black and some worthwhile creatures in both black and white, so that’s ultimately what I decided to play. Some of my notable pulls:

• [card]Sun Titan[/card]
• [card]Phylactery Lich[/card]
• [card]Royal Assassin[/card]
• [card]Whispersilk Cloak[/card]

I lost my first round to an awesome, long-time player who later took some time to offer constructive criticism of my deck. I won the second and the third. And for the fourth, my partner and I took a draw and split the booster packs given out as prizes to those with enough wins.

The wife made a strong showing — especially for a player merely 3 weeks into the game! One of her opponents made the comment, “I hate noobs that know what they’re doing.” Her green/white deck brought on some massive trample damage for some solid game wins. An interesting (but not surprising) fact: she was the only female player in the 32-person tournament.

I had a great time and met a number of friendly players. But ultimately, I’d love to find a community where the competitive atmosphere is shade less insular and adversarial.

Duels of the Planeswalkers on XBox Live Arcade. Duels of the Planeswalkers is a solid Magic game available via the XBox Live Arcade for about $10. You start with two decks, and you have to win the remaining 6 decks by beating the computer-controlled Planeswalkers in “Campaign” mode. For each victory, you get a specific card to add to the deck you used to win that game. You can’t remove any cards from the core deck; you can only customize the bonus cards for any particular deck.

I’ve enjoyed it as an introduction (or reintroduction, in my case) to Magic because many of the decks feature essential cards that have been reprinted in one core set after another. It’s been fun to reacquaint myself with each mana color’s personality and flex my creaky instincts after all these years.

Podcasts. So far, each episode of the Deck Construct podcast seems to do a good job of (a) roving over a basic topic, polishing it in your mind enough to bring out a nice, novel realization; and (b) presenting a completely unfamiliar rule, format, or idea and explaining it quite well.

Software and Applications. MagicAssistant is an open-source card database and organizer. We’ve been using it to track our collection of cards and maintain decklists; I expect that sorting, filters, and searching will also be really useful for deckbuilding.

Well, that’s the brain dump. Every few nights we’ve been playing the “pack wars” or minimaster format, in both 1 vs. 1 and two-headed giant arrangements, so that’s probably coming up next!

Anyway, Left 4 Dead feels dark, scary and authentic, yet it remains eminently playable. Though the polish seems effortless, these features were calculatingly considered and brought to the surface with some very artful techniques. Check out the following blog posts, in which Valve designer Randy Ludeen discusses the “filmic effects” and lighting design that contribute to Left 4 Dead’s quality and success as a game.

However, I’m violently shaking my fist at Upper Deck Entertainment (UDE) for putting random game boards in the Deluxe Edition boxes instead of marking explicitly which game board is in the box. I accept the idea that the booster packs (miniatures only) have a random assortment of characters, but random game boards? With each Deluxe Edition set costing $50, I should absolutely be able to pay $150 and be guaranteed ownership of all three game boards. But as it stands, dumping $150 into 3 Deluxe Edition sets only gives me a 22% chance of having all three boards.

I heard about the World of Warcraft Miniatures Game months ago, forgot about it, then got really excited when I saw a wall full of miniatures at the local GameStop. So my fianceé and I picked up a WoW Minis Core Set Starter from Gamescape in San Francisco. Here are photos of the unboxing:

My fiancée and I have played two games so far with the starter set characters and have really enjoyed it. (The rulebook is here if you’re interested in such details.) The characters have only a few action options per turn, so the gameplay isn’t too overwhelming. However, having the miniatures move around on the game board adds real richness, with ranged and melee attacks, line of sight, and minor terrain bonuses. Combat is resolved by rolling variable numbers of 10-sided dice — and die rolling in games is always fun.

The game also features a sharp “clock” system that makes good use of the rotating bases beneath the figures. Actions cost “ticks,” which determine the next time the character acts — bigger actions (more damage, stronger effects) generally cost more “ticks,” which may result in your opponent getting a chance to act before you do. I figure that players familiar with World of Warcraft will appreciate the strong correlation to the video game’s combat mechanics.

If I could make the time, I’d be interested in playing casually against others and maybe even in some kind of organized play… But my main fear is that the game will grow unbalanced. There are “boosters” available (for $15.00, natch) to give players more miniature characters and action cards — and like collectible card games, some miniatures are more rare than others. In my experience, this can lead to a “race to the rare,” where the game ceases to revolve around ingenuity and luck and instead transforms into shelling out the dough to obtain benefits that are made artificially scarce. On the other hand, I think that most modern organized play is based on draft rounds where choice and strategy still matters and the role of rarity is diminished.

Otherwise, for mass-produced plastic, the miniatures are surprisingly detailed, brightly colored, and well-scaled. Even off the board, I’m enjoying having a little row of recognizable characters to glance at near my desk at home.