MTG Salvation

Greetings everyone!

I've heard that MTG Salvation was the best place to seek MTG enlightment, so here I come, in peace.

Long story short: I'm a passionate MTG player who is completely disconnected from all the MTG universe since... well, 1995! Despite a quick come back in 2005, when I reopened my MTG chest to play with some friends for a couple of months, but as we were all playing with my cards, I was still unaware of any news from MTG (except for some Kamigawa cards that these friends bought at the time - crazy rules huh? :laugh2:).

But then I eventually retrieved my original ~2000 cards collection (after moving overseas) and, well, I'm pretty eager to play again, to introduce some friends to the wonderful world of MTG and to connect with local players. But I made some incursions on the web and, frankly, I have no idea of what's going on!

Of course I'm willing to do my homework here, but with so many online resources I'm LOST on where to start. Where would you??

PLS HELP

Thank you!!

PS: Yes, I'm aware that my card chest is now a pretty valuable asset . I'm in the process of building up a digital database of what I have that I will gladly share once I'm done if anyone is interested. To those who might be curious, I already entered 773 cards, which include the most valuable ones because I did start with my old playing decks. To a sum of $4306.11, according to the wonderful MTG Card Scanner Delver Lens app. $2910 of it comes from 5 revised dual lands.

Well, the first thing should be to get up to date on the rules. Like forget everything you still rememeber and start from scratch. Because there have been so many changes to the rules even since the original Kamigawa block, that the game you remember is a totally different one. Your cards re still valid though, but you should also look up their current Oracle wordings, because many will have changed to work with the newest rules set, some may even be functionally different due to rules changes.

Here's the wizards primer on the basic rules:
https://magic.wizards.com/en/how-to-play

Here's the gatherer database to look up your cards current wordings and rulings that apply to them:
https://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Default.aspx

If you have any questions regarding rules and game interactions, or just how a rule or card functions, ask away in the rules subforum here, we are eager to help. Just don't dump a lot of questions into one thread. Instead make a new thread for every new question. (A few related questions can be packed together, of course, but a long catalog of questions is tedious to get through in one thread.)
https://www.mtgsalvation.com/forums/magic-fundamentals/magic-rulings

Also, be aware, that a mere 2000+ card pool is a tiny trickle compared to the vast collections people have nowadays, especially if your cards come from random boosters instead of specific purchases. Many of your old cards will also be outclassed by what exists today, otoh some may seem utterly broken by todays standards. But if you are all playing with cards from the same card pool, there shouldn't be any big power discrepancies. You may even want o look into making a custom Limited format with self made "booster packs" from your cards, Draft or Sealed, or even a personal cube.

Oh, and get card sleeves, your cards will thank you.

Mighty Razzahan, thank you!

Despite a few Kamigawa cards accidentally acquired back in 2005, the most "modern" set I do own is Fallen Empires. So even on the Kamigawa rules I might be falling behind lol.

I'll surely do my homework on the links you suggested.

Can you please elaborate on your last part? "You may even want o look into making a custom Limited format with self made "booster packs" from your cards, Draft or Sealed, or even a personal cube."

Thanks again!

Look into buying something like this...

https://magic.wizards.com/en/articles/archive/news/magic-gathering-2022-starter-kit-2022-06-02

You can find it at a box store (Wal-Mart, Target, etc.) for less than 10 dollars US. You and a friend can ease back into it and go from there. You are exactly who this product is aimed at. Then you can decide where you want to go from there. It all depends on how much time and money you want to put into it. Best wishes and best to start off on something cheaper and easy to re-acclimate yourself to the game again.

Sealed is a Limited format, where every player gets 6 boosters worth of cards to build a 40+ card deck from. A player may add as many basic lands as he wants. Cards not used from the boosters become that players sideboard. Then players face each other in matches with those decks. Nowadays, a booster usually contains 14 cards plus a basic land (or common dual land), older sets had bosters with 15 nonland cards.

Draft is similar to Sealed in that everyone gets a number of booster packs, in this case 3. But the cards are being distributed among all players in a process called "the draft." Each player opens one booster, chooses one card for his pool, then gives the rest to the player on their right. Thus a player receives a pack with one less card from the left. They choose a card to keep, then pass the rest, and so on, until all cards from the first booster have been taken. The same process happens to the second booster, but cards are passed to the left in this second round. And a third time with the last booster, reversing the passing order once again. Each player will thus end up with 3 boosters worth of cards. That plus any number of basic lands is what theyx build a 40+ card deck from to play against the other players. The key point about Draft is, that you are building your deck while drafting cardfs. You have to keep an eye on what you have, what you still need, what your are passing along (and thus a re likely to face in your matches), etc. It's very fun but skill intensive way to play the game. (Or you could just throw everything into a pile plus lands and call it a deck, like a certain someone, I know.)

Cube Draft is also a draft, but each card only exists once in the entire pool. Putting together a balanced cube (a pile of 1-ofs from which to make boosters) will take some time and adjusting, but is once again, a very fun way to play the game.

Draft needs a few players to get viable, though. An official draft has 8 players, a personal casual draft can do with 6 or even just 5. But less players changes the dynamics quite a bit, as you get more cards from the same booster, and overall less power for the decks.

As you would be making your own boosters from your card collection, the size of the boosters is up to you as is the composition. 1 rare, 3 uncommons and the rest commons is the usual setup, but even actual boosters sold by wizards don't always follow that guideline if the set demands differently (like Innistrad boosters always including one double faced card of any rarity, so that you could get up to three rares in one pack, if it also includes a foil rare.) You could just ignore rarity and just put together some 15 card piles and you'd be good to go.

On another note, one way to familiarize yourself with the game rules is to install Magic the Gathering Arena and play through the tutorial. The game is free to download, but in a free-to-play mode you would have to invest a lot of time to get a decent collection and deck going. It may not be the way to play the game for you. But the tutorial is a good starting point to learn how the game is played, paper Magic included.

@Steve Rogers, there are communities of people who play retro Magic. There's a format called Old School 93/94 that only uses cards from those years. Another is the Premodern, it only allows for cards with the original frame.
These are fan run formats that cater to the old school crowd. And many of them have online events. Check out the youtube channel Timmy the Sorcerer. He runs Old School budget minded events. His next event is going to be Reprint Master 22, only using cards from Revised, Chronicles and Forth Edition.
The Old School and Premodern scenes are larger than people expect. And the people are super chill.
https://www.mtgsalvation.com/forums/the-game/other-formats/homebrew-and-variant-formats/177461-magic-93-94

I find the website Scryfall to be the most useful website when it comes to quickly price-checking all of my cards. Which is something that is highly recommended, you could certainly be sitting on a goldmine of old cards.

Thank you for all replies.

@Rezzahan , only basic rule change from those days to now (despite card ruling and special cases, sure) is that the first player doesn't draw on their first turn. I went back to the 1994's printed manual to make sure I wasn't messing up from memory.

@WarMachinePrime , despite understanding the value of your advice, I'm looking for a comeback without the need to spend, at least initially. Makes me feel weird to think that I need to do it while sitting on 2133 cards

I finished the process of creating a database of all my cards. For those curious to see, here it is:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1UaITLUTBA3H9OlPmvj9wo9Z-J3_nKAXVKxSb0Qt4jqY/edit#gid=966831132

For those who do, you'll notice that there are a bunch of "newer than Fallen Empires" there. It seems that I forgot a few things: first, I bought some boosters on that quick flashback in 2005; second, I got a few cards from a friend who stopped playing as a gift; third, that I bought a Deck Builder's Toolkit (which was still closed) back in 2011.

I gifted my wife with the Deck Builder's Toolkit, so that she could also have the feeling of opening something up and finding out which card she got, and also for her to have the experience of having a limited set to start working with in a sense of building a deck and experimenting (vs. giving her all the possibilities from my collection).

Had a few matches this weekend and it's looking good so far

I also found out that we have a local store in our city, which I'm about to visit soon to see if we can connect have some fun.

Next steps (besides connecting with some local players) is to come up with a good storage solution and maybe finding out if there's something worth doing with the cards that I have more than 4 copies each.

If you have any other tips, inputs or advice, they will be most welcome. Specially on storage, if you eventually check my collection (in other words, specific to my case - otherwise I can surely search for best practices in the forums).

Cheers!

What an interesting collection. All the stuff you have from Revised to Judgment makes sense, but then you just have random bits of sets that feel "out of context" with the older stuff you have.
With what you have you really ought to look into Old School formats. You cards will be on par with regards to power levels. You're going to find that decks fielding newer creatures will be far more powerful than what you have.
Your collection is small. I understand the impetus to not want to spend money on cards, but you eventually will. It can't be helped.

Quote from Steve Rogers »

@Rezzahan , only basic rule change from those days to now (despite card ruling and special cases, sure) is that the first player doesn't draw on their first turn. I went back to the 1994's printed manual to make sure I wasn't messing up from memory.

Well, there are also the tiny bits of doing away with batches, damage prevention windows, interrupts, players losing almost immediately when having 0 or less life instead of at end of turn (phase?, not sure, was way before my time), adding the legend rule, how to mulligan, introducing The Stack, etc. The game HAS changed a lot. Anyway, you'll get the hang of it bit by bit, no worries.

On a different note, deckbuilding has evolved a lot as well. The days of 20 lands in 60 card decks are long past, only a handful of very specialized decks can cope with that few, like dedicated aggro decks, and some combo decks. A usual more midrange focussed deck will run about 40% lands (so 24 in 60 cards), and control decks easily go up to 27, 28, or even higher, all in just 60 cards. And sitting ducks, that cannot do anything in the first 4 turns or so, will be run over. Etc. Etc. So you may want to brush up your deckbuilding skills and learn current deckbuilding theory as well.

I appreciate your reply, Rezzahan.

You're totally right about the smaller changes on the rules. One video that I found pretty useful is this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9SMX0sitEH8 . Definitely useful for other Steve Rogers in the future

On your deckbuilding input, is there any resource you might find particularly useful while catching up on today's practices?

One thing that I also do wonder is that if it would be possible to come up with a "challenging enough" (would not say competitive) deck made with my old cards to compete with modern ones. Didn't have the time to analyze this properly, but it would be nice to have some fun with local players, even without a specific vanilla-like game day or something.

You really need to play with today's cards to get a feel for today's game. Mechanics and card types are far more varied than 93/94. You may be trying to play underpowered Vintage decks that are just going to get blown out of the water by even mediocre Standard decks of today if you are just playing for fun.

Again I am going to recommend the Starter Kit I did above. It eases you into today's game. Then you can find a format you would like to play. Its going to be hard to find others locked in time like yourself to play against. There are 93/94 groups out there though. If you were local to me I would gladly play. I go back to that time period. The game has changed drastically even though the rough framework still stands. Best wishes and good luck.