Hobby #10: Collectable Card Games

I have been a long-time fan of any sort of collectable card game (CCG), and have tried many. There’s just something about that smeel of a new booster pack waiting to be torn open, the fresh new cards waiting to be collected, stuffed into a card holder and put into your your/shown off to your friends/traded. Today I will explain some of these…

Yu-gi-oh incarnation

Yu-gi-oh. This was my first CCG obsession. It’s a bit like MTG (explained later), what with being all about the monsters and the magic. Yu-gi-oh is simple: it’s your monster vs their monsters in whatever way possible. Believe me, there are a lot of ways to obliterate the opposing monsters and whittle down the opponent’s “life points” (run out of them and you lose), whether it be by magic, traps, special monster abilities, altering the metaphorical monster battle field or a strategic yet personal combination of all three. Anyway, there’s much strategy involved.

Pokemon incarnation

Pokemon TCG. Pokemon is a bit of an interesting card game. I never really played that much, but it’s fun- even though it seems the booster pack designers hate you (one random energy card per booster pack!? That hardly seems fair! Heck, I could be paying 30+ bucks just to get one psychic energy for my deck that needs at least 15 energy cards to survive!). Though I guess the poor souls need the money (hehe, I can’t stop laughing after that one). Anyway, the game’s goal centers around either wiping out all your opponent’s active pokemon (very tough, since they can summon basic pokemon without almost any restriction), or defeating enough of them to where you can grab all of the opponent’s “prize cards”. This is all done by controlling your active Pokemon, of course (in lieu of the Pokemon games). Overall a fun game, but it never seemed to quite click with me completely.

MTG incarnation

Magic: the Gathering. This is one awesome game, and my current CCG obsession. I think it deserves the title of “collectable card game” more than any other because one of the main points is to collect the cards, what with many of them being promotional, tokens, extended art, and having a fleshed out rarity system, so that you can show them off to your friends (who might feel the need to kick your butt in a game of theirs due to your gloating- believe me, envy/jealousy is a very… driving force). Writing all that, I forgot to mention how in-depth and fun the game system is. Basically, you use some land cards (much like Pokemon’s energy cards), and once you’ve accumulated enough “Mana” from those, you may summon a creature (or in some cases use one’s Mana-costing abilities). This creature may then attack the opponent’s Life (like Life Points in Yu-gi-oh, see a trend here?). However, the opponent may choose to block with a creature they summoned the their “zone”. That creature is then destroyed, barely scratched or some other after effect. This is where the abilities come in. It’s very hard to find a creature without at least one I-am-only-blockable-by-X/Deal X damage to Y/target card gets X/X until Y/so many others (X and Y would be whatever the abilities state) The funny thing is that the abilities of the cards often overlap the actual MTG system’s rules. Now, after all that, do you see what I mean by in-depth? I thought so.

(Ratings for each game explained will likely be added later.)