Card Games

When I was back in high school, I was just getting into this whole gaming thing. I learned about Dungeons and Dragons and began roleplaying, and I got a deck of Magic cards to play with my cousin, Beau when he was in the area. Soon I found a group at high school and started playing Magic with them. After a while, we started branching out into a number of other games.

I have played a bunch of different games. I have to say, I really liked playing card games. They were easy to transport, quick to set up and play, and the interaction of cards usually appealed to me. I liked creating combos and figuring out how to get the most out of a deck.

What ended up closing it off for me was the fact that nearly every card game started moving into a cycle release style. Every two years or one year, or what have you, you'd end up having to buy in to the game all over again as a new base set came out. It ended up becoming too costly for me, and slowly I lost interest in the games altogether.

But still, I had some great times back in the day. Here are some of the card games that stuck with me the longest.



First was Magic, the granddaddy of them all. I played this through high school and it was from here that I started to learn how to play these games. I wasn't overly good at it, but I enjoyed it. I started a few weeks after Legends came out, and ended up quitting just after Ice Age hit the stores. During that time I had played in a few tournaments and the like, sometimes even placing. My personal best was hitting third place in a local tournament even though I was the only one in the top four without any Moxes or a Black Lotus.

I did come back to the game briefly in college, but mostly with a bunch of my buddies who were looking for a cheap way to play some games. We compiled a bunch of our old cards, mixed them up, created new boosters, and had booster drafts every couple weeks.



Also in high school I was brought into Legend of the Five Rings by Jon. This game did wonders for my gaming horizons, breaking me out of the stranglehold Magic had on my card games and D&D had on my roleplaying games. This game probably stuck with me the longest. I took it with me to college and got a few others to start playing. When I came back home, it fell by the wayside too until Lotus edition came around and I got back into it with a bunch of friends. The game went strong for us until it came time for me to buy back in again. I decided it wasn't worth it for me to do so and let it go.



Also in college, I picked up Warlord, another AEG game. This one was following the whole d20 craze and essentially was Dungeons & Dragons 3rd Edition in a card game format. It was a bundle of fun and was the game I took back home from college with me. I kept playing against another buddy of mine from the area here, but once he and I stopped hanging out as much, that game too fell off. I always enjoyed the world of the game, but the addition of a d20 to the format never struck me as a good idea.



Between my college days and the newest era of gaming for me (which I mark by a sharp increase in miniatures) was a period where I would head out to the gaming store every week to play Lord of the Rings TCG with a bunch of guys there. It's probably the only time I actively sought out a group that was playing a particular game rather than going with someone I already knew to play a new game. Honestly, I consider this to be the height of my enjoyment of a card game. The mechanics were solid and the theme was prevalent throughout. It's one of the few card games I can look back on and say, "I could see myself getting back into that game."

The problem the game ran into was that it eventually ran out of new material, unsurprisingly. After the third film came out, the designers had to figure out what to do. The game was selling well, so they didn't want to cut it off. They ended up re-tooling the game so that each new block would cover all three games instead of each individual game. At that point I lost interest and stopped playing. But for the 2 1/2 years I played it, I really enjoyed it.

I did end up convincing Dan to pick up some cards on the cheap at one point and we played with older cards. But with only two players, it never really stuck.



Being a fan of Star Trek, I decided I'd try to get into the new version of the game when it was coming out some years back. But I needed opponents. Brian also liked Star Trek and I convinced him to buy into it as well, and I think we got Jay to buy a few decks too. Unfortunately playing the game never really materialized and it dropped into oblivion too. Too bad, I had a fun "morally ambiguous" Federation deck to try too.



And the last card game I played that took up any significant amount of time is probably my second favorite, behind Lord of the Rings. We got into the Game of Thrones card game and had a decent set of people who would play it. We had a great time with it until everything clicked with me for Lanister and I learned how to use the control aspect of their faction. Lanister, it seemed, gained an edge and it became less fun to play.

The game moved away from the collectable aspect and into the Living Card Game model (where a set pack of cards comes out monthly, and buying that pack gets you all the new cards, so there's no chasing really good cards). I really like the concept, but by this point, miniatures games were much bigger in my gaming life, and I ended up closing the chapter on card games.

I have tried to get back into some games. Legend of the Five Rings, for example, cropped back up with the new block, but even that couldn't convince me to stick with it.

If I had to rank the enjoyment I've had with these games, they'd come out osmething like this: Lord of the Rings, Game of Thrones, Legend of the Five Rings, Warlord, Magic, Star Trek.

At this point, though, I can't really another game coming back up. I might dust off some of the old cards I already have at some point, but buying into a new game completely doesn't really strike me as fun anymore.