A lot of students have been really bored during their free time at school, but there is a solution! Card games such as Magic the Gathering can be incredibly engaging ways to socialize and have fun with your friends while not using your phone! It’s also pretty cheap to get into, with starter sets which contain two decks costing only $18 on amazon, you can find it here.
MtG is also rather simple once you understand its core mechanic, mana, which is the energy source in the game. There are multiple formats of Magic but let’s start with the standard format. For standard each deck has 60 cards and the goal of the game is to reduce your opponents hit points from 20 to zero.
Almost each card in Magic is considered a spell, the exception being land cards. These are incredibly important cards that give you the resources to play all your other cards. Each turn you can play one land, and most of the time its only effect is that it gives you one mana that corresponds to the color of the card, there are five in total. Mountains produce red mana, swamps produce black mana, plains produce white mana, islands produce blue mana, and forests produce green mana. Each spell has a mana cost on the top right corner of the card.
Look at the card “Soothsayer Adept”.
The top right corner shows a 1 in a circle followed by a water droplet. This means that to play “Soothsayer Adept” you need to pay one of any color of mana and one blue mana. The way you pay mana is by “tapping” (turning the card sideways to recognize that they have been used for the turn) cards that produce mana such as lands, and certain spells. If you look just below the art of “Soothsayer Adept” you’ll see a bar with creature-merfolk wizard. This means that this is a creature spell with the subtype of being a merfolk wizard. Creatures are one of the main types of spells you will use in Magic, and they are also the main things you will use to attack your opponent. If you look at the bottom right of the card you will see a box with ⅓, this means that when “Soothsayer Adept” attacks it will deal one damage and it can take 3 damage before being destroyed. You can’t attack with creatures the turn you summon them, but you can use their abilities. You can pay one of any mana and one blue mana to tap “Soothsayer Adept”, draw a card, and then discard one card from your hand. Since it is a merfolk wizard, any effects that mention either of those keywords will affect “Soothsayer Adept”.
MtG has many different playstyles to build around, with the main format that most people play being commander. In commander each player has a 100 card deck, 40 hitpoints, and a commander creature. A commander has to be a legendary creature (instead of just saying creature, the card will have legendary creature) and will be placed in the command zone rather than your deck, and you can only have one copy of every card in your deck excluding land cards. You can buy preconstructed decks on amazon or from a card shop. These decks are always made with a certain theme in mind. For example if you want to have creatures that empower each other to deal high damage, I would recommend the “Most Wanted” deck.
All in all, Magic the Gathering is a very fun and relatively easy to understand card game that has a theme for everyone. It also is pretty easy to find people to play the game with as there are card shops that host open play nights that are open to anyone to come in and play whatever card game is being hosted that night. I’m sure that you’ll have an amazing time!