Pattern Recognition #307 - Magic for my Dad

Features Opinion Pattern Recognition

berryjon

4 January 2024

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Hello Everyone! My name is berryjon, and I welcome you all to Pattern Recognition, TappedOut.Net's longest running article series. Also the only one. I am a well deserved Old Fogey having started the game back in 1996. My experience in both Magic and Gaming is quite extensive, and I use this series to try and bring some of that to you. I dabble in deck construction, mechanics design, Magic's story and characters, as well as more abstract concepts. Or whatever happens to catch my fancy that week. Please, feel free to talk about each week's subject in the comments section at the bottom of the page, from corrections to suggested improvements or your own anecdotes. I won't bite. :) Now, on with the show!

And welcome back everyone! Today is a special issue because you get a video to go with it!

You see, My brother and I (and his wife) sat down with our dad to teach him how to play Maigc with the Doctor Who precons for a couple hours. He, true to my expectations, went with the Classic Who precon with the The Fourth Doctor and Sara Jane Smith as his Commander.

We had to walk him through pretty much everything, but I found that because we were setting him up to play the game, I may have skipped over a lot of things.

Today, I start to address that.

The purpose of today's video isn't for you, my loyal audience. It's for him. And if you happen to learn a thing or two about what I'm doing, all the better. Because I'm going to do something that's extremely hard.

I'm going to teach my dad how to play Magic. Part 1.

Hi Dad! It's me. Look, I know you love Doctor Who. So do I, ever since you let us stay up late to watch episodes on PBS back in the 80's. And that this was an attempt to bridge the gap between our interests. I feel like I didn't do a good job of explaining everything to you that day, so I'm going to step back and make this video for you. To explain without haste or time pressure or while distracted sleeving cards for their protection, how to play the game. Now, because this isn't going to be a quick affair. I want to do this right.

Magic is an old and complicated game. But the complications are in the details. You can play the game very simply, and still have fun and play and win and lose. That's alright. I'm going to be covering the broad strokes today, so I hope you'll bear with me.

There are several ways to play the game, and what we did on Christmas was called Commander. It's one way to play the game, but my no means the only one. Just like with a regular deck of 52 cards, there are different ways to play the game, different ways to approach your deck building and different ways to win. But for now, I'm going to avoid those details, because, again, today is going to be broad strokes.

The game is set up first. Each player brings a legal deck, with legality decided by the format in which you are playing. Just as you can play Poker, War, or 52 pickup, all players have an agreement about what kind of deck they are playing with as part of the format. You've seen Commander first hand. That's one way to play. Another common format is called Standard, which is a 60 card deck, not 100, and you can have up to four copies of any non-Basic Land in your deck. But the restriction is that you are only allowed to use cards that were printed in the last three years, rather than reaching all the way back to the beginning of the game.

Each player starts with 20 life points. Or 25 or 40 depending on the format. This life is a resource, and when you run out, you lose the game. If you're the last person with life in the positives, you win! Tah-dah! Players shuffle their decks, allow their opponent a counter-shuffle to avoid stacking the deck, then you play the game.

The phrases "Library" and "Deck" are interchangeable. So is "Graveyard" and "Discard Pile". These are holdover terms from when the game was much younger. "Battlefield" and "Play area" are the same.

Each player draws seven cards. This is your opening hand. You can choose to keep this hand as-is, or you can mulligan it. In a mulligan, you set aside your hand, and you draw another hand to examine if you want to keep or not. If you don't like it, set it aside, and try again. However, for each mulligan you take, once you decide to keep that hand, you have to put that many cards from your hand on the bottom of your library. One mulligan? You put one card from your seven under your library. Mulligan twice? That's two cards to the bottom, leaving you with 5 cards in hand.

Being able to read your hand and understand how to play it is a skill that takes time and practice. That hand you started the game with? Was absolutely amazing. For those of you at home, it was three lands, two rocks, the TARDIS and Jamie McCrimmon. Yeah.

Once everyone has gotten a hand they are satisfied with, or can at least tolerate, then the game actually begins. Determining who goes first is usually random, and play proceeds clockwise around the table. I was first, you were last specifically so you could see three turns happen before you got to yours.

And now we come to the order of the turns. I'm going to describe it here for you, and I'm going to refer to stuff in the future, so if you hear a term you don't recognize, hold until the end of the video, please.

At the start, you start with three things. You Untap, you Upkeep, you Draw.

The game is divided into Phases and Steps. Untap, Upkeep and Draw are the Three Steps of the Upkeep Phase. When you Untap, you ready all the cards on your Battlefield. You untap everything that was tapped, straightening them out so that they can be used again. Lands, Creatures, Artifacts, whatever you tapped to use since your last turn is refreshed and ready to be used again. The Upkeep step is where the game likes to check for things that have to happen on your turn, but only once per turn, and it needs a convenient spot to look. It was named this way because in the old days of Magic, there were cards that had what was called an Upkeep Cost, which had to be paid, otherwise bad things would happen. And these costs were paid in the Upkeep step of the Upkeep phase.

This is also the first time that you can activate abilities, and your opponents can act on your turn, but that's more advanced stuff. We'll cover that later.

Lastly, you draw a single card for the turn. That's the Draw Step. You have now completed the start of your turn, and you are ready to do things!

The next Phase is called the "Pre-Combat Main Phase". This is when you have full control over what you can do on your turn. You play the majority of your cards in this phase. Lands being played happen here, and you, as the player whose turn it is, can play Enchantments, Creatures, Artifacts and other such cards. I'll come back to this in a lot more detail later. Please be patient.

Now comes the "Combat Phase". This can be complicated, trust me. But I'm going to try to simplify things a lot. When it's your turn, you are the attacking player. You can then choose which of your creatures that are legally allowed you want to attack with. You determine who you are attacking, and publicly announce those, taking actions as needed, such as tapping your attacking creatures. Then, your opponents get to determine their responses, including how they want to block with their own creatures.

Combat is huge and difficult, but for now, you as the active player, have the initiative in determining what is going to happen. You can say "I skip combat", and there is very little anyone else can do about that. Not impossible, but that's a detail for later.

After Combat, you get the "Post-Combat Main Phase". This is just like the Pre-Combat Main Phase, except that if you've already played a land for the turn, you can't do it here. It exists as a chance to do things after you see how combat turns out, to respond to changes on the battlefield before other players get their chance.

Lastly, we have the "End Phase". This consists of two Steps, the End Step and the Cleanup Step. At the End Step, anything that happens at the end of the turn either because of the rules involved, or because the card says so. In a way, it's like the Upkeep, but at the end of the turn, not the start.

The Cleanup step is automatic stuff. Any damage that has accumulated on creatures (and only creatures!) go away, and most importantly, if you have more than seven cards in your hand, you discard to your graveyard until you have seven cards in your hand.

Then it's the next person's turn, and they get to do all this on their turn. And so on and so forth until it is your turn again.

So, that's the basics of how a turn goes! It's ordered and organized, and it's really simple on the broad strokes. But it can get very complicated the further down you go into the details. I'll cover some of that in the future.

There are... 15 different card types in the game. But of those, six are locked to specific formats and I'm not going to touch them. One isn't really a type, it's an indicator, and I'm not going to touch on it, and two are more advanced and can be talked about later on. This leaves us with the six basic card types that the entire game is built around.

These are, in no particular order, Artifact, Creature, Enchantment, Instant, Land, and Sorcery.

Of these, Artifacts, Creatures, Enchantments and lands are what are called "Permanents". They are played and they stick around on the battlefield. Instants and Sorceries are "Non-Permanent" spells. They are played, then after they have their effect, they go to the graveyard. Let's break all these down one by one.

All these cards have what are called Supertypes, Types and Subtypes, and you can tell the difference by where they are in relation to the dash on the card. If a card just has a single word here in the type line between the picture and the text box, then that's its type. If there are words after the dash that's in the line here, then it's a subtype, something specific related to the card. Supertypes are modifiers to the nature of the card, words with inherent rules attached to them, such as Legendary and Snow, which are outside the realm of this video.

Starting with the most important. Lands. Magic is a game of resources, and Lands are the most basic of resource you have. A land's name is in the upper-left of the card, like with all other cards. But unlike everything else, there is nothing in the upper right. Lands don't have a casting cost like you'll see later, but rather they provide the resources that you use to do everything else.

In the middle of the card, below the nice picture is the card type. Here is where it actually says Land. Now, there are subtypes to many cards, mostly creatures. But for Lands, there are five primary subtypes that correspond to what sorts of resources - called mana - they produce. A card that has "Plains" written after the dash can produce White, or the Sun when it is tapped. Islands produce Blue or the water drop. Swamps are Black and the skull. Mountains produce Red and have fire, while Forests make Green, the tree.

Now, Lands can have these subtypes, or it can have none. In having the subtype, the land has the inherent rules-based quality of being able to be activated, or tapped - you remember the untap step from earlier - to add a single point of mana of the relevant color to your mana pool. The mana pool is where you cast all your other cards from, and I'll get into that a little later. If a land has multiple types, then when you tap it, you decide what color you want to add. You don't get to add all of them, otherwise some cards would be really powerful. Just one. On the other hand, if the card doesn't have a subtype, you actually need to read what it does. Many of these lands will have the option to tap to include a grey diamond symbol (), which is colourless mana. They may have the option to include colored mana with some additional cost or drawback, such as by paying life or doing something else.

Lands can also have activated abilities, which I'm going to cover in the future. These don't produce mana to use, but use the mana produced by other resources.

Lands also have a Supertype that is unique to them. That is "Basic". To be simple, a Basic Land can have as many copies as you want in your deck. Some game formats have restrictions on the number of copies of any given card you can have in your deck. "Basic" says "ignore that, have as many as you want". There are only six basics in the game, Plains, Islands, Swamps, Mountains, Forests and Wastes. That last one is a Basic Land that doesn't have a subtype, but is Basic. It can only produce colourless mana.

Moving on, the next most important card type, Creatures.

Creatures have the name of the card in the upper-left of the card, and in the upper right is their casting cost. Below the artwork is the Creature's Type Line, with "Creature -" and then followed by a species and/or a job. There are lots of cards that care about a creature's subtypes, and entire decks have been built around having all your creatures share a single type. But that's more complicated stuff for later.

Skipping over the text box, here in the lower right is the creature's default Power and Toughness, before and after the slash. Power determines how much damage this creature does when it damages something, and toughness determines how much damage it can take before it dies. Damage on creatures accumulate over the turn, and lethal damage does not need to be done all at once. When they die, they go to the graveyard.

Creatures have the balance factor of what is called "Summoning Sickness" that is, when you play a Creature, you can't so anything active with them until the start of your next turn. This is, as I mentioned, a balance factor. They can react to things, and they can block, but you can't tap them to do anything, even attack.

Creatures can also have a lot of text on them, and a lot of the game's abilities, which is a later subject. I'm going to use them to describe the different types of abilities when I get around to it because there's a lot to unpack with it.

I haven't ignored the casting cost, that's going to be after I talk about the other card types.

And of which, the remaining four can be loosely paired up. A Sorcery is a card that you can play on your turn, during one of your main phases. You play it, you pay the cost, and it has its effect before going to the graveyard. They don't stick around on the battlefield. On the other side, Instants are like Sorceries in that they are played, then go to the graveyard, but they can be played outside of your Main Phase. They can be played in your Upkeep, in Combat (often called Combat Tricks) and most importantly, on your opponent's turns. Playing Instants when its not your turn forms one of the pillars of the game's strategies.

Now Enchantments and Artifacts have a more.... historically contentious relationship. They both play to the battlefield, and can do things when they enter the battlefield, or while they are on it, or can have an activated ability to do something as long as you can pay the cost. For the most part, the difference is that Artifacts are colourless and Enchantments have a color. That's not true now, but for most of the game, that was the difference. Nowadays, you'll find coloured artifacts, but not so much colourless Enchantments.

However, there is a major difference between the two. You see, up until this point, you probably thought that all these types were exclusive. They're not. And in fact, the most common overlap between the types is Artifact Creature. Like K-9. These sorts of card have the advantages and disadvantages of both their card types. This isn't the only combination as you can have Artifact Lands, Enchantment Creatures, Enchantment Land, Enchantment Artifact, and even a single solitary example of a Land Creature. Trust me, that last one causes a lot of advanced rules headaches because of the way the two types intersect.

However, all of these are Permanent types. They can be mixed and matched. You cannot combine Permanent and non-Permanent types. But, you may be wondering, when can I play these spells? Well, the answer to that is at the same time you can play a Sorcery. On your turn, you can play these - as long as you pay the costs, on one of your main phases.

Now, you may be wondering if there are permanents you can play at Instant speed. There are! They have an ability word called "Flash" that means "You may play this spell whenever you could play an Instant". Which does include when it's not your turn. And is something to deal with in the future. But if it helps, consider Sorcery and Instant less as card types, but also as the speed at which you can play spells. But I'm getting a little side tracked here.

The last thing I want to talk about today, because this is getting a little long, is the casting cost that I've been ignoring up to now. That's those symbols in the upper right corner of each non-Land card. These symbols correspond to the various types of mana that are produced by lands. White, Blue, Black, Red and Green. There is also or as well as a number in this place as well. Whenever you cast a spell, or activate an ability, you need to pay its mana cost. That cost can be modified, but for now, we'll deal with it as it is printed.

To pay for a cost, first consider the required colours. If a card has a casting cost of , then you need to tap two lands for for those required pips, then you can use any colors - or lack of color - to pay for the last three. It could be three more White, or two Blue and a Green, or three colourless. You are required to pay colour costs with that colour, but generic costs can be anything.

Now, sometimes, costs can be modified. There can increased or decreased depending on the nature of the card that is being cast or through external factors. You saw this yourself when you cast The Five Doctors for it's higher cost. When costs are changed, you always add the additional costs first, then you apply the cost reductions. Then there's this one card called Trinisphere that sets all costs to a minimum of three mana total. Being accurate about your costs is important, especially when you're casting mutli-colored cards or multiple cards in a turn.

So, that's this video. I hope this works out for you dad, and helps you understand some things. If you're interested in more tutorial videos, I'm sure I can work on something for you.

As for the rest of you, thank you for putting up with this, and I'll see you all next week when I talk about something else. What, I don't know yet. But it'll be there.

Until then, please consider donating to my Pattern Recognition Patreon. Yeah, I have a job (now), but more income is always better, and I can use it to buy cards! I still have plans to do a audio Pattern Recognition at some point, or perhaps a Twitch stream. And you can bribe your way to the front of the line to have your questions, comments and observations answered!