Mmm… The smell of virginity (cheetos, tears and lube). It’s no secret, but perhaps an untold truth, that I’ve always had a secret love for Magic: the Gathering, or, the idea of it anyway. Unfortunately I none of my friends were ever nerdy enough to want to play, ENTER: Magic Online.

I’ve been interested in Magic ever since I was about 8 or 9 when I saw a commercial for it on TV, it wasn’t gimmicky with overdone with shitty CG dragons flying everywhere, it just showed two people playing Magic with a really cool build up about how you can play anywhere at any time. It’d be awesome if it were as widespread as that shitty game in Final Fantasy 8 was, but alas it was not.

And So My Journey to Mt. Virgin Begins

I tried to buy cards, first Portal and then a 5th edition white theme deck (with Wrath of God!), finally being duped by the guys at the local hobby shop into the $10 100+ count boxes of old, shitty out of Standard cards that I couldn’t do anything with. I played in a draft or two but never did well because I was 12 and I was playing against adults. Later, much later I saw that there was an online version of the game, at the time version 2.5 and I could not have been happier…

How to be Successful in 7 Easy Credit Card Transactions

$120 later I probably could have been a lot happier. The bad thing about Magic Online (and maybe Magic: The Gathering in general) is that you can buy success and anything where money means you do well means fun and satisfaction decrease. Knowing that you lost a game because you didn’t buy 4X of the $12 rare isn’t a good feeling, especially if you can’t justify the $48 of invisible cards to your reptile brain. It’s not like Magic cards are subjective either, X card is good because of Y, therefore it costs more. Sure there’s a whole lobby for “casual” play but that just means you need the $6 rare set instead.

“Just when I thought I was out — they pulled me back in.”

After a few weeks winning because I spent the money and losing because I didn’t, I was done. I was pretty lucky and recouped about 90% of my investment by selling my collection, but I think I got lucky. But did I learn? Fuck no, fuck me. A friend mentioned that her boyfriend had gotten her to play Magic, so dopey-dumb me, forgetting all the bad and remembering nothing but the good decides to dive right in again, but this time it’s version 3.0! (3.0.5, to be exact)

How Quickly We Remember

Buy an account for $10, check. Buy 10 “tickets”, the de-facto in-game currency for MTGO, with the $10 coupon, check. Spend 3 days debating which cards to buy with the tickets and additional $60 investment, check. Realize you’re $90 away from being competitive in more than 1 color, check. Regret, check. Recoup initial investment, working on it. That sums up my entire experience with Magic Online 3.0 from a fun:financial standpoint. I’ll go more into detail about my feelings of the Magic Online 3.0 software and supporting cast of characters in my actual review.

A Challenger Appears

Apparently there’s an alternative to Magic Online that’s completely free but somewhat ugly. It’s called Magic Workstation and apparently you have to download a bunch of piece to get it to work, but get it to work I shall, and when I do, I’ll review it as well. Even if it doesn’t have the 500+ people playing at one time that Magic Online has, it’s still beats paying to win.