Hammer24 said:
I haven´t played Magic for at least 15 years. Have there been any rule changes, or will I be able to pick this up and play right away?
I'm basically talking out of my ass since I havent played since ravnica, but based on ravnica and several of the sets before it plus some things ive read from time to time since then, every set seems to have one or two new little cutesy mechanics on many of the cards, but these mechanics are not EXTREMELY game changing, as in they can actually be fully written on the card itself.
So for some examples to best show what I mean, one set in ravnica or something added some cute mechanic where you could discard the card and then search through your library for another of the same type during upkeep or whatever, and there would be 5-10 other cards in the set that all had the same type of ability. Add in maybe a maximum of two more similarly "game-changing" abilities like that per set and thats the main distinguishing difference between that set and any set of magic youve ever played. Then of course you have the cards that everyone creams themselves over and pays up the butt to get a copy of like this guy ishimaru the lion or something who is like an improved "Savannah Lions" from the kamigawa set, or they remake a card like birds of paradise in ravnica that's been there since alpha or beta (the first sets) and youve got most of the sets I played.
Now like I said, I havent played since ravnica, but of note would be a more recent card like the "plainswalker" cards that I dont know too much about, that play like the OLD legendary cards from the legends set but they are a separate attackable creature that acts like a second set of your 20 life points that you still start off with even in magic today.
These are the cards that might trip you up with trying to learn, but basically if you remember all of the archaic rules like when to tap and attack and upkeep and all that then youll be fine. Plus, with the way the game is built, youll likely not even be able to make a mistake like you might if you dont thoroughly read the rulebooks and are playing by hand.
Another thing to note is that when I got back into it a year or two ago (and then stopped), the current way you played was by either playing classic, extended or standard (I think). This would mean that if you played classic, you could use any card from any set, but the funny thing is, NONE of the new cards even compared to the cards from the revised set or even earlier, so youd have these standard ultra expensive decks that all consist of having moxes and whatever else cards that werent banned from the earliest sets. Yeah, cards like time warp or fork are essentially banned if you want to play officially, and I would bet any of the fun old cards arent even in this game.
So then if you play extended, that goes back a couple sets more than standard, so when I played kamigawa, extended included mirrodin and invasion or something but I only had mirrodin and kamigawa cards. Then standard just included kamigawa and mirrodin. Then when they came out with ravnica, mirrodin was taken out of standard, which also kind of made them useless to me because if I didnt have all the great cards from invasion I wouldnt be able to make a good deck for an extended card game.
One final thing is that even though like a new set or expansion will be introduced every quarter of a year, they still come out with like 8th edition or 9th or 10th edition, (compared to revised which was called 3rd edition). These are probably the cards in this xbox live game. But the funny thing is, they still add cards from the newer sets for newere "editions", but ONLY THE BLAND ONES, so NO COMPLICATED CARDS WHATSOEVER. So like youll have some samurai of kamigawa that is 2/2 with haste, he'll be added to 11th edition or whatever, but NEVER super time warp ninja of kamigawa that searches your deck for a ultra-mega-hidden-valley of kamigawa with 8/8, trample and seeing-eye-dog ability. So even though this makes the base set a lot less complicated, I dont even think people use many if at all any cards from these editions in any sort of advanced play unless its that rare isimaru "savannah lions remake" that i think got added to 9th edition maybe.
Hope this helped at all, and anyone with accurate information compared to this talking-out-of-my-ass 2 year old knowledge feel free to correct me on the multiple errors I likely made.
