C. Zircon

Every day I open M:TG Arena to check if there's anything in my inbox, but then I'm too intimidated to actually play against anyone. Why am I like this

I eventually won my three Starter Deck Duels in M:TGA, but it turns out that still doesn't unlock the full game. It puts you in "spark rank," and you have to rank up out of that before you can participate in events or play other formats. I haven't yet been able to bring myself to even try playing a ranked match, because the whole concept of ranked anything intimidates me. I hate competition. I can handle a casual game of Magic where nothing is on the line, but as soon as there are stakes, it's too much pressure. So, I dunno, unless I have a change of heart, I might be done playing Magic again. I keep opening the client and then being like "enh... not now." I got a bunch of cards from promotional codes and stuff, but I don't know how to build a decent deck. I could just copy one from online somewhere but that feels like it kind of defeats the purpose. I dunno. I just feel like I'm too dumb for it now.

After watching @VoidBurger stream herself learning Magic: The Gathering Arena a few days ago, I was inspired to try it myself. I played a tiny bit of it back in 2018 during the open beta or whatever, but I guess my account got wiped or something because I had to start from scratch. Other than that, it's basically been more than 20 years since I played any serious amount of Magic.

I went through the tutorial and the Color Challenge and had a pretty good time (although I have to say, if I didn't already know the basics of how the stack works, I don't think the tutorial explains it adequately at all). The Color Challenge is a series of pre-designed bot matches intended to teach you about different aspects of what each color is focused on. For each color, there are four of those and then you finish by playing a real match against a human. I won all but one of those, so I thought I had a decent grasp on the game.

The next thing they make you do is Starter Deck Duels, where you pick one of 10 pre-made starter decks and fight someone else using another one of them. I found this to be a huge spike in difficulty. For one thing, all the starter decks are two-color, but more importantly, the cards from the current sets all seem extremely complicated compared to the ones they've had you use so far (and, more to the point, compared to the ones I remember playing with from back in the day). There are all these weird mechanics I've never heard of, and you don't really get a lot of time to figure out how they work in the middle of a match. So I'm having kind of a hard time. You have to win 3 starter deck duels before you can progress, and I've managed 2 so far, so I'm sure I'll muddle through eventually (once I get lucky and get matched with someone even worse than I), but I'm already having less fun than I was having during the Color Challenges, so I wonder how long I'll stick with it. Playing games against actual human randos still stresses me out, even though you can't really communicate with them at all and they basically might as well be AI. And I know I'm going to stop having fun the instant I have to start thinking about the "meta."

Anyway, the point I was mostly trying to make is that Magic cards are too damn complicated these days. I wish there were a way I could play a version of it from a simpler time, because I'm old and easily confused. (Also, I don't like the Lord of the Rings set.)