Daily Dose of English 202
Magic
Daily Dose of English 202
Intermediate
Hey everyone, my name is Ben and you're listening to a Daily Dose of English. This is a short, simple podcast that you can listen to every day to improve your English. You can find the transcripts for all episodes and more on benslanguagelab.com. I'm glad you could make it today. In this episode, we're talking about magic. And there's actually a lot of definitions of the word magic. It could be something that's magical and mystical. It could be talking about magic in like a movie or TV show or book. It can also be stage magic, if you've ever seen a magic show, which I actually want to talk about in the future because I really do enjoy stage magic. I think it's an awesome performance art and I would like to talk about it. But today I actually want to talk about another kind of magic that has been a huge part of my life for well over a decade. I think it's been 15 years. I don't know when I started. No, it's got to be more. Someone was 26. So Yeah, I think, yeah, like 15 years, crazy. But sorry, this is a game, a card game called Magic the Gathering. I went off into my own little thinking world for a second. So this game called Magic the Gathering is a card game. It is the first trading card game, the original trading card game. And the idea is that it is a game, right? Like a board game or whatever, like a game that you play with somebody. But there are thousands of different cards or game pieces, right? And not all of them come together. And so you have to build up a sort of a collection of your own ones and create your, in the case of a card game, a deck of cards. If you're familiar with chess, which is one of the most well-known games in the world, it's almost as if there weren't just, what, nine or no, there's like seven different chess pieces or something like that. King, queen, bishop, knight, rook, pawn. Six. I think that's it. Yeah. Let's say there's six, maybe seven, if I'm just forgetting one for some reason, but I think there's six different chess pieces, but imagine if there were like 200 or a thousand. Right. And they all did slightly different things. Um, and you would like collect your, your, your, your own chess pieces and you would trade them with your friends and you would play games and everybody knew what they did and that sort of thing. That's more like what magic is, but it's a, it's a lot bigger because the cards have text on them so they can say what they do. So if you see a new card that you've never seen before, you can figure out what it does just by reading it, sort of. We'll get to that in a second. It was made in the 1990s by Richard Garfield and a team of the game designers at some university in the US. I actually forget which one. I think it was in, was it in Washington State? I'm not actually sure, but that's where the headquarters is now, so I don't know. Um, and it just grew in popularity grew, grew, grew, grew, grew. There are now. Tens of thousands of cards that are totally unique. Um, there are millions of players in the world. It is one of the biggest, uh, gate non video game games, like competitive games in the world. That's hard. What, what kind of game is it? Um, cause it's not bigger than like league of legends or something. Um, But it's bigger than things like Pokemon or other competitive card games. But it's also, yeah, we'll get into this in a second. Anyways, it's a very complicated, very interesting, very deep game. It's also a very good game. The system that it's built on is very, very good. It is the best game in the world, in my opinion. However, I know that there are major flaws, especially in the complexity. I have 15 years of experience playing, I can pick up a new set of cards, usually every year they come out with several thousand new cards really, usually in sets of a couple hundred that are meant to work together. And I can pick up a new set and understand the cards very quickly. I can read them, I can go, okay, I get this, I understand it. But for a new player, there are so many things going on in a single turn, in a single game, that it's really, really difficult to do, even like a little bit well. Like I was talking with a friend of mine who also plays Magic the other day, and he went to play a new card game called Lorcana, which is based on the Disney universe. And it's supposed to be an okay game, but it's also really, much, much simpler than magic in a lot of ways. And it's also really popular among non-gamers, people that have just entered the gaming world. They see Lorkana. It looks cool because it's got the Disney characters. And so you can play Stitch or other whatever Disney characters there are. I don't know that many Disney characters off the top of my head. But he was like, yeah, I went and I easily won on my very first time learning how to play the game because everybody makes every turn like dozens of just obvious mistakes and coming from Magic, it's really, really easy to pick up. which is, he's not like, he's a good magic player, but he's not like a genius. And it just shows that there's so much depth to magic, which is a great thing for the game, but also kind of a bad thing if you want to get into it. It's just, you have to be all in on the game. Which also I think makes it interesting. However, I want to get in and rant for a second because I haven't played Magic really in about a year. I played a little bit with a couple friends when they invited me, but I haven't gone to a shop and played and kept up with the news and everything for over a year because I got really tired of the cycle. because Wizards of the Coast, the company that controls magic, has basically been milking it for everything that it's worth because they know that magic players will often spend very large amounts of money. And this started several years ago when they started directly printing cards and then just selling them for like $50 a card basically. They would just be like, here's a card that is really old and rare and it's worth thousands of dollars. There's not very many of them. They're hard to get, but we can just print new ones that look pretty and shiny and sell them to you guys for $100, $200. And they just started doing that again and again and again and again. They're at the point where there's essentially a new one of these releases every single week, which is just old cards with new art, new designs, new shininess, but at a way bigger price. Not only that, but they're changing so many things and printing out so many products all the time that it's really, really tiring to keep up with what's happening. And that just exhaustion, as I call it, of keeping up with what's happening is one of the things that made me stop. The other thing that I haven't, why I stopped really enjoying going to play is because my favorite way to play, which is called draft, where you sit down with a bunch of other players without a deck and you have to sort of, you build it with the same cards that they see like secretly. it's a little bit hard to explain if you don't see it but essentially you're just taking cards that they don't want but then you're also trying to like get the ones that you want and it's very interesting and fun and then you play with those decks afterwards however the problem is that everything is online now and there is so many there's so many players and so much data That days into the newest set, there is an objective best card, there's objective correct plays, correct things, so, so fast. And it takes a lot of the creativity and interest out of it. when you can show up on literally day one of the set being out and somebody can already be like, Hey, did you see that this card is insanely broken? You're like, no, it's day one. I haven't even read all the cards yet. Like it's, it's just, it's so fast and focused on this, like, not hive mindness necessarily, but like there's just such a quick consensus and that everybody knows what's going on. It's a lot less about like the better player, but more about who studied more. And I don't really want to be studying for a hobby, but I also want to be at the point where, or at like the level where I can compete with people well, which requires study at this point, instead of like, just practice and creativity. And so it's just, it got me really unhappy with the game. I just wasn't having as much fun with it, which is a shame because it's a really fun game. There are some ways that I do still enjoy playing, specifically it's something that's called Cube. And because I actually, you create your own basically version of the game and you go, okay, I like these 400 cards, that's what we're gonna play with. I love cube, but it does require you to have a bunch of friends to play with and so it's a lot harder to get people together to play. I was playing regularly back when I was living in Portland, which was great. We had like a cube meetup every single week, but it's been really difficult to get a cube thing going here regularly, which is just a little bit too bad, but you know. I would like to try, and I guess I should probably just keep bothering people until I find enough people, but yeah. Anyways, that's my 10 and a half minute rant on Magic. There's so much more I could talk about. It is really an interesting and good game. If you're at all intrigued, I would recommend you Would I recommend you check it out? Honestly, no. I kind of wouldn't. There are better games out there for more casual players. If you're interested in some kind of online game, like a card game, there's... Actually, what is good online? I think people like Hearthstone, I guess. Or there's another one that's coming out relatively soon that's supposed to be pretty interesting. Let me find the name of it really quick. But if you want to play a physical game, Flesh and Blood is actually quite fun. Flesh and Blood is similar to Magic in some ways, but it's faster, it's easier, and it's also cheaper, which is nice. Magic can be pretty expensive. The online game that's coming out pretty soon is called The Bazaar. The B-A-Z-A-R. That's also looks interesting. I haven't actually played it, but it does look cool. I'm sorry, B-A-Z-A-A-R is what it's called. And yeah, it's got, yeah, pre-register is what it's going on right now. So it looks like there is stuff happening, which is cool. Or an actual like simple, similar game that I actually quite enjoyed playing a couple of months ago, like last year, is called Super Auto Pets. Super Auto Pets is really quite fun and very simple. You can understand it pretty quickly, but there's a lot of depth to it, surprisingly for like a little game that uses animals. And I would definitely recommend it if you want like a simple, little card-ish kind of game that you can play on your phone, on whatever. Super auto pets, a lot of fun, definitely recommend. But that's everything for me. Thank you so much for listening to this episode. I hope that you enjoyed it and maybe learned a little bit of something. If you have ever played card games or you're a Magic player, let me know in the comments below. But other than that, I will see you in the next episode. Bye!
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