An OG Look at Magic the Gathering

Then I took an 26ish year break from magic (1995 to 2021). I started back casually doing some prerelease tournaments at my local store. I had moved from Upstate NY to St. Pete FL and was looking for more gaming friends. Innistrad Midnight Hunt was my first event. I did a few more prerelease events over the next couple of years (Kamigawa, Cappenna, Outlaws of Thunder Junction, and Tarkir Dragonstorm) and then really dove deep into MTG again when Final Fantasy came out. I am sure that is a thing people hear, I know I do, how people love Final Fantasy and were dying to get magic cards based on that IP. 

I am the exception, I had not played FF since FF1 which I hated and never went back to. I was just ready to get back into MTG and that was the set that coincided with the timing of my life. Since then I have been in deep, I have been buying singles (remind me I need to break up with TCG Player, that b!tch takes too much time and money from me), booster boxes and more to get back into it deep. I am really enjoying magic, Commander I play the most, with sealed events second. I now have a partner who also plays MTG with me so we both go to the store and play weekly. 

Speaking of FF, this week on Friday night, there is a sealed commander box format of FF. There are 6-8 of us and we each buying a box of FF and opening it and creating "commander" decks. Sealed commander seems interesting, I have not yet played it but will in a couple of days. Here are the rules for that format

To help players build exciting and effective decks, we're adopting some of the paradigms of Commander Draft for Commander Sealed. Here are the basic rules you need to know:

• You'll construct a 60-card deck out of the contents of a single Play Booster box and any number of basic lands.
  • You can include anything you open inside your Play Booster box, but not any promos you receive. That means you can include the contents of any Box Topper packs but not things like Buy-a-Box promos.
• Your deck can include multiple copies of cards you open with the same name.
• You ignore the color identity rule in deck building. Play any legal commander you open, then fill your deck with cards of any color.
  • The color identity of your commander(s) still applies to cards like Arcane Signet to explicitly refer to color identity.
• Games are played in pods of three to four players with normal Commander rules. You start at 40 life, track commander damage, and so on.

So basically commander box rules just has you make a 60 card deck, pick a commander for it and play in a multiplayer pod. Essentially multiplayer sealed magic with a commander. Sound good, lets play. I don't know what I think about this for rules, I would prefer this was a 100 card deck at least, and with an entire box of boosters I think sticking to commander colors would be fine, but we will see once I try and build a deck. Does anyone have experience with this format? Please comment below if you do. 

I find that I have some really old views on MTG still. I was always a type of person who like themed decks I had decks that were Lion King (white green red with cards that were just things like lions, jackals, stampedes etc.), Cereal Killers (all cards that could be associated with cereal BoP for Toucan Sam, Sol Ring for Cheerio, etc...) and Whips and Chains (Angels and Artifacts like Bullwhip). These kinds of ideas stick with me to this day, I will be posting decklists here on the site and you can see some of the themes I come up with, things like Mobilize, Banding and Flanking, Proliferate and others. 

That means I am back, having fun and looking to see if I can help others that are just returning or new people in general navigate some of the craziness that is MTG.