I haven’t played Magic the Gathering with “real cards” in years. In fact, I had taken apart all of my decks and put my more valuable cards in binders and the less valuable ones in boxes. They would have very likely stayed that way if I didn’t stumble upon 2 co-workers playing on their lunch break one fateful day!Fond memories of casting dragons and tapping assassins came flooding in! I asked if they would kindly include me in on their next game and they gladly accepted, but not without some hesitation. I had confessed that I had not played in years and they were worried that my ancient cards might not hold-up to their newer ones. One of them even offered to let me play with a pre-contructed deck until I got myself some new cards. I gracefully declined of course…One of the reasons I even got into Magic was that I was (and still am to a lesser degree) an avid collector. I hate borrowing novels from people as I want to put any novel I finish in my bookshelf next to my sports trophies and family pictures. To me, it’s almost as if the finished novel is a trophy itself! The same is true of my comics, cards, and other collectibles that I’ve amassed over the ages.It’s not as if I stopped playing Magic altogether for the last few years. I’ve been playing Magic the Gathering Online on and off since its creation. I still play the odd game online. It has its pluses. You can find a game anytime of the day or night, you face off against the most unlikely of decks, games tend to be shorter than their offline equivalents, there’s no debate about the rules, you can reuse the same card in several decks, you can download the client to any PC and play, and more… There are definitely many good reasons to play online but I prefer playing with real cards face to face with real people.Regardless, my old cards really did hold their own! We played two 3 player free-for-all games, which is all we could fit in one lunch hour, and I won one of them! Honestly, both games could really have gone any way. What impressed me most was that one of my co-workers had a deck made entirely of cards from the most recent expansions (Shadowmoor and Eventide), while my other co-worker had recent cards from earlier expansions, and I had cards from before 6th edition (almost 10 years old) and our cards really did play well together! Yup, my Gaea’s Lieges really made me feel old in more ways than one…Hats off to the designers of Magic the Gathering, their game truly is a timeless classic. Here’s hoping it’ll stay that way!

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