While I've spoken pretty openly about many of my issues with the addiction over the years, I really haven't written much about one of the most addictive drugs I ever discovered, that sweet sweet cardboard crack: the one and only Magic The Gathering I've played off and on since the mid-90s, and when I've been on, there have been times that I was playing at tournaments around town 5+ days out of the week, spending thousands a month on the game.
The digital age
As you can imagine, seeing @aggroed announce @steemmonsters (post here) was exciting and a little scary. I've dabbled in the realms of digital card games a small handful of times over the past years, most notably playing the now-defunct Marvel: War of Heroes, where I was in a top 10 guild and broke top 5 in more than one global PVP battle... if you played it you get a sense of just how insane that was.
After playing that, Galaxy of Heroes, Hearthstone, and others, I realized that the digital style really doesn't fulfill the same way for me. I really enjoy shuffling my cards, not needing a computer, etc. Plus one of my big patterns has been to get into a game, master it, and sell my collection. Though possible with digital games, this style has proven much harder in that realm than with physical cards.
I think I'm glad that #SteemMonsters didn't launch with a fully functioning game, because I may have gone far more overboard buying things right away if I had the option to start doing battle already. Start winning and want to keep going, or start losing and want to turn that around, BOOM the Private Active Key's pulled out and you're hitting up the dealer for another fix...
So far I've been able to stay away from it relatively well, not chasing the dragon(s), being excited to just check out the cards I've pulled. That said, I've now bought 60 packs, and I finally hit my first Legendary! (pack number 57 or 58).
1 in 60, ouch!
I wasn't feeling too bad about no legendary yet when I had about 50 packs down, and after reading @berniesanders' post about getting all the cards, it still didn't seems so bad because it took him 211 packs and I (mistakenly) thought that only the gold cards were legendaries. The next day he posted again and I realized he had actually gotten all 9 legendaries in 211 packs (potentially doubles), making my 0 in 50 pretty horrible.
Bought 10 more packs and BOOM! Got myself a Gold Dragon! Now today I read about how legendary drop rates are going down, and may go down again in the future and the part of my brain that used to be a drug dealer and work in finance is definitely piqued, haha! What to do, what to do? It's so interesting not know what the game will be like, what the cards will do, what synergy will look like... it's driving me up a wall a little bit.
For those who are curious, @tzap90 recently did a great breakdown of the pack odds after studying 1000 openings, which featured the chart above.
Update!
I had a stack of SBD in my account, and after writing this post I decided to throw a little bit more at @SteemMonsters since I was going to be moving it around to other cryptos anyway. I bought 15 packs, and upon opening the third one got another legendary! Those 15 packs also gave me a total of 7 epics, well ahead of the statistical averages :-)
So grateful for the opportunity to experience and enjoy things like this!
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The Games...
Whether it be digital, collectible, or all-in-one-box, I sure do love deck-building games. When they first came out, I was all over the Dominion games, I still have Ascension with the first expansion, the all-consuming MTG. In my late teens & early twenties my card-playing skills really soared. I spent at least some time EVERY day playing, researching cards, goldfishing, and generally thinking of new strategies. If I wasn't at a standard tournament (blue-black faeries for a while), I was at a friend's smoking, drinking, and playing Elder Dragon Highlander, or some boxed card game, and if I wasn't there I was probably at the casino.
Across the years back to 2nd or 3rd grade when I got started, there was Pokemon, Digimon, Star Wars, Warhammer, HeroClix (oh god the time I spent on Clix!!), and all the other games mentioned here (plus all the others that weren't)... You can imagine why I have a tendency to lean away from the urges nowadays, haha! Speaking of which, I think I'm going to go to an MTG draft while I'm here in Portland :-) There's SO many card-shops here, and I always have the most fun when I have no idea what's in the set being drafted.
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I think this is a great thing for the STEEM blockchain, will help onboard and prove potential use-cases, and will hopefully be a whole lot of fun! @Aggroed is a great guy, and @yabapmatt seems cool, the community is of course powering up behind it (because community is what STEEM facilitates more than anything else!)
Those of you who share my love of gaming, science fiction, and fantasy may be interested in checking out my project Real Life: The Role-Playing Game, working to create a guide to playing this game of life in a way that maximizes freedom, abundance, and joy! Playing on so many concepts & tropes from RPGs, novels, and the whole geek culture, I'm hoping to empower people to step into their own role as The Hero.
8 Pillars of TribeSteemUp
