Magic: The Attempt-to-Gather

Geek & Sundry produces an awesome series, called Spellslingers, where Sean Plott (aka “Day[9]”) plays the card game Magic: The Gathering with his nerdy friends. They took a lot of cues from the production of Tabletop, but gave it a unique feel. There’s a lot more shared analysis of the gameplay that doesn’t really happen on Tabletop. If Wil Wheaton wants you to play more games, Sean Plott wants you to play better Magic.

Confession time: I’ve never actually played a game of Magic. I grew up in the bible belt where people honestly believed that Dungeons and Dragons and Magic would teach you to worship the devil. Or at least ruin your prospects at courting a respectable, God-fearing mate. The closest thing I ever got to play was the Star Wars Customizable Card Game published by Decipher. I loved that game but it never had the mass appeal of Magic.

Anyway, Spellslingers really has me itching to play a game. Unfortunately, I’m totally not spending money on games right now. There’s a baby on the way! Gotta save up cash. But I thought I found an easy way to do this with Magic Duels – an online tabletop simulator of the game. But more downside – the only platform I can play this is on is Windows PC (I don’t have any iOS devices) and my Windows PC is so old and janky I barely got Steam installed. There’s no way I can actually play a game on it. I also tried adding it to a VM on my Mac, but the VM’s video memory is only half the recommended specifications – so it’s also slow to respond and not worthy of playing the game.

My gathering of Magic will continue to wait and I’ll just have to whet my appetite with more Spellslingers.