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okay, y'all are gonna call me nuts for this but here it goes.

Other Cards games (DBZ, Yu-Gi-Oh!, Pokemon, etc.....) can greatly help with playing M:tG... AND vice cersa...
MAny strategies and mindsets hold true across the board for all the games...
I'll use some of the decks I used in other games as examples and analog them to magic deck concepts...there are tons more, but you get the idea.... Don't knock other games, they can teach you to look at the game you play in a different light.


GAME: Pokemon
Deck Style: Normal blitz
Purpose: Who care what energy (land/mana) you draw, you can still use it!
In case you can't tell, its like playing an artifact deck.... since almost all your cards that require energy (mana) can use any color..... you can spread out what you use and slip in a myriad of lesser cards that normally wouldn't see deck time together.
PERSONAL LESSON razz okemon taught me better mana/resource management... seriously, imagine losing lands everytime a creature died and having to get more to let another attack


GAME: DRagonball Z/ Dragonball GT
Deck Style: Namekian
Purpose: Sending cards from discard pile to deck (graveyard to library for magic players) and blocking attacks.
NAmekian runs alot like white, blocking damage done by combat and healing what has managed to get through. (In DBZ/DBGT your life total is however many cards are left in your deck.) One must not rush to be aggressive or to sacrifice resources.... let your opponent get his big cards in play, you just need to be patient and wait.
PERSONAL LESSON: I played DBZ since its conception as a card game in the US , my first deck was given to me by a friend at the store that held the tournaments (at the time i was playing pokemon) because he wanted me to try it.. My fav DBZ character is piccolo so that who i wanted to use... within minutes of learning the game, the old strategies that I used with a CoP deck were coming into play.... such as making yourself seem like your not a threat and basic defense tactics... after a few weeks I was placing 1st in almost every tournament, when I stopped playing DBZ, I became even more skilled at defensive playing.



GAME: Digimon
Deck Style: Impmon Rookie beatdown
Purpose: staying at rookie level (equivilant to a 1/1) to make better use of your opponents weaknesses
In digimon, the winning conditon is to beat your opponent to 1000pts, this is done by destroying their digimon... the higher above the attacking digimon the defender is, the more points its worth. so while your opponent is worrying about getting a mad fatty out, you sit there with a weak lil impmon (if not for his ability i'd barely rate him as a 1/1) and you attack, sacrificng rookie cards from your hand to boost his power (his ability boosts his attack for every rookie you discard) and get bonus points for taking out big guys. So this deck type is a weenie deck, teaching that even the lil guys can kick tail.
PERSONAL LESSON: Basically, when i started playing digimon, i couldn't afford a deck of power cards or even mid range... but i did get lucky and pull impmon... The metagame for digimon was to use the primary lineups and race to mega (highest level) to win.... I learned to fight the metagame by not putting anything above a rookie in my deck.

great example biggrin

And then you can start ones that have mechanics that are fairly, fairly weird. .hack//Enemy comes to mind, as does Doomtown and Tomb Raider, and of course, Rage.

Yeah, I've got all those. I've played a few more, too (Wyvern and Jihad are the main two I can think of).

.....

Umm....I've had a combo out that let me gain 5000 life, then attack with a 5000/5000 power creature....same combo, too.

Wait, there were people who actually understood how to play the Star wars game?!?!?!

I remember when I first started magic my friend who owned our local card shop was showing me some star wars TCG stuff and we were reading the rules, and at the time it seemed like the most complicated game either of us have ever heard. heh, we thought it was a joke at first.

I don't remember much of the specifics, but i could have sworn complicated math was involved and weird stuff where you'd have to move your cards into certain places to do stuff.

Just thinking about it is starting to make my brain melt a little bit.

I'm not trying to disrespect the game or the people who play it or anything. I was just totally shocked that theres people who actually understood it.

I've played all sorts of silly things. Until pretty recently I was primarilly a Decipher player. I started with their LOTR TCG and played that for several years.

LOTR runs on a rather different system to any other TCG I've seen (though some other D games incorporate some of its concepts). You are essentially playing two decks shuffled together. A "fellowship" deck whose objective is to traverse 9 "sites" and get the ring bearer to site 9 (symbolizing mount doom) and a "shadow" deck whose objective is to prevent your opponent's fellowship from accomplishing their goal.

Resource management is also odd. Fellowship cards have "twilight" costs which you pay by putting tokens into a "twilight pool". Moving from site to site also costs twilight. Shadow cards have twilight costs as well but they are paid by removing twilight from the pool created by the opponent's fellowship. So the fellowship has infinite resources but the more they spend the more the shadow has to work with.

Card drawing is also different with a "reconcile" system whereby you draw cards until you have 8 in hand at the end of each turn. Since you don't lose for decking out (you just have no more resources to work with) this means that you can tune your deck to see more or less every card in an average game. It also means that playing above the minimum is, for once, a viable strategy with decks as big as 44/44 ( minimum is 30/30, your shadow and fellowship sides are counted seperately and must be equal) playing competatively.

When D started previewing their Dot Hack game most of my local meta got into it. I first played that at the demo at dragon con 2003 but after release I got fairly heavily into that one too.

It's a comparatively compact game that plays a bit like a cross between LOTR and magic or YGO.

The dual deck concept from LOTR is worked in somewhat with "PCs" (since it's based off a property having to do with an MMORPG) and "monsters" but you aren't restricted in your PC to monster ratio as in LOTR. Along with the standard power stat monsters have "score points" and the objective of the game is to score 7 of them by winning fights against opposing PCs (or an empty field). Hack also uses the destiny system pioneered in the SWCCG but in a more agressive manner. Where battles were incidental in SW they are integral to dothack since the only way to stop an opponent from scoring a monster they play and attack with is to fight it with a PC.

The hand management system is reconcile like LOTR but with a 4 card starting handsize and a beginning of turn draw like most games. Since you're limited to one card play per turn taking advantage of the reconcile mechanic is much more difficult (discard costs are very powerful).

I continued playing LOTR while picking up dothack and when D released megaman I picked that up as well (though, on a more limited basis.). MM ran on a matrix similar to DBZ with a main character and a win by deck depletion but it incorporated the destiny system as well as a "power bar" which you filled with cards from your deck and used as a resource.

I also played a little VS (I should think most poeple are familiar with that system) and Decipher's Star Trek game (which I won't go into here for the sake of brevity) as well as a very little legend of the 5 rings and a couple of memorable games of decipher's Austin Powers game (about as silly as it sounds) plus YGO and Pokemon via my younger brother.

WARS was the last decipher game I picked up (I skipped Beyblade along with everyone else). That was more or less a refurbishment of the SWCCG system and is IMO the best mechanical TCG I've ever seen. Unfortunately D didn't seem to have any idea how to market a game that didn't have a movie/TV/game tie in and their conduct toward the end of their SW licsencing deal (hey, we're gonna lose the license. I know, let's not tell the players and print disgustingly broken cards they'll have to buy!) turned off alot of former SW players.



The SWCCG timing system was worse. More like pre 6th edition magic timing rules only more convoluted. There were maybe 6 different timing types and they were tied to what the card effect was rather than the card type so you couldn't always tell by looking at the card.

And the fact that there was no card per deck limit led to some REALLY stupid counter war situations (a bit like being able to play 20 force of wills in a deck).

Thankfully when D revamped the system for WARS they chose to go with a stack system more or less identical to MTG's.

There was also the whole thing where some of a card's attributes were in its flavour text.

I didn't find the SW:CCG too difficult to learn to be honest. Attrition was a bit of a pain in the a**, but overall wasn't difficult. nor was battle damage hard to figure out.

Starships were bit...weird too until you got used to it. I built two decks that dealt only in star ships to show the similarities/differences to new players.

And the location conept I thought was very cool, flavou wise. My friends and I had several brawls in the Mos Eisley Cantina xd

But yeah, cards in the last few sets before the license was pulled were pretty broken. All The Episode 1 sets are nasty proof of this.