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by Kevin Hess
In Defense of the Card Rarity System Though some recent points have been made in favor of abolishing the current rarity system, I'd like to make a defense of it. The current rarity system has its problems, like keeping quirky cards out of the hands of newbies; this is a bad thing, most people would assume. Well, I'll get to that in a minute. To begin with, the rarity system now isn't much different from that of baseball cards, except at least you're guaranteed to get a rare in a pack of Magic. Baseball cards, well, you might pull one of the '1 in 7', 'only included in 500 packs', etc. cards, but the chances are fairly slim to non- existent. Of course, but the point of Magic is to have the cards to play with, right? Sure, it is - and that's why I like trading. Once you learn to do it correctly, you can build whatever kind of deck you want, for free. The Desertion in my blue deck(I put only one in for a reason, and it wasn't because I could only get one), I picked up through trading. Same with the four Dissipates, the three Forces of Will, the two Disrupting Sceptres, the two Jalum Tomes(one Antiquities), the two Walls of Air.. trading for all this stuff didn't give me heartburn. In fact, it was a lot of fun. The trading aspect of Magic is one of the things that makes it so interesting, in my opinion(if it weren't for the trading, in fact, I'd probably have lost interest by now). And I was the guy who only a year ago used to take a single notebook page to a tournament and trade out of it.. now, still mostly through trading(and even after weathering a couple of losses and thefts), I've got way more cards than I used to. Anyway; I've grown a bit cynical of people over the years, and I'm starting to think that Magic's a little too complicated for most folks. Typically, the rare section is reserved for cards with weird effects, or effects that can't be used in most decks. Necropotence is a great card - but it's got a weird effect('you mean I have to skip my draw phase?' 'can I play this creature that I just 'drew' now or do I have to wait until next turn?'). Jayemdae Tome is a simple card(4 casting cost.. 4, T: Draw a card), but there's no way in hell I'd have used it in any of the deck's I've built in the past year or so. Lightning Bolt, on the other hand.. or Fireball(actually, I prefer Kaervek's Torch..), or Disenchant, or Counterspell, or Blue/Red Elemental Blast, or.. these are the cards that pretty much every deck needs. Now I'd care to disagree on a lot of the choices for rarities in the sets, of course.. Thunder Spirit should have been common, and so should have Granite Gargoyle, Uthden Troll, and Roc of Kher Ridges, since they're all more powerful versions of Hill/Tor Giant and Grey Ogre; on the other hand, Feldon's Cane should have been uncommon or rare in Chronicles). However, for the most part, the weird cards have been relegated to the rare slot and the more everyday cards to the common slot. This is a good thing, by the way - in my experience, the people who play mostly-common decks because they don't have anything else to play with, wouldn't know what to do with all the rares they couldn't get if they could get them. Example - at school, we had a proxy tournament; basically, if you wanted to use a card that you didn't have, you took a card and wrote on it, and that was your new card. It should have been a tough match, right? Wrong. Nobody at the tournament had any idea how to build a decent deck, now that they had the cards to do it with(except for me, of course). One idiot had his opponent down to about four life, but couldn't kill him - he had a Wheel of Fortune in his hand and an Underworld Dreams in play. He eventually figured it out, but it took him awhile. Some other bonehead thought it'd be smart to put Forcefield in his deck. I had a field day with that one. The second-place winner(who was the only person who beat me at all that day, and only one round) played Air Elemental or something like that in a STASIS deck. A STASIS deck#%@! He was also prone to Time Walking on the second turn, if I remember correctly. Needless to say, I won the tournament. :) What I meant by that whole paragraph is that people don't need having access to only common cards to stink at Magic. In fact, sometimes it helps. A lot of their regular play decks would have stood more of a chance than the ones they were using that day. I shudder at the thought of playing against newbie decks with four Tombstone Stairwells and a total of eight creatures, simply because it'd be such a beatdown. -Then- they can't figure out what they did wrong because Tombstone Stairwell is 'such a good card', and then they have nothing to blame. At least if they don't have any rares in their deck, they have that to complain about :). Anyway, if someone only knows how to fight with a knife, don't give them hand grenades, that's what I say. WoTC seems to be doing a pretty good job of this now, at least(Elkin Lair is a weird card, while Fireblast isn't, too much). Good enough, I suppose.
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