ever since I was introduced to Pokemon at age 9-10 and Magic at age 14-15 I've loved card games, and had noticed today they are in decline.
Pokemon:
I was one of those 11 year old ensnared by the Pokemon craze. I got rather good at the Pokemon CCG with a lot of Practice, with a number of several decks. I played the PKMN CCG throught the entirety of the WOTC lifetime, before the EX stuff. I sat at a KB toys 2 times a week to participate in the official league. there were many cool events, such as the Rocket "Random Attacks" on our store that made it such a cool experience for my young self. I loved the Rocket and Gym sets a lot, but now, at age 21, I still like the Pokemon games, and still think to this day that it was an amazing card game.
Magic:
Magic's..... an odd one, I love the game a lot, but recent sets and the horrid kinds of dicks who play turned me off, I still love to play oldschool casual to this day though.
Magi Nation:
A great mix of Pokemon/Magic with better execution and awesome machanics made for a very enticing, brillaint, awesome game experience, the Magi League rivaled the Pokemon league in Awesomeness.
THE ERA OF DECIPHER:
I loved Decipher game, but Decipher make crappy decisions and axes games.
Star Wars CCG:
An amazing game. if you disagree you are a communist.
.hack//ENEMY:
A short lived, little amazing game. it was quite a fun game despite it's short life
Trek:
Star Trek was a pretty cool game, if you didn't mind a little indirect play.
LOTR:
Lord of the rings was okay, it just seemed like it would die quickly because they would have no content when the movies ran their course, instead, the big Decipher axes .hack and Megaman to keep LOTR around. using "Weta Cards" to keep it alive.
It's a shame that card games are declining like this, thoughts?
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It was ok, but I didn't see what the fuss was about.
It was all about Pogs and Football (soccer) stickers for me growing up.
But yes, it's a shame that this kind of game are dying out. Kids just don't seem to appreciate stuff like this anymore.
Hmm, now I'm wondering if these could be valuable in any way. I remember limited edition Magic cards selling for $150-200 back in the day.
This is, in my mind, the only thing wrong with Magic, and largely why I stopped playing. Magic has been an incredibly successful game, and it's one of the only ones that's still going strong after so many years. However, it's success is also it's downfall here, as they have such a huge tournament scene. Huge cash prizes = players turn into assholes, apparently.
The only other game I can think of that's of the same quality and been around for as long is Legend of the Five Rings, published by AEG. Much, much smaller fan base, and much harder to find people to play with (I haven't found a group since I moved to Oregon), but damn that's a well made game. It's essentially set in a generic "far east" fantasy world, with samurai, dragons, ninjas, monks, you know, all that good stuff. The game set-up is what's fascinating to me, though. You have two decks, dynasty and fate. Fate is your "sorceries/instants", if you will, where dynasty is your people, gold mines, etc. Fate cards go into your hand, like normal, but dynasty cards go down on the table, making a second hand. These are your provinces. When you attack, you don't attack the player, you attack his provinces. Destroy a province, you gain tempo. Kill them all, you win the game.
Interestingly, there are several other ways to win the game, including honor, dishonor, enlightenment..... God I miss that game.
tl;dr - L5R is teh awesomezors. Get it.
CHESS!
Back in my day, Kids who played Pokemon were cool to play with. because the Pokemon game was FAR more balanced and you didnt need every awesome Rare ever to stand a chance in the meta.
I used a lightning deck with limited rares and I destroyed the Rain Dance meta.
At least it wasnt as bad as the Dragonball Z card game, remember that piece of shit?
On the Nostalgia front, though, the Babylon 5 game was amazing. It did a great job of encapsulating victory in both political and military arenas, and using Babylon 5 to screw over your opponents. It was complicated, as any political TCG is, but that was part of its charm.
My gaming group at the time had invested in thousands of cards, probably at clearance, so that they could play with virtually any deck they wanted. They had personal cards, of course, but the communal pot they could draw from was larger than many Magic colelctions I've seen.
Bullshit with 2 jokers in the deck.
Do it. Do it now!
I used to work at a card/hobby shop and we had a good thing going back in Diamond Edition. Oh so much money down the drain...
Good times, though. Good times.
Good going!
I got into that when it was still called Jyhad.
It was tough getting people interested in it though. I had a killer Malkavian deck.
I remember going down to a local game store and dropping all my lawn-mowing, leaf-raking, wall-washing money on a deck, a few boosters, and some select cards. Originally it was always Phoenix to me but then I realized that Crab is pretty much easy mode if you stack your deck right. I never beat any of the 40 year old guys that played up there but I always had a damn good time and occasionally gave them a good run. But no matter what one person would always smoke me like a blunt, my brother. He had a honor-based Crane deck that would win before I could get more then 2 guys out. And attacking with 2 guys is essentially useless. He would never take it down to the shop to play against others though (I think he was too ashamed of it or something, anytime we bought anything I had to go up there to do it), but I remember asking him if I could. I stole all his cards from him awhile ago and have been thinking of going back down there and seeing if anyone still plays....
Edit: And while I must apologize for this off-topicness: Anyone play the P&P RPG? If so and you want to get an e-group together send me an e-mail or a PM (My PMs don't work though and I won't be able to respond so if you do leave an e-mail address).
Lots of fun trekking across the world with my homeboys and showing that pussy Gandalf who's the biggest, baddest wizard in town.
I still have this crazy bograth deck that used to rape everything we could come up with till it got nerfed to hell. Well not all of it, just Moob, because he was insane.
Star Wars CCG: I loved this one as well, made me cry when they lost the license.
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God yes. I need to force the buddies to play that next time we meet.
Hell yeah you do, and try to pick up some of the expansions. Y2K is great, Church of the Sub-Genius Illuminati FTW.
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Ditto for me. I was there when the whole Jyhad to Vampire transition happened. It was amusing to watch them explain how to use your Jyhad backs with the new backs. You could use new backs with old backs if you had a minimum of four cards that were of the other back but they had to be all different cards.
Fun times.