Magic: The Gathering - Duels of the Planeswalkers 2013

Most of you should just skip this post while I wax nostalgic on a game I first played close to twenty years ago.

Props again to Microsoft for another quality free game. Apparently there've been four or five iterations of Duels of the Planeswalkers with this being the second-most recent one. This makes sense; the 2014 game must be way too new for Xbox to be giving away for free at this point, while the versions going as far back as 2009 have to be sort of dated and shitty.

Magic: The Gathering has been around since 1993. Every year a few new sets of cards have been released and according to some basic Google searches there are anywhere between 13,000 and 20,000 unique cards in existence at this point. That's insane. Large numbers are meaningless out of context, so to put that into perspective, if you had to make a deck of sixty cards without repeating any, you could make 10e168 decks. Meanwhile, the number of atoms in the universe - atoms, in the universe - is estimated to be something like 10e80. This means that if each atom in the universe contained its own entire universe, the grand total of the atoms in all those universes would still be less than the number of sixty-card decks you could make out of twenty years of Magic: The Gathering expansions. And the kicker is that there's no maximum or minimum size a deck must have, and you can repeat multiple iterations of the same card. Possibilities are very literally endless.

Having said all that, no video game could possibly contain every single Magic card ever made. Instead, a few hundred are present in this game, and still they were plenty. I first started playing Magic in 1996 or so, back when there were only a few thousand total cards. I must have several hundred myself, sitting in a box somewhere within another box in my mother's basement, or attic, or, man, who even knows? I remember playing the game - or mostly, really, just building decks and trading cards with neighbors and friends - on and off for a good chunk of my later elementary school days. And then, just like that, Pokémon cards swept through and became all the rage. And shortly thereafter I was in middle school and, aside from when I got back into it for a few weeks with one or two friends in college, my Magic days were over. So when I found a few weeks ago that Xbox was giving away a Magic game for free, I was all over it. And the beauty of it all is that even though the game was composed of cards I'd never heard of and deck themes I'd never have come up with on my own, the overall gameplay worked exactly the same as I remembered from so long ago.

I don't need to play any more Magic for a long time, and I won't be seeking out the newest or latest versions of Planeswalkers or even digging out my old cards any time soon. But damn, I had some real fun these last two Saturdays dicking around with an old pastime made new again.