Magic is the best card game of all time. Ciro Santilli agrees with this fact, and this has nothing to do with the nostalgia factor of having played it while being a teenager.
It is also the one with the most cumbersome name possible, containing even a bloody colon punctuation in it!
However, besides that, Magic has another major flaw: the cards of old formats (Legacy and Modern), which are the only really interesting ones, are fucking expensive: Section "Magic: The Gathering is too expensive".
Like in mathematics, the most beautiful decks are those that do crazy things:All of this comes to a certain extent from the deep asymmetry that permeates the game.
- infinite combos
- semi-infinite combos that allow you to likely draw your entire deck or deal 20 damage
- all-in decks that either win or lose on turn two
- and lands
It is also really interesting to watch as new sets as spoiled and try to guess if certain cards will have any impact on the Modern or Legacy metagame.
Here are some cool decks:
- Cheerios, Modern. Meryn MTG, 2019
- Lands, Legacy. Channel Mengucci, 2019
- Belcher, Legacy, Jeff Hoogland, 2019, Channel Mengucci, 2017
- Ops All Spells
- Gyruda Cannon - Legacy - April 18th, 2020 www.youtube.com/watch?v=PefRTsRRi6w
If Ciro were to ever overcome his cheapness and play the legacy forma (which will never happen), he would likely play one of the following decks when trying to be able to win at all:Both of this decks focus on cheating a huge creature into play in one go, and both have combo protection methods (discard for turbo depths, and counterspells for sneak and show). Ciro believes that those decks reflect his personality well, notably Ciro Santilli's self perceived creative personality. Related decks that don't appeal as much to Ciro:And above all, Ciro would never play a fair deck. Grinding victories is not for him. He'd rather quickly decide win/lose status and move on.
- reanimator: you have to worry about graveyard hate all the time, worrying is bad
- storm: you have to play too many spells, it's tiring. Ciro would rather put a fattie into play and swing once.
Competitive commander is also interesting, although matches tend to be much more random so the format is harder to digest, see for example this channel; Playing With Power MTG channel.
In Ciro's mind, Urza's block is the most epic of all, followed by the masques block. Those sets had a ridiculous power level and epic art, and they happened just before Ciro Santilli started playing during Invasion, which had an extremely low power level in comparison. So Ciro saw some cards from those slightly older formats floating around, but not many, and they felt so mystical and awesome.
ChannelFireball is one of the best Legacy resources out there, but they have too much crap filling in between legacy videos unfortunately.
The following creators share many of Ciro's interests and output large quantities of interesting content covering all memes/overpowered combos of new sets:
- www.youtube.com/watch?v=1u5yzmta2oA BoshNRoll (Brian Coval) is basically Ciro Santilli's favorite MTG streamer of the early 2020's very good Legacy focused content, with occasional Modern and Pauper, good spicy deck selection. And he says nice and intelligent things the hole time, it's the type of person Ciro would be good friends with in real life. It sometimes makes Ciro said to see such a person wasting their lives with Magic. Twitter: twitter.com/BoshNRoll
- www.youtube.com/watch?v=9eKSg5HAfC4 UNDEFEATED BRAIN POWER! Legacy Hive Mind Combo 5-0 Trophy! Sudden Substitution Show and Tell. That's fire!
- Magic Aids
- Squa Chief. He does a lot of cool decks.
- Jeff Hoogland. Not Ciro's favorite personality though, too rambly/matter-of-fact. Also was going too much into MTGA.
- www.youtube.com/channel/UC2hkmJr2x--IiMfozqj6VdQ Meryn MTG. She's too much on the jank side for Ciro's taste, but for that reason she covers some decks of interest that others don't. She's cute, and a Timmy at heart. Which makes you feel really sorry for her as she gets crushed by more competitive decks.
- CalebD. Legacy and Modern. Too much drafting in the middle of actual videos. Sometimes decks slightly too janky/experimental. Amazing channel soundtrack.
- Nikachu has some decent commentary. His endlessly rambly persona is a bit annoying, but the content of the commentary is still good.
Ciro was pleased when he learnt that Steve Wozniak plays magic the gathering.
Magic's competitive play became a mess in the late 2010's. They had a clear tournament structure, but they decided to start changing things every 6 months, and give tournaments meaningless names like "Mythic championship", and it just became impossible to follow what is what.
- www.mtggoldfish.com/articles/disorganized-play-and-the-magic-pro-league
- mtg.fandom.com/wiki/List_of_PT_events
- www.youtube.com/watch?v=nXUHaXiZ0HI The Moment Professional Magic Came to an End by Nikachu MTG (2021) has a good perspective. Magic is never going to have enough viewers to actually allow pros to make consistent ammounts money. And Magic's variability is just way too high for anyone to consistently win few large prizes on annual contests. Therefore they just killed such contests.
The mtg.fandom.com/wiki/Card_frame#Original_frame is the best, much more epic all others (notably since 2003 update) ware bullshit, good overview medium.com/@raphaelaleixo/the-graphic-design-for-magic-the-gathering-card-frames-b3b6da4cd003
www.youtube.com/watch?v=5hk3IOQiisg Crazy MTG Scandals That Changed The Game by Nikachu (2021). Good list:
This game is quite detailed: www.youtube.com/watch?v=w4Jmqp8a_bU