Does anyone here play Magic: The Gathering? I've been looking for a hobby, and this fits the bill :)! I've already made a few Standard decks and am having lots of fun. Do you have any tips for deck-building and strategy? What kind of deck do you play?

Cheers :)!

I have played that on and off since like 1996 lol. It is sure an easy way to spend hundreds of dollars, but the strategy is fascinating. I play legacy, so the deck-building options are different. Like, I have a big blue deck that's one of my simpler decks, but good luck making that work if you can't use High Tide because it's not in standard. (A Big _color_ deck means a one-color or mostly one-color deck which has mainly large creatures, large meaning 4/4 or bigger, and usually some kind of mana acceleration to get them out. I use sphinxes and Stormtide Leviathan. The mana acceleration is mana Myr and High Tide, and some card drawing cards, blue's specialty.) I'm out of time so I'll chatter more here later.

This is the directory of all the magic cards ever and rulings on them: http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Advanced.aspx?SearchFlag=1

I recently got back into Magic. I do love all of the ways decks can come together, but Standard has a LOT less variety than Modern or Legacy. At Friday Night Magic at my local gaming store, there are about 3 decks which are competitive, and the rest do pretty poorly. That being said, the first few weeks after release are always interesting as you have people trying all sorts of stuff with the new cards, so now is a good time to be playing.

i played for a good bit with several friends, was fun, we had plenty of good nights of playing 6 person ffa, or 3v3 teams, and a couple other variants that i can't remember the name to.

magic is great if you have at least 2-3 other friends to play with consistently, playing the same couple people over and over can get boring. keeping up with standard can get pretty expensive pretty fast(well, magic in general tends to drain the bank account anyway).

unfortunately we all kindof just got bored of it, or got busy, and now we don't ever really play.

Finally got back to my computer. Okay, in addition to the Big Blue deck, my other simple deck is a Pure Burn (all red, no creatures, only direct damage and some Howling Mines and Browbeats). Then I've got a green Elf deck (that's a classic archetype because it's the single best way to produce the most mana the fastest, aside from infinite combos; the same infrastructure can be used for either an Elf deck or a Eldrazi deck). My fastest but more fragile deck is blue/green Unblockable Poison. I've got a white healing deck which isn't very effective, though it can win certain matchups. And the last functional deck is Black Annoyance (small creatures, removal, and enchantments that all damage the opponent for one or two points each). Then in a currenly nonfunctional state I have a Sacred Mesa pegasus token deck, a landless Dingus deck aka Eight Armageddons, and a white/artifact Kemba deck.

Among my friends some different deck archetypes can be seen: a Mill deck, a Discard deck, a Sligh/Red Deck Wins, a White Weenie, a green token deck (squirrels and wolves), a Relentless Rats deck, a Sliver deck (the most popular tribe other than elves and maybe vampires), a black poison deck (slower and sturdier than my poison deck), a Big Red (dragons), a classic blue/white Control (counterspells plus removal and board-sweepers).

If you want to read about MTG strategy, try this article, it talks about clock position which is a really important concept in MTG strategy. http://www.mtgfanatic.com/Articles/ViewArticle.aspx?ID=168632

I'm the same as SunAndShadow. I've got decks ranging back to Antiquities in '94.

I've probably got 12 or 15 card boxes (each box holds about 800 cards) full.

We play a work almost every day, there are about 10 of us in the studio who play regularly, more who play irregularly. We very rarely play Standard because it is expensive. The studio is friends with Hasbro/Wizards so we'll occasionally get promotions and boxes, then we'll run a free tournament for those who are interested.

For deck strategies there are many websites dedicated to that, far more than what gd.net could focus on.

As for my favorites, I've had decks of all types. Some of my favorites are token explosions (Attacking with a thousand 2/2 tokens is fun), and blatant "You Win!" cards like Biorhythm. Then there are thematic fun decks where you can get everything out for free or do something just for the joy of watching a combo go off.

Currently at work I've got about six decks that I am rotating through. They include a mono-green ramp deck, a blue-white flyer stalling deck, a green-white token deck, a blue-black control deck, and a black-red direct damage deck. We also sometimes play EDH format, where I currently am reliving pure artifact decks. Of course, they're all fun depending on my mood. Also they give very different results based on who is playing; we may have a bunch of 1:1 games, or 3-player, 4-player, or rarely 5-player free-for-all games. They all play very differently in various scenarios.

I have a Standard Populate deck (Token Explosion: Return to Ravnica Style!), which creates a bunch of tokens, doubles them, and buffs them. It has three parallel lives (I'm getting a fourth, they're great cards. If I play intangible virtue, I get thirty 1/1 spirit tokens) and eight cards which give those spirit tokens +1/+1 (and sometimes vigilance). What can happen is that by turn 8 I have out 60+ 4/4 creatures. Normally I use the many game-stalling instants (Cards which destroy creatures, stop creatures from attacking, prevent spells, etc.) in the deck to draw out the game, because Populate decks normally take some time to get going, and then, on the turn I finally attack, I'll have 20+ Centaurs, 5+ 8/8 Creatures, an insane amount of 1/1's, etc. Unless they have a Gideon, Champion of Justice out (He has an ability which destroys all permanents on the field. Unless I have a card to kill him, stop his ability, or get cards from the graveyard, he essentially starts the game over), the game's won. It's fun to play, however with the new (extremely powerful) Boros and Gruul decks, people can get out very powerful cards very soon, while I'm still preparing for my game winning blow, and destroy me.

I played as a teenager back in the 90s. I got into it when it was 3rd (revised) edition, and was playing when 4th Ed and Ice Age came out. I gather it's a totally different game these days but I still have a ring binder full of old my old collection.

We used to play that in school. As long as we just used one stack of cards from starting decks it was fun. When some people got into 2 or even 1 colored special tiny decks it got into a weird arms race.

I pretty much regret now having taken a good amount of money to that shop to buy all those silly random extra cards that are just laying around for years, since I realized long time ago the moneymaking scheme behind it, where they put 1 good card every x packages you buy and make so many different cards that noone can ever collect all from random packages which often contain cards you already have many times. You are then seeing price lists from addicted collectors with ridiculous numbers for single cards floating around where it probably just costs a few cents to print one, which imho makes buying those card packages for any of those many trading card games nearly equivalent to a loophole to providing gambling to kids who feel the need to have more and better cards then their friends.

I played as a teenager back in the 90s. I got into it when it was 3rd (revised) edition, and was playing when 4th Ed and Ice Age came out. I gather it's a totally different game these days but I still have a ring binder full of old my old collection.

Same here. Every time I find I think "I should sell this", but I never have have the heart to to do it.