CCG Collection

Often, right where you bought the game. Most game stores have gaming areas and regular “open gaming” times. They also usually run local tournaments for many CCGs on a regular basis. Scrye magazine’s tournament calendar is the most comprehensive of its kind; check for the stores near you.
Also, fantasy, comic-book, science-fiction, and game conventions, from local shows all the way up to mighty Gen Con, provide wonderful formal and informal settings to play CCGs. The larger shows may be more than a day trip, but there are several that are true “celebrations of gaming” that are not to be missed. Again, check the listings in Scrye.
In this weblog, we try to provide some guidance as to which games have larger ready-made player bases. Check the ratings boxes with the individual game listings.
But often, you don’t have to look far to find an opponent. One of the things that made CCGs so popular in the beginning was that, where it took four or five people to play most board games and role-playing games, it only took two people to play a CCG. Magic’s earliest TV ads had the slogan, “All you need is a deck

Good Lord, no! In the early 1980s, “urban legends” about college kids who played Dungeons & Dragons and ran off made the rounds. Televangelists who were already railing against heavy metal music and late-night television added it to their hit lists. A novelist cranked out a potboiler on the subject, Mazes and Monsters, and Tom Hanks played the cracked gamer from that story in the movie of the week. 60 Minutes even sent Ed Bradley out to investigate the claims.
Problem was, there was never any problem. The Industry Watch Committee of the Game Manufacturer’s Association has diligently investigated all claims to date of adventure games leading to violent activity. None have panned out. Again: None have panned out. In the few known criminal cases where games were blamed for antisocial activity, all the people eventually recanted. It was just a handy defense.
And concerns with the topics of certain games being “seductive” tend to deflate when people find out the broad range of subjects that games address. Yes, Magic features characters who dabble in magic

We’d wait a while too see how useless they really are. Every so often something will come along in a gaming system that’ll revive interest in certain cards that once seemed worthless.
In the meantime, if you’ve got heaping gobs of land cards from Magic, you probably won’t want to stuff them into plastic sleeves. Many of the supply companies that make the sleeves have card-sized boxes available.
If you’re sure you don’t want the cards, you can try to sell them

These are phrases used to refer to whether CCG systems are being supported at present by their manufacturers (and, to a lesser extent, by their fans).
A “dead game” is very hard to get into, because no one’s out there organizing tournament support or answering questions about rules. And because new releases are so important to the evolving “metagame,” when they stop coming out, players stop playing.
The first CCG to be released, Magic, is very much alive. Its manufacturer is still cranking out releases, supporting tournaments, and answering questions.
The second CCG to be released, Spellfire, is dead. The last release came out in 1997, when Wizards of the Coast bought its original publisher, TSR, and stopped making additions to the game. There are cells of players keeping it “alive” here and there on websites and at conventions

Sideboards were introduced with early tournaments for Magic: The Gathering as a means by which players could filter some additional cards into their decks between games

This is a word you will see in several of the posts in this weblog. Sometimes called the “tournament environment,” the metagame refers to how the universe of cards available for use in a CCG affects the strategies players are choosing. Because CCGs are dynamic

Scry is a Middle-English word meaning to tell the future. You’ll see it in fantasy novels where people talk about using scrying pools and such.
Scrye is Krause Publications’ trademark for the leading magazine in the adventure gaming industry. Scrye was founded soon after the invention of the collectible card game market, not just to talk about the strategies for the games (though that’s a major part), but also to follow the ups and downs of the CCG secondary market.

We suppose we shouldn’t care what the manufacturer says

Here’s the burst of design genius in Magic. The game gave players the freedom to personalize, to pick a strategy that suited them. To develop that strategy, then to abandon it when it got boring. Compared with other games

Before retailers began building sets of their own, getting a complete set of Magic in the beginning required buying a huge number of starter decks and booster packs