CCG Collection

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

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

Magic was initially sold in starter decks and booster packs, and that remains the way that most CCGs are marketed. There have been a few CCG products that have been sold in boxed sets

A collectible card game is a card game in which each player uses his own deck using cards that are mostly sold in random assortments.
Magic: The Gathering was the first. The novelty of the game is both in its mechanics and its method of availability: Each player builds his own deck of wizard’s spells from a wide selection of cards. Then, in “duels” with opponents, the player learns the weaknesses of his deck and chooses different cards to work with before entering another game.
Those cards can be acquired by trading with other players, or buying them from retailers in starter decks (usually containing 60 cards and rules) and booster packs (usually containing from 8 to 15 cards). The assortment of cards is mostly random, with cards vital to play being the most common (or fixed), and more powerful cards being uncommon or rare. Later, special foil cards came along to look pretty.
That’s it! Now you’ve got all the definitions you need to recognize a “CCG” when you see one. Just about all of the many, many others that followed conformed to the above description.