This is in response to Dave Zoltok's article "Is Magic Evolving Too Fast?" (Editor's note: that article can be found here.)

My name is Mark Slack. I have been playing since Mirage was released, and have been playing competitively since Urza's Block. As a pretty serious tournament player, I thought I would try to refute some of Dave's points about the seriousness of the game.

"Obviously, some research was necessary. So I hit the Web, trying to update my knowledge. Quite frankly, I was astounded at how much the game had changed in the time I had been gone. The "stack", threshold, flashback, split cards... had I really been out of touch for that long? Now, I know what you're saying. "Well, when you're out of the game for so long, things change. You just have to roll with it. You quit a few years ago, right?" WRONG! I quit just before Invasion was released! If I remember correctly, that was only a year and a half ago!"

Every block brings with it new mechanics. It's one of the set-in-stone things Wizards does to keep the game fresh. If you'd quit before Tempest and come back a set and a half later, for instance, you would have missed out on buyback, shadow, echo, and cycling. The game will always be bringing in new mechanics and abilities to make the players think about what the possibilities for deckbuilding are.

This changing dynamic makes Magic different from almost any other competitive game. Let's take chess, for instance. Chess has been the same for almost a thousand years. Almost every game follows generally the same pattern--set up your pieces to have the maximum influence over the board, gain board superiority, and eventually checkmate the king.& I used to play chess, and I was decent-to-good at it. But once I started playing Magic, I found chess, well, boring. The changing formats and decks of Magic keep me interested in the game.

"Currently, WotC releases 4 sets every year; 1 standalone, 2 expansions and a revision of the basic set. This accounts to approximately 600 new cards every year. This also means that the allowed sets in type 2 tournaments is completely altered every year. Therefore, every year, tournament players are forced to create brand new decks in order for them to stay valid. Can they trade off the contents of their old decks? Nope; their old decks are no longer T2 valid, and therefore useless. Until now, I have accepted this as "evolution." But this is more like "survival of the fittest"; every year, another generation of Magic players is left in the dust because they can no longer invest the time and money the formats require."

First, a minor correction here--Wizards updates the basic set only once every 2 years, not every year.

The pattern of Type 2 enforces another necessary skill to stay current in Magic--that of trading. When Masques left Type 2, I was left with only four rares in Masques Block that could not be used in Extended--4 Parallax Waves. I had managed to trade away everything else. The key to this is getting out early; I was trading off Saproling Bursts and Ports two months before the release of Prophecy. I am well aware that I am probably the exception to the rule here, but I can usually minimize my losses from the changing Type 2 environment pretty well. For those who can't, however, the best strategy is to pick a deck, build it, and play it until you can fully acquire another deck to play. I would imagine that this would cost $50-100 at fair prices. This isn't a cheap price, but I think it could be worse. For older formats, most of the newer players would have to buy their way in wholesale, and Dual Lands aren't cheap. Their decks would stay current, but the buy-in on Extended is well over $100 right now.

Let's face it--this isn't a cheap hobby. But let's again compare it to something else...say, skiing. First, you have to acquiree all the necessary equipment to ski in the first place, which is certainly not cheap. Then you have to pay for time on a hill. Then you have to pay for repairs if you break some of your equipment. The point is, every hobby and sport has an upkeep cost, and Magic is the same as everything else.

"Personally, I pine for the old school days of casual play. Me and my friends used to bust out our old collections, rent a keg and just go nuts (I now know of several Magic-related drinking games, if anyone's interested). None of us had very good cards, because we just spent all of our money renting the keg. But it didn't matter, because it was never competitive and it was never about who had the most recent cards; it was about having fun, exercising our brains, being creative, and playing a game."

What's stopping you from playing this way? I personally love to play casual magic. If you think the tournaments are too competitive, just buy cards when you can and play the way you enjoy playing. Don't let the cutthroat nature of the tournaments get to you.

Since you're just getting back in to the game, you might check out 5-color Magic, at www.5-color.com. This is an extremely entertaining format, and lets you play with all the old ante cards. You can either build a deck with a purpose and intent in mind, or you can just make a pile of cards and go nuts (which I recommend).

"Face the facts, fellow card-floppers; this is no longer a game."

I totally disagree with this. Let's go back to my first example: chess. At the very highest level, by your definition, chess isn't a game. It's just one strategy against another. But aren't all games like that?

"Tournaments are always dominated by two or three decktypes, and everyone just picks up a decklist from the net and goes to town. The only reward for people who create original decks are comments like "How the hell is THAT supposed to win?" or "I can't believe I lost to that piece of garbage. It's just luck!"

Rogue decks are a big part of the fun of tournament play; the only qualification is that they have to be good. You can take your Goblin Bomb-Opalescence-Bomb Squad deck into a casual game and have a blast. Everyone will love your great idea. But tournaments are for the purpose of winning, just like in any other sport. Innovation may pay sometimes, but most of the time it will just make you lose. And since there's money at stake in the higher levels of the game, making yourself lose is not a great strategy.

"Frankly, I'm sick of beating players who lifted tourney decks card-for-card off of websites and claim it was their idea..."

This is just bad taste. I would hope that no one does this around where you play.

"...and I'm sick of those same players whining about "bad draws" and "lucky bastard" when they lose. When did this get so serious?"

Frankly, this got so serious when it became worth $2 million or so a year in prizes. When there's money to be won, seriousness becomes the norm. Whether that development was good or bad depends on your point of view. From your side, the money sucks the originality out of the game, which is mostly true. But a Pro Tour in an untested format will have an amazing amount of originality and innovation. Just take a look at Pro Tour New Orleans, which featured an essentially totally new format due to the bannings. A huge amount of new decktypes, from UGW Call of the Herd control to Reanimator, reared their heads. Seriousness makes this a competitive game at the higher levels, but it's still a game. The top players have as much fun playing as anyone else does (just check out the Invitational if you don't believe that). They just bear down more when there's more at stake.

The game still holds an immense amount of fun for me. The part I enjoy most, however, is taking a concept and trying to make it hold water in an established format. The Ana Sanctuary deck I built today, for instance...it probably can't hold up in type 2, but it's certainly fun to play.

If you ask everyone you know that plays Magic, from hardcore tourney player to casual gamer, the same question, you will get the same answer...

"Why do you play Magic?"

"Because it's fun!"

--Mark Slack
WarWolf on MTGnews, BDominia, and IRC