https://tappedout.net/mtg-decks/budget-beginner-teaching-decks-1-green/
https://tappedout.net/mtg-decks/budget-beginner-teaching-decks-2-red/
^^ the two decks I used, I played green and the ai was red. Still getting the hang of this game but with over like 50k cards in the library and endless combos it's so deep. The AI is quite smart on Forge too. I've never played MTG in my life so this is all new to me.
Game has been around since I believe 1995 and is very popular.
But how the fuck can you balance a game with 50k cards
That's the neat part! You don't!
49k of them aren't good enough for competitive play, and of the 1k that are there's enough give and take to keep lots of strategies viable.
But at the higher levels of competition you are dealing with a card pool of maybe 100 unique cards played across many decks. Much easier to manage!
So basically Gwent but with waaay more forgotten cards
There's definitely a lot of trash cards, but there's way more than 1k cards that regularly see play at tables. There's a ton of different deck archetypes and so some cards are better in certain decks than others. I think there might only be 1k cards at the very top level of competitive play, but those decks are worth thousands of dollars and are just not realistic for most players. It's kind of a completely different game once you get to that level.
Imagine paying for cards lmao
The community is generally cool with people having some proxies in their deck (10-15) but unless everyone in the pod is playing with all proxies, having an entire deck full of proxies is kinda frowned on (I would not be comfortable showing up with an all proxy deck to a non-proxy game).
There are proxy events and formats and those are fun. There's a lot of two turn wins and infinite combos in those, but playing with all high power cards is great.
Proxy Vintage sounds like so much fun
It's great! Sometimes it can result in some really annoying and frustrating games. There are some cards that are just broken and can result in some games that are really toxic for other players, but that isn't that often, and really only happens if you're playing with someone who is kind of an asshole anyway.
I think there's more than 100 at the top levels of competitive play.
Yeah I might be off by a zero here. I'm just thinking if a player comes to me, says they want to play serious Modern tournaments, and wants to know what Red and Blue cards they should know, off the top of my head:
Counterspell
Murktide Regent
Spell Pierce
Force of Negation
Preordain
Subtlety
Ragavan
Lightning Bolt
Dragon's Rage Channeler
Uhh... Flame Of Anor?
That's 10 cards. There's others, but if you want a competitive Modern deck in Blue/Red the Murktide deck isn't far off from this list + lands.
Maybe the truth is somewhere in between (radical mtg centrism). There's tons of different decks on moxfield using tons of different cards, but the card pool does shrink the higher up you go, depending on the format.
One of the big things in Magic is formats, releases of new cards are called sets and those sets can be legal or illegal depending on which format you use
The most basic format is Standard, which means only the 4 most recent sets are legal to use in your deck, another popular format is Modern which allows every set after the 8th Edition to be played
There are exception (notably ban lists) to these
Formats are easier to balance than the entirety of the game since release (although the devs frequently fuck up the balance)
If you want more info : https://mtg.fandom.com/wiki/Format
Standard rotates every three years now, which is kind of nice. It used to be too short IMO.
It can be double edged tho, if the sets are whack you're kinda stuck with it
I dont follow competitive Magic too much these days, but I remember the community was seething about Throne of Eldraine at the time
They introduced a new format (pioneer) that seems to be about the same rotation that standard used to be (~4 most recent sets). I very recently just got back in so I'm still learning about a bunch of the stuff I missed. I think those format changes just happened.
I don't know I'm just a newb but so far the decks I've played against each other seem to work.