On Monday I launched a new side project, a Blogspot blog called The Daily Deck. It contains a catalog of the current Magic: The Gathering deck that I am playing as one of my hobbies, and it updates once every weekday.

Magic: The Gathering has always been a side-hobby for me that I’ve been fighting to keep out of this blog since I’ve started it. However, it’s an excellent game that I feel compelled to write about on occasion, even if it makes me more of a geek than I already was. However, I’m keeping it to a second blog outside of this one, so you can just suffer through this post (or wait until Friday) and no longer have to worry about it.

For those who don’t know, Magic is a game where you sit across the table from an opposing “planeswalker” – the name for the player just like you who has access to a sixty card deck of his own creation, capable of using it to summon tricky spells and deadly creatures to bring the game to an end. It goes until someone uses his or her spells and creatures to reduce the opponent’s lifepoints from twenty to zero – whoever does this first wins.

Now of course, it’s really more complicated than that. You can have multiple players, and there are other ways to win besides reduction of life points. There are hundreds of strategies that a deck can have. The game is a collectible card game with over ten thousand playable cards, although the playable formats usually limit it to a few hundred to a thousand to choose from. From this large pool, you have to evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of every card as compared to the cards that other people are playing, and make a deck from those cards.

And then you actually have to play the game. You get a hand of seven cards, and you play lands and cards until someone wins.

You can find more about it at the homepage of Magic: The Gathering, or from it’s Wikipedia article.

But in the meantime, I am now running The Daily Deck.

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