Metal Slayer

I have been a player of Dungeons & Dragons for many years (since about 1982), and to me, it has always been a ROLE playing game above all else… I was eager when 4th edition came out, but to be honest, it is not Dungeons and Dragons in my opinion. It isn’t a ROLE playing game, it is a ROLL playing game. A board game… a miniatures game.

First edition (Basic D& and AD&D) was a great game and I don’t even want to think of the thousands of hours I spent playing it in High School… 3.5/Pathfinder is a great game, but very rules heavy. It took a lot of the ‘fun’ out of the original game by putting too many restrictions and trying to come up with rules to take care of every possible situation – again, this is not a bad thing either, but it isn’t first edition… (I do like 3.5/pathfinder, so I am not being negative about it).

Fourth edition however, as I said above, is not a ROLE playing game… but, that isn’t a bad thing depending on how you look at it. In fact, I really like 4th edition if you play it for the miniatures aspect. It is an awesome system to work out tactical skirmish situations and battles with clear and clean rules, powers you can use at will (whenever you want), once a day, etc…

The problem here is the spells and rules and abilities are too different from 3.5 to use with the game. Meaning you can’t play a 3.5 role playing game, and enter a big combat situation – it would be nice to be able to work it out using rules like 4e, but it just ins’t practical.

This review is quite mixed, because depending on how you look at it, I like the game and I don’t like that game, lol.

I don’t know if you’d consider this a review so much as a complaint. I’ve tried to play magic maybe 3 times in my life, and by “try” I mean I’ve actually bought the cards, looked over the deck, figured out what I thought would be good combinations and cards, and then sat down for some games at local gaming shops.

Each time I get my *** handed to me by some 11 year old kid with some expensive store bought set of cards. Like no joke, I just have no chance, everyone has these decks that cost them hundreds of dollars and they love nothing more than to try and win as quickly as possible. My games last like 2-3 minutes and I’ve lost.

Absolutely zero fun for me, and each time, the kid (or middle-aged man who lives in his mom’s basement) tells me the same thing “Oh, you need to get some of the expensive cards if you want to have a chance to win”.

Well, that isn’t what I want to do. I don’t want to spend hundreds of dollars on a game that isn’t even fun to me at this point. I’d love to be able to buy a deck and some boosters and sit down and have some challenging games with a mature opponent.

I considered playing online, magic in digital format, but I see that there could potentially be the same problem since you ‘buy’ decks (which I still can’t understand why you would pay money to own cards that only exist digitally?).

Anyone here who is a magic player that can give me some real advise?