Game 18: Magic the Gathering - Pack Wars Format

 It's slightly tricky to do a count of all the games on our shelves - given that many of our games have expansions and we also have multiple versions of the same game or multiple games in one box.  Mostly I'm sticking with counting a game as just one game no matter how many expansions of it we have (see 7 Wonders which I've counted as 1), but with Magic the Gathering I am going to count each different format we play as an additional game.  The photo below is that of the part of my Magic collection in one area of my closet (and I'm not the only person in this family with a collection of Magic Cards).  I think when  a woman gives up this much of her personal closet space to a game, that game gets to count more than once.
We hadn't played the Dominaria set yet, which is the newest set out.  Caleb picked up a couple of packs while he was out shopping today, so we played a game of pack wars in order to introduce ourselves to the set.  We've played pack wars differently before, but our rules this time were simply that we started with one mana of any color and increased that number by one each turn.
 It played quite well given that we just kind of made up some house rules on the spot.
 The set up below is my board just before Caleb killed me.  The d20 shows my life total (4), and the d12 represents the amount of any-color mana I was up to at that point.  I also got a non-basic land in my pack, which was nice.
 I'll close out by featuring a couple of cards.  First, a big green creature, because I'm all about big green creatures!  Second is a sub-type of enchantment that's new to this set.  It's a saga enchantment and has abilities that fire off in order three turns in a row before it is sacrificed.

I used to play MTG all the time at home and used to go to tournaments with my boys, but now I pretty much only play when my youngest is home from college (David doesn't play), so it's hard to keep up with new card types, especially when I get 3 or 4 sets behind.  One of the many things I love about having Caleb back home from school is that I get to play Magic again.  Of course it's not like I don't have other games to choose from!  But there's just something about Magic - the mechanics, the artwork, the story, and more that I really love about this game.

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