Magic the Gathering Online: Please no v4

I love Magic. It is one of my longest lasting hobbies. Now, sure, right now I'm not playing in real life. I take breaks here and there, sometimes card games feel great. Other times card games don't feel so great, some years I don't play it at all and instead write 300k words or whatever. Other times the draft set is core set, which I would rather gargle than play, especially when it is as actively worthless as m15 looks to be.

I think the things that make Magic itself so endearing lies in the various oddities, silliness and so forth. The game is essentially an abstraction as all RPGs are of wizard hat battles, and therein lies the rub - The abstractions themselves make for a really neat game, one built on math and theories. Magic gets pretty stupid sometimes, of course, R&D is perpetually stuck between doing a terrible job and an good job due to the fact they need to codify their theories and stick to them or instead get weird thoughts like 'X isn't very intuitive!! We should change it' or 'this doesn't feel very green'. It's an abstraction, guys, it doesn't matter.

here we have os/2

But still for all the shit talk I've ever mustered up, Magic has gotten a ton better and is a really interesting and deep game. I don't know if it is for everyone, I feel like not, but it definitely is a game that supports all its game modes and allows for a huge amount of players.

Magic Online, on the other hand, is a blight. And thanks to Wizards letting everyone do some prereleases for free, we can talk about an authentic v4 experience.