Hello there! My name is Tommy Sullivan, and this blog is all about the trials and tribulations of teaching my children to play Magic: the Gathering.
We’ll start with a little background on me. I learned to play Magic back when Ice Age was on the shelves, and was never really any good at it. The priest at my church taught me and some of my buddies how to play, and we mostly played massive, messy multi-player affairs that lasted entirely too long. We also played a good deal of D&D, of the old-school DragonQuest variety.
Regardless, I kind of forgot about Magic for the next, I don’t know, fifteen years, until my in-laws got each of my step-children a starter deck of Magic cards. I dug out the shoebox of old Magic cards from my parents’ attic (seriously) and soon found myself buying Deck Builder Toolkits and Fat Packs and voraciously inhaling Magic articles and rules tips and getting myself caught back up on everything I missed since 1998.
Because, after all, I have four little Prodigal Sorcerers to educate in the Magical ways! Judging by how they’ve done at casual night at my FLGS, the Florissant, MO Fantasy Shop, I think I’ve done alright.
From oldest to youngest:
Alexis, age 12. She likes to run her Rage Extractor starter deck and has been trying like hell to make an angel deck work ever since she beat me with a couple of Archangels. She’s more interested in the art and the “collectible” part of CCG than the strategy in the gameplay, but absolutely loves the social aspect of the game.
Kanaan, age 10. He’s probably our most serious Sorcerer. Currently in the “tribal” stage of deckbuilding. His goblin deck kills on turn 5, fairly consistently; to the point that the guys at casual night at the FLGS refuse to play against it. And he won the “goblin showdown”.
Chloe, age 8. Chloe is an enigma, but a pretty clever Magician. She’s got the rules down pretty well. Her most recent deck is black-blue, and it wants to be control but she hasn’t quite figured out how to play that way yet.
Aiden, age 7. He plays a white humans build; the base was the Innistrad starter deck, and I helped him tweak it some. It’s not bad; oblivion ring is a decent answer to just about anything, and if he plays his hand right, he can get through a lot of damage really quick.
Oh, and there’s me, Tommy, age 29 (30 in a week). I’ve got three different decks I like to run: a red/white aggro humans and soldiers, a green-white roaring primadox midrange ETB type of thing, and a monoblack vampire control deck.
We’ve done a number of different experiments to help the kids all learn the game, and I’m going to recount them all in posts here on this blog in the coming weeks. We don’t play Standard, or Modern, or EDH or Commander. I guess we play Legacy but not really, because we don’t have any Force of Wills or Dark Confidants or any other serious cards that cost more than $20. Seriously, any time we open up any chase rares, they get set aside so they can get traded out for a TON of cards. But I’ll talk about that in another post, too.
Til then, attack first and cast your spells during your second main phase. Unless, you know, you don’t.
-Tommy