Religious views of Magic the Gathering--PLEASE HELP!

As Crashfrog's Magic: The Spending comment emphasizes its a commercial game distributed world wide. They are pretty good at keeping the images within bounds. They've had to put alternative illustrations on some Chinese cards due to a restriction against depicting skeletons! I don't know what that is about but someone asked about it on the website and that was the answer.I worked with someone who didn't participate in Halloween activities and it wasn't because they disapproved of sugar. I know it was religious grounds. I don't even know what her religion was. I got along with her real well, I liked her and she had a great sense of humor. She didn't try to stop anyone else from doing the Halloween stuff but did state she couldn't take part. I had no problem with that at all. It was easy enough to work around and I respected her but she also respected those of us who just do Halloween for fun.Hmmm, I'm glad I remembered that. I think I will use it as an example tomorrow.lfen

I was talking to my class about 18th century Deism, and why they don't allow prayer in schools.One said, "but they allow Harry Potter!"Demon worship!A college class.

Well, if I can get out 3 cards in my cleric deck I can get as much life as I want, like in the billions, so go ahead and fireball me for 100, a 1000 even. I'll just laugh like a madman! :-Plfen

I think the direct connection is between these games and geekery but I'm kinda geeky and I like geeky kids. And in the one case that has happened I've respected their wishes and it was no problem.lfen

A child was incensed when a parent who was helping out at the school told her she shouldn't be reading Harry Potter. This girl's mother was a Ph.D. in hard science and was Jewish, I don't know how religious, but she certainly kept well informed about her daughter and supervised her. Her child wouldn't be reading Harry Potter if she disapproved. The child told me that she didn't think that parent should have told her that and I agreed.I don't know if Harry Potter is regarded any different from LOTR. I don't really understand this. I think I was wondering if there was some preacher, or movement that was drumming up emotion against this mainly as a way to get attention or money or something. But then my nieces played Magic sometimes with me and read and watched Harry Potter.lfen

IIRC the connection is that Richard Garfield Ph.D. the mathamatician who designed Magic was trying to sell another game. The owner of the company told him he was looking for a game that wouldn't take long to play that D&D players could play on breaks between the longer scenarios, something like that.Magic and D&D are very different kinds of games. I think you might actually like Magic but that is sheer projection on my part. I like it so I think almost everyone would like it, so I'm mostly wrong, but occasionally right. Anyway, I think of Magic as improvising virtual Rube Goldberg operations from a randomized set of parts. The game is really logical and mathamatical operations dressed up as creatures and spells, but I find the game visually as well as intellectually appealing.lfenABE: IIRC Garfield was inspired by Cosmic Encounter, a space conquest board game that had a simple play that was made interesting because each player chose a unique alien type and each alien type could break or get around one rule of the game. For example normally you couldn't see another player's hand, but one type of alien had telepathy so they could look at an opponents hand. Magic has that same thing where individual cards can over ride game rules. Cosmic Encounter was a fun quickly played game also.This message has been edited by lfen, 06-16-2005 11:57 PM

i once saw a deck that dealt infinite damage. it was rather impressive. had something to do with enduring renewal, aluren, and some creature you sacrificed to deal damage. might challenge a cleric deck pretty well, unless you can gain infinite life.i've also seen a deck that simply cards the opponent, by forcing them to go again and again, but never be able to actually do anything. i think that one was kismet, statis, and chonatogs. (i think i actually have a kismet and stasis somewhere. but no chronatogs.)although, the most simply ludacrous deck i have ever seen was that squirrel deck. that was insane. somehow, this guy got out a ton of squirrels (and i mean like hundreds, mostly tokens) and one of those coat of arms. that was right around the time i stopped playing magic.

---

אָרַח

you know, i didn't even catch that the first time. as a former magic player, that's pretty darned funny.

---

אָרַח

I never played the game or D&D, so not much help for you, but from reading the posts the game sounds interesting. I'm looking for a family game that will help my nephew (5th grade) with reading and math.I noticed several posts talking of different decks. Is there a base deck to start with? Is there a limit on the group size? I'd like to check it out.Thanks

---

"The average man does not know what to do with this life, yet wants another one which lasts forever." --Anatole France

Bah I'll own you all with my black-red-blue control/permission deck.But then I stopped playing when 8th Edition came out and all the cards looked like Yu-Gi-Oh.

I don't mean to bust anybody's balls about it - I've played it for years now, but I'm not very good, and I usually got my ass beat by people who had blown 200 dollars on rares to put in their deck. I mean I had heard of people who were so good at deckbuilding they could stomp with nothing but commons, but I never saw it in person.But I don't play to win, really. My deck is constructed so that I have a good time losing.

Magic: The Gathering offers several starter decks, but these quickly become underpowered compared to the decks people are putting together on their own. You wind up needing about 1000 cards from "booster packs" (sold like baseball cards in little packs of 15 - 12 commons, 2 uncommons, and one rare) in order to construct a couple 60-card decks.Starting from scratch it can be an expensive game to get into. Sometimes you can buy people's card collections on eBay, or local game stores will have bins of opened cards you can pick through ("commons piles") for like a nickel a card.Traditionally it's a 1-on-1 game but variants exist that allow for 2-on-2, or a kind of round-robin "star magic" for odd-numbered groups.If you can find the sort of store where you live that carries things like Magic, Dungeons and Dragons and other RPG's, and things like Cheapass Games and James Ernest games, the clerk there will be able to point you to games that might be more suitable for family play, or more rewarding for such a disparity in age. Magic is definately a game that rewards rules lawyering, and players almost have to develop an impressive, detailed mental encyclopedia of card-rule interactions. (Here's what I'm talking about - the rules of the game are so complicated that they can only include an approximation of the rules in the retail cards. The actual rules are a 400k download here.)Your nephew may already be playing something like Yu-Gi-Oh, which is sort of like Magic with way simpler rules. It's pretty popular among the kids their age.

quote:

---

fundamentalists as a whole are very wary of temptation. they seem to avoid it at all costs. and something with pictures of beasts and demons and ghouls doesn't really seem like anything BUT temptation to idolatry to them.

---

I guess they will be "saving" their children and themselves from all art museums, too.

quote:

---

Old-fashioned occultic practices such as astrology, Ouija board, seances, tarot cards, are more obvious.

---

You do know that Ouija boards work via the ideomotor effect, right? linklink to info

MTG, much like music, is amoral IMO. The decision to delve into witchcraft or the ocult can come from any outside source. One reformed witch said he got into it from watching the old TV show Bewitched.Now, the game would be more appealing to I-see-demons-behind-every-tree people if the phraseology were different. But the rules behind the game are excellently thought out (pays to be a mathematician), the strategy in deck building and execution is the best of any game, and its fun.Too much money though. I played from Urza's Block to Marqadian Masques Block.

---

"Some say freedom is free...but I beg to disagree. Some say freedom is won, through the barrel of a gun..."
-Army Cadence"A good plan executed today is better than a perfect plan executed at some indefinite point in the future."
- General George Patton Jr No webpage found at provided URL: www.1st-vets.us