I Weild a Power Greater than The Heart of the Cards!

It's called reading the cards.

That is a common quote from me when it comes to teaching people games and showing them tricks and effects that are a little more obscure than the norm.

So why is this phrase so important? Well the more you know about a game and its mechanics the better you can manipulate them in your favor. Heck even in my own blog I've a perfect example of that. Just take a look at the comments from Circles of Annoyance and you'll see what I mean. In that same tournament I could have won a turn earlier but the rules were not followed exactly so the odd thing crept through there.

Now while this might seem to you like a pointless exersize I have a few examples which I hope will show you the importance of this along with a few tips on how to make things easier on yourself.

Now the most common mistakes that get made are simple misreadings or assuming the card does something different to what it acctually says. Reading and remembering cards is oh so important here.

The World of Warcraft TCG was rife with problems like this, the most common being Chain Lightning effects, where an ability would target 3 targets and deal 3, 2 and 1 damage to them respectively. The biggest problem was that the card this was named for, Chain Lighting, didn't infact work like this. It only required you to choose a single target and then from there the remaining damage was delt without the need to target a single thing. Thus getting round Untargetable things and other such effects.

This also opened up a whole slew of problems and arguements but none so hillarious as when a little draenai ally was printed in March of the Legion. Piana was her name and at first glance her ability is templated exactly the same as every other chain lighting effect that was printed up to that point. So cue players going mentalist and complaining about "that broken alliance ally" because they thought for a single resource you could kill just about anything that hit the board for a long time. Pretty much guarenteeing you a game win. After a few hours of bitching one of the judges finally decided to acctually read the card. The vital word is Heals not Deals damage and so many an angry player was found that day.

Now while people might be chuckling about the stupidity of WoW players many of the people involved in this fiasco were high level magic players and judges who just assumed that the card would work like that, while not the stupidest moment in the games judging history it was pretty bad.

Magic's most common rules assumption is that lands have a colour. http://magiccards.info/od/en/313.html and Centaur Garden were both uncommons from Odyssey which allowed colourless damage and colourless buffing of a creature which was particularly important when the set also contained Iridescent Angel which I used to win the sealed event spoken about previously. I could have won a turn early but after I sacrificed centaur garden I was told that it was green, so I couldn't target the angel with it and lost the card. Ah well, I still won but it shows that even experienced players can forget simple things.

But this can also be used to your advantage, Urza's Rage gained a great deal of fame when it was touted as an unstoppable kill spell, while that's true for the most part there's at least one way around it's damage Delaying Shield, a rare from Odyssey which doesn't prevent the damage being dealt it mearly turns it into delay counters which you can malarky with as you see fit. Cue much yelling when you point this out to someone who's just Banefired you for 10000000000.

Now while I can go on and on about various rules tricks and abuses and the like, and I more than likely will in the near future, it's important to realise that the most successful players know the most about it. Chess masters know all the openings, Go masters know everything there is to know about laddering, cutting, seki and the like, Fighting Game players understand system abuses such as the oh so famous Dust Loop, which allows a skilled enough player to deal an infinate combo to their opponent.

Argueably in life people who understand the rules better than others succeed. If you know how basic human interactions work on a better level than other people you can get ahead, you can predict what the other person wants from you and the easiest way to achieve it. This might sound like some new age horseshit but for the most part it's true, understanding what is required to reach a goal implicitly will make that that much easier.

Just as building a deck around a win condition makes that deck much more efficient or playing a character to their strengths and against the opponents weaknesses makes clinching that important round so much more likely, so the same can be said of life. If you understand your skills and the skills of those around you and how to use them to their greatest effect you will go far further in this world and work towards your goals far easier than all the blood sweat and tears you can shed working against those rules.

I'll be editing up these articles to remove various mistakes and make them prettier in the near future, I'll also be touching on this topic again in the future. Stop by on Sunday where I'll be posting the first part of my world building design articles where I hope to show people the techniques I used to create the world of Bore-Na which will eventually become a complete world for you to use in your games and otherwise.