Magic the Gathering

Magic the Gathering is a card game that I play once in a while with some friends of mine. It's a game of creatures and spells with a goal of defeating the other player's life points. This game has been around for a long time and it continues to produce new cards, rules, etc. This game is always evolving which makes me think it's going to last for a long time.

Something that I found interesting about the game can be found within the cards. Each card has an ability that you can cast against your opponent and the wording of that ability is very unique. For example, a card might say "target opponent loses 3 life" and another might say "at the end of your opponent's turn, cast this spell for 3 mana to draw a card," etc. In order to fully understand Magic and the cards that come with it, you have to be able to read the wording of each card carefully and interpret it correctly. Some of the cards have vague instructions and it comes down to the player to fit that into the game. An annoying one that I run into frequently is when someone's card lets them activate an ability at the end of an opponent's turn. My friend Ethan would do this to me a lot where I would say "my turn is done" and he would respond with "before your turn ended, I activated this card" which technically wasn't true because he had said that after I had already declared that my turn was done so he couldn't have done that, but because Magic plays off the cards and happens instantly, it really becomes an after thought or rather explanation of what had happened.

It's kind of confusing, but the language that Magic uses is very specific and you have to be familiar with that in order to understand what's going on in the game. In a way, the text on these cards serve as its own genre which is pretty neat but also pretty darn annoying.