The King of Munch, Emperor of So Asbena, has Deigned to act in character for some of these threads before!!

Unfortunatly they got deleted after the games were over.

  M:TG player-characters (we used to call them 'Planeswalkers' but that means something slightly different now) don't use DnD spellbooks.  They just stuff all their spell patterns (composed of 'threads' of magical energy) into an extradimensional matrix.  (Each Planeswalker has one of these and it's part of what makes them speical.)
  Unfortunately, these extradimensional matrices are extraordinarily difficult to keep organized, so it's kind of pot-luck what you manage to pull out.  Lands are a bit different (but get stored in your matrix as well), as they represent the various planes you've visited and established a mystical connection to.  These connections provide the energy needed to weave those spell threads into a summoning spell or fireball or a cool chalice that lets you take a peek at your opponent's matrix.

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  Spells don't require 30 minutes to cast.  It might take that long to play out, but a six-second round of DnD or 1 second of GURPS might take an hour to play out sometimes.  It's just a disparity in the temporal continuities of the planes that prevents us from viewing their actions in "real" time.
  Some spells are slower to cast than others (non-instants vs. instants), but the main things that require you to wait on the other 'player' are waiting for your mana connections (land) to recharge and waiting to see what his reaction to your spells and attacks are so that you can interfere with them.
  Traveling from plane to plane and in between doesn't allow you to carry around guns and swords - and a gun or sword would largely be like carrying around a banana for a powerful entity of that sort anyway.  It would be like Godzilla carrying a flyswatter.  Not only is it not nearly as effective as your spells, all the other casters would make fun of you and you'd lose prestige and never win that M:TG Badass PC of the Year Award that is so coveted.
  In addition, the creatures you summon often have such weapons and they don't instantly kill your opponent.  Why?  Because when you hit him, you're not hitting HIM, you're hitting the mystical barriers that protect him.  You start off with 20 such barriers (each one capable of absorbing a blow that would slay a normal man).  20 seems to be the optimum number of barriers to maintain while traveling in order to provide significant protection yet still allow easy passage through inter-dimensional Customs without suffering from a full body-cavity search.

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Tapping a land does not take all the life force of that plane, or else you wouldn't be able to draw upon it again next turn.  Tapping a land just draws on a tiny portion of that planes power, however it is still such a huge amount of energy that your connection to that plane requires a few moments to recover before you can use it again.  Even lands that you sacrifice to use don't draw out all the energy of the plane, it just severs your connection to that plane temporarily and stores that connection in the 'graveyard' (the other, more difficult to access storage matrix that M:TGers have... it's where 'used' patterns go until you have a chance to recycle them back into your 'library' matrix since it's a bit more tricky to stuff patterns back into there).

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Attacking creatures don't necessarily represent a single swing of their sword.  It might represent a charge, or flurry of swift blows or claw/claw/bite or whatever.  It depends on the creature.  I'm sure that for some of them (giant stone colossi, for instance) it represents one big, slow attack.

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See?  You can rationalize any game mechanic if you try hard enough...

Unless you have an ACTUAL Spellbook...

http://magiccards.info/10e/en/343.html



Where did you get that one?




More like "he's tough enough to take 20 kill shots from knights with guns and swords. I'd do much MORE damage ripping his soul out with black magic or summoning bigger and tougher things to hit him with."



Several. Planeswalkers are just too tough to be killed by them.



Tell it to Espelth or Araji.

http://magiccards.info/som/en/6.html
http://magiccards.info/m11/en/1.html

Heck Gideon's got wolverine-Claw blades or something.

http://magiccards.info/m12/en/16.html

And that's just the White guys.



Well yeah, that's why the ones with "Immune to summoning sickness" have such an awesome power. :p

Which, unlike a DnD spellbook, does not allow you to start with all your spells right in front of you.  It only allows you to organize more than seven at a time.


None of them are actual M:TG players.  They are planeswalkers USED by M:TG players.  We're talking about the players themselves.  I specifically eliminated "Planeswalkers" from my rationalization.



Which says nothing about sugar's misguided (in my opinion) notion that each round is 30 minutes and each attack by a creature represents a single 'swing of the sword.'

Well I assumed that those were just supposed to be OTHER Planeswalkers you were calling in favors from or something; but conceptually they were the same power-level as you, they just were sticking to a theme with their spells or something.

The old explanation of summoning sickness was pretty much, "Dude, if you just got ripped from your plane of existence into the middle of a battlefield, it would take you a few moments to figure out what was going on, wouldn't it? How about if you were at the dinner table and someone teleported you without even asking by your leave?"

Or on the john, for that matter.  At least let me wipe first...

Hey, if they get their own deck, their own 20 starting life, their own hand of cards and their own turn to cast spells and attack, then I'll count em.  Otherwise they is just another fancy critter at my beck and call.

Oh they've GOT 20 life and their own deck, they just don't want to waste it putzing around with you. :p

Wow.  Making it personal, are we?

I wish I could find where it was said, but there was an article on Magic's website where they explored what the Planeswalker card type was in game. Essentially, you aren't really summoning another Planeswalker, you're just calling in a favor that Planeswalker owes you. And in response they send a simulacrum of themselves to help you. Obviously, the simulacrum isn't as powerful as the true Planeswalker, but they aid you by casting a spell each time you can act, until they run out of energy.

Right. Just a fancy creature, effectively.  Now, if it allowed me (Lord of the Pit) to call you (Jsalt) to come over and team up on someone (say, The MunchKING) in a duel, then that would be a different story.

Well that was supposed to be "You" (plural) to refer to all magic players who use them, not "you" (singular) to refer to Lord of the Pit.

In reply to The MunchKING (msg # 963):

Oh, well that's a unicorn of a different mana source then.

I'm going to be the one to post the 1000th post on this OOC thread, and I will go down in history as SugarRush the Reaper, SugarRush the Destroyer, SugarRush the End!


Yeah, it could be anything. A question is what the varying strengths mean, weapon quality? 1 is like fists or something.
Another thing is, that Llanowar Elves have only 1 strength, yet in the nice illustration they're holding majestic bows, and that there are multiple Llanowar Elves.

Why is a group of elves from a forest called Llanowar able to be taken out by a single Squire, is that what you're asking? Especially when the art shows them with bows, and the Squire has only a sword that he is giving to someone else (by the angle of the image, you)?

Why do Knights move in weird L shaped patterns in chess? Because they do. We're playing a game, one rooted in fantasy lore to be sure, but it is a game. And games have rules. And sometimes, those rules cause weird things to happen. For example, during the early days of the original Mirrodin block I was amused by equipping a Dross Crocodile with three different scimitars. And I couldn't explain how it could hold them all. But it works.

I think we just need a variant on the MST3K mantra here. "Just repeat to yourself it's just a show game, I should really just relax."

It's just for fun. We could go on forever about the unrealisms of a game, but it's all in fun. If we tried to make a game as realistic as possible, then it wouldn't be a game.

In other news, chess pieces move the way they do because one day, there was a door to door salesman. The king opened the door.
"What are you doing here, my majesty?" he asks.
The king cursed off the guy, "Smörgåstårta!", and slammed the door in his face. The salesman was angry. So he began plotting his revenge. It took him 8 decades, but when the king was about to die, the salesman gave him a free sample of a mysterious liquid.
"Try some, my king."
The king, following the generalization that kings are greedy, drank it because it was free. The liquid was a paralyzing agent that made him move ever so slowly.
To his pawns, he gave to them very, very, very, very, very heavy swords. That forced them to move ever so slowly, and they can only swing it to the left and to the right, not overhead swings.
To his rookies, he made them cyborgs. They can only turn 90 degrees now.
To his bishops, he made them cyborgs, then turned them 45 degrees a bit. They can only turn 90 degrees now.
To his queen, he... did nothing.
To his knights, he... did nothing.

The moral of the story is that smörgåstårta means sandwich cake. Another morale to be taken from this story is that auto correct thinks that it should be spelt StairMaster.

One in each fore-leg and one in its mouth of course!

In reply to The MunchKING (msg # 968):

Funny. My friend and I talked about it at the time. We concluded one in the mouth, one with the tail, and the last one floating alongside. It was a Dancing Scimitar, after all.

That works too...

Of course, since the thread is becoming full, it is my intention to start a new OOC thread just before we get to 1000...  :-)

I'm sorry for not posting, but my friend and I are in the ER at Presbyterian Hospital in Pgh.  She's actually out of sight receiving tests right now to determine her fate, Lower bowel problems, really lousy but not deadly.  Its been ongoing for the past 30 hours but there was nobody available to watch my friend's 4 yr old son if she was admitted until his Dad returned home earlier today. Its anxiety provoking!

Thanks for letting us know Jeff - best wishes for a speedy recovery to your friend.

Best wishes to her, Jeff.

Well it's good that it shouldn't be fatal, but I'm guessing ANY kind of bowel problems bad enough to need a doctor really suck. All The MunchKING's best wishes to her.