Enter: OCTGN. OCTGN -an acronym for Online Card and Tabletop Gaming Network- is a tremendously popular alternative to the Official (but costly) Magic Online game. Why is it so popular? Good question. One of the biggest things is that its free and safe, on all fronts. And it isn't just for Magic players. It has a plethora of Game Definitions (available game you can play) including WoW TCG, Warhammer 40K, HeroClix, and others. The sets and equipment needed are free as well, and you can find the downloads to each individual set in the official forums. Please note that if you plan on downloading them all, you'll want a Download Manager, like the Firefox add-on DownThemAll! The only drawback to this kind of program is that running it on anything but a Windows box is a little tricky. The Ubuntu layer-converter Wine doesn't accept it, so you need a OS Emulator, which in itself can be troublesome. But the better news is that thanks to hard work and efforts of some new members of the community, you no longer need a VPN client like Hamachi (or the Linux GUI front-end Haguichi) to network with people in the IRC channel (Which by the way is on irc.ircstorm.net, channel name #OCTGN). OCTGN now has a lobby that you can use to host or join games without the need for extraneous software. Of course this is a recent development, and there are still people such as myself who simply prefer the interaction of networking for the pure purpose of gaming.
Now, this brings me to my second point. Remember how I said that getting the program to work in a non-DOS environment could frankly be a real bitch to do? Well, for the same reason I seemingly abandoned my post [pun intended] I recently had to do just that. Hence my swap to the new Lobby system. After several days of fragmented efforts in my spare moments, I finally was able to get up and get a game going. Oh boy! All those hours wasted toiling for a pass-time I loved finally coming to fruition! I get on my box, open it up, make sure my deck files are there, make some last minute changes, and off to the races! I host a new game entitled simply "Standard". I see another game labeled "Competitive Legacy: please know how to play" close. The same guy who was hosting joins my game. I accept and we start. Now, as I'm playing inside an imaginary computer inside a real computer, theres a bit of lag. And he's pretty much going through the motions as fast as he can after I tell him this. Fine, he probably doesn't know. We start playing. Over the course of the match, several incidents arise. Time and time again I explain that it takes a couple seconds for things to appear correctly. Every 3 or 4 seconds he tells me what just happened, how much life I lose, or why something does or doesn't resolve. After he starts getting upset because I haven't tapped my Drowned Catacombs yet, I concede and leave the match, disgusted and not wanting anything more to do with the game I labored so hard to get up and running for the rest of the night. Not because his deck was obviously better than mine, or because he may have known more or been quicker to spot things than I, but because regardless, he wanted to let me know he knew this. He wanted to be a elitist. Now, this could just be a troll, and I kinda hope it is, because generally people playing online already know and love Magic. They're there for a reason. You can expect people to expect it once in a while. But if I where a new player, I would have already gone to do something else, not talk about it more. And this is a big problem.
So many people stop doing something because their initial experience with it was less than suboptimal. People like this drive new players away. People who play to win and let you know they're better than you for it. Please, don't be that person. Few are intentionally, but it happens. I ask everyone to consciously make an effort to be constructive, not critical. If the game stops being fun, no one will play it.
