On Watching Card Games and Understanding Nothing

Lately, a lot of my friends have been playing card games, notably Magic the Gathering. And sometimes they stream their card games, allowing me to watch. Watching these games is quite enjoyable, but I don’t understand any of it.

Weirdly, I am not too bad at learning new games. I mean, I always suck at games in general but I like to think I have some understanding of these things. If I am watching a stream, I’ll soon work out the rules and generally get the gist of a game. Sure, I can’t often replicate streamers’ skills but it’s better than nothing.

Card games though hit differently. I’ve been watching a friend play Magic the Gathering for a bit now, and I am utterly clueless about it all.

Well, not everything. I kinda understand that you need land cards to be able to some spells or powers, some cards are better than others and you win by either killing the other player and getting them to concede one way or another.

But my understanding of what all these cards and stuff do is beyond me. And, of course, friends can only do so much to teach me. My brain is like a sieve when it comes to games, so a lot of this knowledge is brief and I quickly forget.

What REALLY confuses me though is when players concede. Out of all the games I have seen, I have only seen two games where the game was lost because a player reached 0 health. Most of the time, something happens that I don’t understand and someone ends up conceding. It can be my friends conceding or their anonymous other player that concedes. Seriously, I saw someone concede while having 39 health. Why? Well, for once I was given a brief answer: they had run out of creatures. Or something like that.

Either way, I don’t get it. Sometimes I can kinda guess why, but I’m mostly wrong and guessing some more.

I’m not normally that confused and delirious though. I may not have played online card games, but I can follow and understand offline and physical games. After all, Binding of Isaac: Four Souls, I can play that no problem. The Isaac game (as we often call it) is a big complicated mess, but I worked it out.

I guess, if I actually want to be good at these games, I should probably sit down and try to learn them. Because of course I won’t learn much just by watching. But the problem is more that I am not learning anything at all. Things explode and players concede all the time and I am none the wiser.

There is some benefit though to all of this. While I really am not learning anything, I can always just watch the pretty cards. Magic the Gathering’s gameplay may be above my feeble little mind, but at least I get to witness sone absolutely stunning art. Seriously, MtG cards are astounding, as are all the scenes, the play areas, the loading screens… It’s all so damn beautiful.

So, despite knowing nothing about these games, at least they look nice.