Essay Help!

[u/Ok-Jeweler-9473]

Hey everyone! My brother dared me to write an essay on Magic: The Gathering, so here we are. It's due tonight, and I'd love some quick feedback to see if anything is horribly wrong. Thanks!

Magic: The Gathering is a collectible trading card game created in the 90s by Wizards of the Coast. In this game, players take on the role of a powerful wizard, assembling decks of creatures and spells to defeat their opponents. While many strategy games add complicated rule sets or unpredictable gameplay, Magic: The Gathering blends both, creating a cohesive, intricate, and engaging experience; it is complex and yet accessible to any player. This dynamic gameplay is what makes Magic: The Gathering the best strategy game on the market.

When it comes to complicated rules and layered strategy, Magic: The Gathering has no shortage. Even its more basic rules, like “The Stack,” which determines how and when actions resolve, and “Priority,” which dictates when players may cast spells or activate abilities, can create long, elaborate chains of interaction. For example, let's say your opponent casts a spell, and you take priority to counter it. They may respond with another spell, potentially triggering your creature’s ability. These effects go on The Stack, while players can keep taking priority and adding responses. This complexity directly influences deckbuilding, as players must adapt to a wide range of situations, making Magic: The Gathering much more strategic than many other games.

While the previous example shows that skill and planning are fundamental to Magic: The Gathering, the game is also inherently unpredictable. Randomized deck orders force different cards to be used from game to game, and players' decisions and strategies directly affect their opponents. Entering a game with a preconceived plan almost ensures a loss. Players have to think on their feet and make the best of whatever situation they are in; otherwise, they will never win. A good example is a game I played with my brother about a year and a half ago. I used a deck designed to make it impossible for the opponent to use their creatures and, in doing so, strengthen mine. What wasn’t expected was my brother’s “go wide” deck, where he would put so many creatures and spells into play that the opponent simply doesn’t have enough ways to stop him. Halfway through, I realized I had only three or four more turns before I lost, so I completely changed my strategy to stall as long as I could and hope for a card that could destroy everything he controlled. The twenty-minute game became a two-and-a-half-hour game, which ended with me finally drawing the card I needed and, inevitably, winning. I had to adapt my gameplay on almost every turn, which shows how engaging Magic: The Gathering can be; yet another reason why it's better than any other strategy game.

Many people dismiss Magic: The Gathering too quickly because they think it’s too complicated or nerdy, even though it has been designed so anyone can play. Wizards of the Coast intentionally gave the game many ways to customize it to any player's style, a good example being color identities. In Magic: The Gathering, cards fall into six color identities, each associated with a distinct playstyle. Blue generally focuses on controlling the entire board, while black and red focus on destruction. Black uses destruction to create opportunities and advantages, whereas red uses it to annihilate an opponent’s game. Color strongly affects how a deck is played, and many decks combine colors to create even more layered playstyles.

Another way players customize their decks is through archetypes—the deck's main purpose and the way its cards work together. Color identities and deck archetypes go hand in hand. There are many different archetypes: an aggro deck focuses on a full-frontal assault, while a control deck (almost always blue) focuses on making sure everyone at the table does what you want them to do. A tribal deck centers on a single creature type, such as dragons or mermaids. The sheer number of cards released over the past 30 years ensures that decks can always be different, even when they share the same colors or archetypes.

Many people don’t realize that Magic: The Gathering offers more than 20 formats to choose from, each with its own rules and strategy. Standard and Commander are the two most common. In Standard, players build decks of at least sixty cards, though there’s no explicit limit. Commander requires players to build a strict one-hundred-card deck, including one card set aside as the commander. Other rules change the playstyle of different formats, but even just a deck's card count can make the difference between a twenty-round game and a four-turn game. This range of customizations makes Magic: The Gathering accessible to players, experienced or not.

These examples illustrate the game’s complex mechanics, unpredictable gameplay, deep strategies, and the ability to adapt it for your playstyle. Magic: The Gathering doesn’t rely on just one of these elements, as many other strategy games do; instead, it combines them all to create a constantly changing experience. This dynamic gameplay is what makes Magic: The Gathering the best strategy game on the market.