"There is Magic in Everything"

For a MtG fan like me, whose life revolves mostly around the cardboard crack that WotC (owned by Hasbro) produces, it shouldn't come as a surprise when I say this prompt leads me to provide Magic cards as prize support. I'm sure a good lot of you are fellow MtG fans too, eh? I mean, Magic truly pervades almost everything in my life, from eating, sleeping, random conversations, and even at one point, making love[1], and even reading and writing. Now, it invades ponies, more so than ever.

Now, it happens that the Uncle of Machines, in his bid for more power and will to show off financial power, has pre-bought a whole booster box case of Khans of Tarkir, set to be released Sept. 26. Now, that's a crapton of booster packs to work with, and I'm feeling rather generous. Lovely lovely.

-1st place: Any fetch land from Khans of Tarkir of the winner's choosing and four packs of Khans of Tarkir.

Personally, I have at least one of each fetch land from Onslaught (the Khans ones are reprints), and am rather lucky when it comes to opening packs, so I'm confident that I can pull enough to make play sets for myself, with enough for spare. Watch as I'm proven wrong and throw a bitch fit when the winner calls Polluted Delta and I found out I only have four :S

Value of fetch lands are upwards of $50, so you want to write yourself into first. I am expecting first to be truly exciting!

-2nd place: a Sliver Hivelord and three packs of Khans of Tarkir.

-3rd place: a Master of Feasts and two packs of Khans of Tarkir.

-4th place: a Stormfront Pegasus and a Stab Wound (possibly foil if I can find them) and one pack of Khans of Tarkir.

Stories from the Front is my fave pony tumblr and now you can pretend to play Rainbow Factory with Storm Front[2]. What? You don't want to know how many times I saw that happen to the Pegasus in Ravnica events. It was hilarious every time and it proves there's magic in pegasi.

Dead Last: a Squee, Goblin Nabob[3]

yamgoth's Choice: I'm feeling this prompt will produce stories of morals and hopefulness. I dunno. Whichever story does these successfully gets this.

(Note to self: think up good relevant Magic card to represent this, possibly an angel(?) No, jamming an Elspeth here is the easy way out we should talk FoME)

Can overlap with other prizes.

And if you don't play Magic, well, in most cases here, you have an expensive collectables which you can sell. Or give to a friend who plays Magic. Or better yet, get into the game! ^_~

Please post suggestions in the comments. Oh? And plug this if you can to drum up some competition. I'm running very late with this and any help would be greatly appreciated.

Prizes may change, depending on feedback and whatnot.

Prizes will be sent out shortly after Khans of Tarkir's release.

Prize support next time: spooky goth crap. (Haloween! ^.^)

[1] Strip Magic :D Don't bother playing while you're doing stuff, though. It gets thrown on the wayside. And you're truly a geek for trying to do so.

Yes, I am implying you should write lemons and MtG crossovers because edge (jk!)

[2] Yes, this is totally a plug for Stories from the Front (link is SFW mirror) and it's creator, Sev. I'm nice this way. What? His world building does contain a shitton of magic. Totally relevant.

[3] I want Bad Horse to get this, if he's in this contest. I truly want to call him Squee Horse, for he does squee, and the imagery is so cute when it happens ;) Solution: everybody write better than Bad Horse.

Incentive, yo.

You're a monster.

Seriously. I used to play Magic. The reason I stopped is because the cost of cards went nuts and standard decks went from costing $200 to costing $500.

It wasn't that I couldn't afford it so much as I just didn't care to anymore.

And now you're waving this at me?

You're a monster.

A monster.

wtf is a Khans of Tarkir

3625684
It's the newest Magic: The Gathering expansion, coming out in a couple weeks.

3625329
Have you tried playing Commander? Decks are still $200 to $500, but they don't ever rotate out. (You could build a good one for less, too.)

Barring that, you could draft and use your winnings/drafted rares to pay for future drafts.

3625778
I play(ed) competitively, and I generally find standard/extended to be the most interesting formats precisely because they change so much.

Good on you for sweetening the pot a little! Cute way to tie it into the theme, too. It's cool to see someone loving the writeoffs enough to chip prizes into it twice in a row!

That having been said, I haven't played Magic since Ice Age and don't plan to restart. If When my SUPER AWESOME STORY OF AWESOME wins, I'd feel pretty bad about accepting a prize that I'd just turn around and sell. (Though I guess it'd give me an incentive to unload my old dual lands at the same time.)

3624652
Well, now I'm very glad that I've got the skeleton of the story ready to be fleshed out. Fingers crossed and all that.

3626125 Yeah, I wish I could find a competitive group near me that played Standard. My closest group switched to Modern about a year ago, and it's starting to get a bit stale.

Ah well, games amongst friends are always fun.

Hmm. We appear to have a tie. How are we going to handle this?

3647821
3624652

(linking to the OP to make sure Yamagoth sees this)

While I'm perfectly happy go along with whatever tiebreaker you care to think of, I think it's best and easiest for me to just concede first prize to Fanofmosteverything. Negotiations was my top-ranked story, anyway.

Besides, I don't play Magic; the last time I did was about 15 years ago, and I wasn't serious about it even then. I'm just going to give the cards to my little sister (who does play), and it's not like she's going to know that she could have gotten slightly better cards if her big brother had pushed for it, right? In fact, if these cards are as valuable as all that, maybe I'll sit on them for a few months and make a Christmas present out of them. One less shopping trip for me...

...Anyway. Point is, I'm happy to break the tie in Fan's favor; he's earned it.

3648323
Oh. Well, thanks! For the record, The Sweetest Water was one of my favorite stories. I only rated one higher.

For that matter, you can add the 4th place prize to the pot. :B All I'd do with it is try to sell it.

I'm kinda with 3648666. I'm tickled at the idea of getting a single card as a trophy that I can frame and put up on my wall (though I don't care about its value since I won't be playing with it, so if you want to send me a card that's more appropriate to the story I wrote, even if it's a common, swap that in instead). But, as I already said, I don't need the boosters, none of my local friends play, and I'd feel bad about taking them just to resell them.

Now, if you've got Netrunner cards, on the other hand …

3649005 >Netrunner
That game was my life

3652659
"Was", as in, the 1996 WOTC CCG? Were you aware of the recent Fantasy Flight Games reboot? It's been turned into an LCG instead, which makes me very happy, and the gameplay is almost identical.

3653274 I saw the promo video for that. So much hype.

Probably won't invest much money into it if I can help it though, university and all :V

Well, this turn of events makes things a bit easier for me. I think I'll make it official, assuming no one else wants to be generous. I think we'll need to have a discussion on at least a couple of these.

In first place is FoME, who'll receive four packs of Khans of Tarkir and a fetch land of his choice.

In second place is 3648323 , who'll receive three packs of Khans of Tarkir and a Sliver Hivelord. Thank you for your generosity to FoME, eh?

In third place is 3649005 , who'll receive a card that suits his story. Thank you for your generosity.

Eheh... 3648338 ? Don't suppose you could lend a hand? I'm more of a Spike and the extent of my creativity in Magic is usually crunchwise, like bombs and removal. And shouting memes throughout gameplay (ex. Plays out Zedru, shouts, "America!" in a goat voice.). Uh... don't suppose you could think up something appropriate for me to give to horizon based on his story, please? If it were completely up to me, it'd be Vampire Nighthawks and Lightning Bolts, not completely appropriate.

In fourth is 3648666 , who'll get... uhh... I dunno. Do you like the MLP comics at all, or those black coloured small vinyl mystery figures they have in boxes that are all randomized and stuff? Oh, and thank you for your generosity, too!

Since I have three packs spare, I guess I'll give them to fifth place, who is 3625329 . And I'll throw in a Hasran Ogress as a bit of passive-aggressiveness for a comment he made earlier ;P Questioning if I had voted earlier C_C

On the bright side, just enough packs to squeeze you into a draft. Really, don't say anything or I'll get prolly more pissed (and I have been rather angry the past few days because of this) and send more bad luck tokens, the deal has been altered, pray I do not alter in further yadda yadda yadda... and prolly feel bad about it send good luck tokens in the form of biting the packs. What? One time I won a Magic tourn and was thoroughly ticked off at the whole endeavour that I bit the single M10 pack I won and pulled a Baneslayer Angel from it. It was worth $50 at the time. Still got that one in my Bant deck.

Worth. My bites are lucky. You'll have my dental record. How's that for dox, eh?

For Dead Last, Silent_Strider gets a Squee, Goblin Nabob, who actually isn't useless at all. He's just got a great mix of expendability and indestructability.

I give Bachiavellian yamgoth's choice. "Life is the best gift; the rest is extra." I dunno. *jingles ankh necklace* I really like that from a moral standpoint because sometimes, we as humans can forget this and be ungrateful for such a simple and magical gift as we reduce its value. From a hopefulness aspect, I guess it's implying you can prolly expect a bit extra. Eating good tasty food, making friends, making something out of your life, that sorta thing. I was also rather impressed someone took the time to do parts up in another language.

Zebras could stand to be used a lot more in ponyfic.

The reward for Homecoming is an Urborg, Tomb of Yawgmoth. Somewhat appropriate, considering that in Magic fluff, Yawgmoth was very much the antithesis of magic, his drive for mechanical perfection killing the romantic aspects of magic. With The Father of Machine's death, the plane of Dominaria can recover. Oh, and yeah, "Yawgmoth" is kinda where I derive my username from. Sure.

Edit: And one pack of Khans of Tarkir, too. Almost forgot.

Everybody mentioned gets a Concordia Pegasus and a Stab Wound, because it was hilariously irritating to run into in New Ravnica prereleases, and it was the only pony related MtG thing I could think of at the time.

3655225
Man, Hasran Ogress takes me back to an old suicide black deck I had. Nothing like paying two mana for a 3/2 back in the day when Grizzly Bears set the curve at two mana.

3653274
I... got the basic boxed set of it and was not very impressed with Netrunner, honestly.

Though I have to admit, most games like that have been ruined for me because of Magic, because whenever I play them, I'm like "Man, I could be playing Magic."

I do love me some card games, though, like Dominion and Puzzle Strike, but those are deck building games and are completely different animals.

3655225
I'll go with a Flooded Strand for my fetch land. I have PM'd you my contact information.

As for 3649005's card... Hmm... Fluffwise, the best comparisons would be the Phyrexian corruption of Serra's Realm, Lorwyn becoming Shadowmoor, or the shard of Bant reuniting with the rest of Alara...

I've got it. A symbol of hope wrought to protect those who cannot protect themselves against a new, unexpected development. Even better, it's a pun:

3655225
It's been forever since I had anything to do with MtG, but I was always a big fan of Unglued, and that Fat Ass card is the funniest thing I've ever seen.

3655237
Eh, YMMV. Though Netrunner is very definitely a deck-building game, it's just not randomized in terms of which cards you pull from boosters. The core set is a reasonably cool start, and the asymmetric nature of the game (which it shows off) is one of the big draws, but the real fun of it in my local play group has been the deck construction.

3655225
Yay!

3655452
I support this.

3655923
Netrunner isn't a deckbuilding game, or at least not in the sense I'm talking about (I also listed off something which wasn't a deckbuilding game either - I said Race for the Galaxy, but that isn't an example of one).

When I'm talking about a deckbuilding game, I'm talking about a game wherein the game is literally about building a deck. In dominion, you start out with a deck of 10 cards - 3 victory point cards and 7 coppers. Every turn, you draw five cards, then play them - you have one action per turn, and there are various action cards which have various effects (including letting you draw more cards, have extra money that turn, forcing your opponents to discard cards so they have fewer cards to play on their next turn, stealing cards from other peoples' decks, stacking your own deck, and even, yes, giving you more actions). After you've run out of actions, you can play however much money from your hand and purchase one additional card from the middle (some action cards allow you to purchase more than one card from the middle) with a cost equal to or less than the amount of money you have available. The goal of the game is to get as many victory points worth of cards in your deck as possible by the end of it, but most victory point cards are A) expensive and B) give no benefit in and of themselves, so you have to run a balancing act between getting more money in your deck (you can buy cards which are worth 2 or 3 or even 4 money on their own), getting action cards, and getting victory point cards (some of which grant much more than one victory point) that allow you to win the game. As the cards you buy go into your deck, your deck progressively gets thicker and thicker as the game goes on (usually, though there are also cards which allow you to remove cards from your deck, which makes your deck better because you can eliminate the weaker starting cards and thus only draw the best cards every turn once you've got them) and eventually, once enough cards have been bought from the middle, the game ends and whoever has the most victory points worth of cards in their deck wins.

Thus the game is literally about building a deck. Puzzle Strike is somewhat similar but uses different mechanics to achieve the same general idea. There are other games in the genre as well.

3655588
There's always this:

The DCI, for reference, is the organization in charge of competitive Magic tournaments.

Though admittedly, my favorite card in terms of magic humor is probably:

Some other classics:

And, in the category of "This was an interesting choice for card art:"

For those of you who aren't familiar with old Magic-ese:

Whenever an opponent casts a creature spell that doesn't share a color with a creature you control, counter that spell unless that player pays Variable Colorless, where X is its converted mana cost.

For those of you who aren't familiar with Magic at all:

It is a card which discriminates against creatures on the basis of color.

On a similar note:

Someone at one point shopped a copy of that card and posted it online so that instead it read "Protection from blacks, protection from reds."

Someone then immediately asked them where they'd gotten the card art from.

Wizards of the Coast, which had just commissioned new art for the card for that release then commissioned another set of new card art for it the very next edition.

Prizes received! Many thanks, 3624652!

3648323
3678795
Oh yeah! Forgot to mention that I sent those out last week. A few of you guys have already gotten themWell, except for 3655923 . I've been looking for a Mark of Asylum everywhere and am dead set on giving that to you. It's too epic a thing to pass up XD And I think you forgot to give me your address.

3655237
Not the response I was expecting. Then again, I'm pretty pervy, even while playing Magic, so I guess that kind of reaction is to be expected. I think I've got it to a point where my friends and people I used to play with regularly cringe whenever I drop a Hasran Ogress onto the field. It's funny. Just wish I had the money back then to get some Stone Throwing Devils.

Strong moves, so I didn't bite your packs. Although, my bites are lucky so you might've missed out on something :B

3678946
Ah, Stone-Throwing Devils, another card which got some complaints directed at WotC for being racist, supposedly. I guess someone used it as a slur at some point.

Of course, they also had the cards Jihad and Crusade early on...

3656383

I'm still waiting for my Fblthp planeswalker.

3679244
Well, I did come up with one in a comment for one of Lithl's stories...

Fblthp the Humble WU
Planeswalker — Fblthp
+1: Fblthp the Humble gains hexproof until your next turn.
0: Creatures can't attack Fblthp the Humble until your next turn.
-6: Put all creatures on top of their owners' libraries.
2

3678946

Just got mine today! Thanks again for the generous prize--I know my sister will be thrilled.