I absolutely learned how to play magic with this video. I think I only recently threw out the vhs. My mother learned how to play from it and then she taught me. It was about 6 years before MTG became popular in my town and a local opened up a gaming shop
The weirdest part of Portal to me wasn’t the limited ruleset, it was that they actively added or changed some terminology. Why would they call blocking “intercepting?” Why do that? How does that help someone learn the game?
I can understand removing instants and limiting when cards can be activated at least a little bit (even if I think it was a mistake, because they ended up having to add a few bizarrely-worded cards to fill the gap), but renaming blocking was this bizarre head-scratching thing that would do nothing but cause confusion for Portal players when they tried to move on to the main game.
This is how I learned to play Magic. A bunch of my friends had some cards and I thought the art and general idea of this fantasy card game was amazing. I ended up buying the starter box from a 7-Eleven of all places. If I remember correctly it had a simple computer game along with this video played that actually taught you how to play and walked you through a game or two before letting you battle on your own?
Here I am looking at magic so entirely differently. Loved this video and also the Trained Orrg Comercial that aired around the same time on TV.
I learned to play from this video as well (along with the guided game on the cd that was basically you playing this exact sequence). When I teach people Magic I generally try to follow this game (with newer but similar cards), as I think it actually does a great job of teaching the basics and a bit of strategy. Obviously you have to branch out into things like instants and artifacts, but for a foundation, this video does it very well.
i had this starter pack when i was a kid. This is what got me into magic around 2002. I remeber being grounded for a whole summer with my brother and we played the hell out of those starter decks. I still have the big ass trained orc card that came with the box.
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