Interacting with Magic The Gathering

Name: Magic the Gathering
Genre: Trading Card Game
Rating: 13+
Original Creator: Richard Garfield
Publisher: Wizards of the Coast

Magic the Gathering is interesting with its player interaction because there is no one way to interact with the game. Each player has to build a different deck for each game type because the way the players interact with each other is so drastically different in each one. If a standard deck designed for one on one play were to be used in a multiplayer match then they would probably lose because they simply couldn't deal with more than one threat at a time. A deck designed mainly for multiplayer however would get thrashed in a one on one match by just about any deck designed for that simply because multiplayer decks are designed with a certain degree of the no one wants to be the aggressor mentality. In a one on one match this does not matter because the sole goal is to make the person sitting across from you lose, not to survive long enough to win.

Standard

All standard matches revolve solely around player vs. player matches so the decks are usually designed to be as aggressive as early as is humanly possible. This means matches are usually over within ten turns for each player unless they are very evenly matched decks or they are both extremely slow decks. Typically however standard decks are one of two things incredibly aggressive or based around letting your opponent sit there and do nothing ever, those ones are called control decks.

Multiplayer

Multiplayer decks usually have entirely different goals because this game type is based around multilateral competition. In this game type people tend to play the long game by either getting into a strong enough board state that nobody can do anything about them at that point or eliminating those they find most threatening while convincing the other players to not turn on them. That last bit usually requires a bit of smooth talking because nobody wishes to look like the aggressor but at some point there needs to be somebody who loses.