Hey, Christmas is next Wednesday! And even if you don’t celebrate Christmas, it’s still a nice time to get somebody you love a present. Me, I pride myself on being able to buy really good gifts for my friends and family—but this year I’ve been so busy with my new job that I haven’t been able to devote as much time as I would like to coming up with cool gift ideas.
So, to help out you 40-card fanatics, here are my top five holiday gifts for the Limited player in your life.
1. Magic Online tickets—$50
If you don’t know by now, Magic Online—despite its troubles—is the best thing to happen to Limited players since sliced drafting. No more do you have to worry about hosting a game, finding eight players, getting everyone there on time, and so on. (Hitting your local game store on FNM or another drafting night is of course an easier option, but it’s not always Friday night.) With Magic Online you can literally hop into a draft, in a variety of formats, at any time. But with great power comes great—cost. Unless you are a Magic superstar, you are going to burn through a serious amount of tickets, which (along with packs) serve as the standard entry fee for a Magic Online draft. It costs 14 tickets to play (or three packs and two tix), which basically translates to $14. So do the Limited player in your life a favor and gift them an AmEx gift card from $50 on up, which they can then use to buy tix on MTGO. $50 is three free drafts, with eight tix left over!
2. A Chessex D6 dice set—$8.42
When you first get into Magic, often you’ll buy a Fat Pack or two and end up with a few of those spindown twenty-sided dice that they make for each set. While these are cool and commemorative (and you can also sell them back to StarCityGames for more than you might imagine, especially if they are older—check it out on their buylist here), these are not the kind of dice you want to use for tournament-level Limited games (or really anything other than jamming kitchen-table games with your buddy). No, what you want is a Chessex dice brick, which comes with 36 tiny D6s. You can use them for everything: rolling to see who goes first, putting counters on creatures, putting one on top of your library to remind yourself of upkeep triggers—and, in an innovation that a friend of mine came up with (Nick Forker or Dominic, I can’t remember exactly who—sorry boys!), for trading, kind of like soccer jerseys! I started off with an all-uniform set of Chessex in this color, but over time I’ve traded these dice one for one, in other colors, with players I meet at GPs, FNMs, and so on. Kind of a fun tradition.
3. An Ultra-Pro Pro-Dual deck box—$8.89
This has become my go-to deck box, for the simple reason that it holds everything I’m going to need at a Limited GP or PTQ. The box sort of folds or clamshells open, revealing two card containers. In one, I keep 12 of each land along with my Hipsters of the Coast business cards and a collection of hotel key cards (which I use for tokens), along with my off-color sideboard cards. In the other, I keep my sleeved-up Limited deck, as well as my sleeved-up on-color sideboard cards. That way, when you get deck-checked, you can very simply hand over the whole box to a judge, and not worry about whether any stray cards from outside of your pool have gotten mixed up in there, which can easily happen if, say, you have a larger deckbox, like a Fat Pack box (which I used to use). And this model in particular just looks dope, with art from the Modern Masters version of City of Brass. It even comes with 80 City of Brass sleeves! Buy it now, though, because A) they only seem to have two left of this edition, and B) it’s a steal at $9—I think I originally bought mine at GP Vegas for like $18, after I saw and admired Dave “I’m Sorry Dave, I’m Afraid I Can’t Do That” McCoy’s own deckbox. (Sorry for copycatting, Dave.) But anyway, if you can’t find the Modern Masters deckbox, Ultra-Pro makes a bunch of other versions of their Pro-Dual box; you can’t find them on Amazon.
4. Booster packs!—$3 and (way) up
The great thing about Limited is that you don’t really need anything to play: You can turn up at any FNM with nothing at all your pockets but cash, draft a deck, grab some lands, shuffle up (riffle shuffling, of course), and play. The *other* great thing about Limited is that you don’t have to restrict yourself to eight-person drafts: There are tons of other ways to play, such as a six-person team draft, two-person Winston or Rochester drafts, or, hell, even Mini Masters, with any number of players. But to play any of these you are going to need spare booster packs. And there is nothing sweeter to a die-hard Limited player than having a stock of boosters. I never just crack packs for cards, so I’ve always got a bunch of packs sitting around, waiting to revive an old Limited format or even mix it up for a super-fun wacky draft. But the newer Limited player, or the player who has the bad habit of pack-cracking, may not have that stock. So delve into your collection or check out your local game store or an online retailer—Card Kingdom is a good one—and gift your buddy a draft set (three packs) or even a whole draft set, aka eight times three packs! For instance, a mixed set of eight Return to Ravnica, eight Gatecrash, and eight Dragon’s Maze makes for a ready-made eight-person full-block RTR draft.
5. Modern Masters booster box—$248
This, friends, is the Limited grail: Modern Masters, which in many people’s opinion is the single best Limited format in recent memory, outside of maybe triple Innistrad. With awesome and varied archetypes spanning Magic’s (recent-ish) history, from Faeries to Storm, you can do tons of fun and broken stuff in MMA draft. And, with a foil in each pack and high-value cards like Tarmogoyf and Dark Confidant floating around as well, it makes pack one, pick one all the more exciting. Sure, these boxes are pricey, but they are only going to get more expensive over time, so gift one to your friend now, while the price is still semi-reasonable (at 24 packs in the box, each pack works out to $10.33)—just make sure you’ll be guaranteed a seat whenever your buddy decides to fire off this draft.
Merry Christmas and happy new year, everybody! May all your packs two and three contain on-color bombs; may your Limited GP sealed pools contain zero dual lands and no copies of Pyxis of Pandemonium, and may you win all your win-and-ins!
23/17 is a Hipsters of the Coast column focused on Limited play—primarily draft and sealed, but also cubing, 2HG, and anything else we can come up with. The name refers to the “Golden Ratio” of a Limited deck: 23 spells and 17 lands. Follow Hunter at @hrslaton.