Table of contents
Open Table of contents
Two games, one weekly habit
Pokémon TCG judging gets its own post. This one is about the two games I actually play, at a table, trying to win: Riftbound and Magic: The Gathering.
They scratch different itches, and lining them up side by side says more about what keeps a competitive card game interesting than either one does alone.
Riftbound, right now
Riftbound is my main competitive focus at the moment. I pilot Vex, the Gloomist as my main deck, and I’m in it every week — Nexus Nights on the weekly cadence, the monthly Skirmishes on top of that. Results have been consistently good; I’m not going to dress that up with a specific finish, because the part that actually matters to me isn’t the record, it’s that the format is new enough that there’s still real room to find something before everyone else does.
That’s the appeal of a game early in its life. The solved lines aren’t solved yet. A deck like Vex rewards reading the board rather than executing a script, and the weekly event structure means you get to test an idea, lose to the thing you didn’t account for, and come back the next week having actually learned something.
Magic: three formats, one throughline
Magic is the longer story, because I’ve played it across three very different stretches, and each one taught me something about what makes a format worth sticking with.
Standard, and the rotation problem
I played Standard from around 2018 to 2020. It’s the most accessible on-ramp Magic has, and for a while it worked for me. What eventually pushed me off it wasn’t the games — it was the maintenance. The card pool rotates, the meta rotates with it, and keeping a competitive deck current means re-learning the format every few months whether you want to or not. That’s a reasonable trade for some players. For me it stopped being worth it; I wanted the hours I put in to compound, not reset on a schedule.
cEDH, during the pandemic
Around the pandemic I found cEDH — Competitive Elder Dragon Highlander, the tournament-minded end of the Commander format. No rotation, a huge card pool, and a deckbuilding puzzle instead of a ladder to climb. I was active enough in the scene to publish decks in the cEDH deck database, and the one I’m still happiest with is a Jeskai (white/blue/red) list called Jeskai Turbo Duck, commanded by Kykar, Wind’s Fury. Building it was the actual draw — stacking a combo line out of a 99-card singleton pool is a different kind of problem than sideboarding against a known metagame, and it’s the part of Magic I enjoyed most during that stretch.
I’ve since laid low on EDH. It’s not a format I actively compete in anymore, but it’s the one that taught me deckbuilding is its own competitive skill, separate from piloting.
Pauper, now
These days Pauper is my main format, with a bit of cEDH still on the side. Pauper is commons-only, which sounds like a restriction and plays like the opposite: a huge, slow-moving card pool with almost no rotation pressure, so a deck you build stays relevant for a long time rather than aging out on the next set’s release. It’s the thing Standard never gave me — a genuinely competitive 60-card format where the hours put in actually compound.
What the throughline actually is
Put the three stretches of Magic next to Riftbound and a pattern shows up that isn’t really about either game specifically. Standard burned me out on rotation. cEDH held my interest through deckbuilding creativity even without a traditional competitive ladder. Pauper works because it has both — low rotation and a real competitive scene. And Riftbound works right now for the opposite reason cEDH did: it’s new enough that the deckbuilding puzzle and the competitive ladder are the same puzzle, because nobody’s solved it yet.
What keeps a card game interesting long-term, at least for me, isn’t the theme or the card pool size on its own. It’s some combination of format stability, room for deckbuilding creativity, and a scene with enough regular events to actually test ideas against. Different games hit that combination at different points in their life, and it’s worth noticing which one you’re actually chasing before you decide a format isn’t for you.
There’s a board game shelf too
Riftbound and Magic are the competitive side of it. Outside of that, there’s a regular playgroup here in Laguna, and a shelf that covers a pretty wide range on purpose.
On the light end there’s party stuff — Ding!, Flip 7, That’s Not a Hat — the games that work when the group is bigger or newer to the table and the goal is just a good night. On the heavier end there’s Hegemony, Andromeda’s Edge, Root, and Dune Imperium, which is the one I’d currently call my favourite — it layers deckbuilding on top of worker placement in a way that keeps paying off the more you play it, which is the same thing that keeps pulling me back to Pauper and cEDH for different reasons.
The co-op we keep coming back to is Bomb Busters, working through its campaign one level at a time — we’re at level 29 now. It’s a different kind of game night than the competitive stuff: the table’s working with each other instead of against, and the campaign structure means a session builds on the last one instead of resetting.