What do you use for tokens?

Thomas David Baker <bakert RemoveThis @gmail.com> sent:
> I'm new to Magic - I played for the first time this week. I started
> with Core 9th Ed. off eBay but now have some Lorwyn theme decks.

> Magic is such a good-looking game with all these illustrated cards in
> meaningful formations on the table.

> Yesterday I played a game with tokens in for the first time.

> Yellow post-it notes with skulls drawn on them in pen really detract
> from the otherwise loveliness of the look of a game-in-progress. I
> don't like it!

> I read a thread on this newsgroup from 2001 when only Unglued! had
> offical tokens with it and no others were being produced. Has that
> changed?

The last few sets have come with extra token cards in them, so there
are printed Elemental Shaman tokens and Elf Warrior tokens and all
that.

> If not I guess some other company must have closed the gap in the
> market. Here are these people spending untold amounts on more and
> more expansion set cards ... surely they have a few pennies spare for
> some nice tokens?

> What do you use? Do you have anything better than coins/beads/paper?
> Can one buy tokens that are just as nice to look at as the cards?

> (Well, that was long-winded but I hope I made my question clear!)

I personally use a little box of blank white cards that I picked up at
a stationery store, the kind you'd use for business cards or little
visitor badges. It's easy to mark which is which using dice or just by
keeping them near the permanent that made them. I sometimes ponder
making some markers for particular types according to the deck, but
never get round to it. The stack of blank card is convenient enough,
and games with large numbers of tokens don't tend to last too long
(except when using my amazing Infernal Genesis deck of doom, of
course.)

--
-- zoe

Thomas David Baker <bakert.TakeThisOut@gmail.com> wrote:
>> The last few sets have come with extra token cards in them, so there
>> are printed Elemental Shaman tokens and Elf Warrior tokens and all
>> that.
>
>Thanks Zoe, that's interesting to know.
>
>Forgive my ignorance, but what is a "set" in this context?

An "expansion set" (or "base set"), to spell it out more fully. Magic gets
released as base sets - we're currently in ... Tenth Edition? I've lost
track ... - that update every two years in the summer and are available for
sale that whole two-year period, and expansion sets, which come in 'smaller'
and 'larger'. The larger ones appear in the fall and are available for a year;
the smaller ones appear in the early spring and mid summer and are available
for several months. Once an expansion or base set is no longer available for
sale from WotC, stores may still have boxes of it but the price tends to go
up, and/or you'd be able to find specific single cards from the set if you
were looking for those.

Zoe's saying that the last few expansions have had some extra cards in the
booster packs/starter decks to represent various kinds of token that that
set's stuff makes.

Lorwyn is a large expansion set; Morningtide, Shadowmoor, and Eveningtide
are small expansion sets (though they did something funky this year, since
usually there's two small sets in a block, not three).

>The Lorwyn theme decks that my friend bought yesterday but had no such
>tokens. Is a set something else?

The 'theme decks' - or preconstructed decks - are not the whole set; they're
made from cards in the set, but they do not between them contain all the cards
the Lorwyn set has. You can buy booster packs or 'tournament packs' - starter
decks - of Lorwyn that contain randomized cards from the set in various
commonalities. If you want to see what-all cards are in Lorwyn, Gatherer
(gatherer.wizards.com) can show them to you...

Dave
--
\/David DeLaney posting from dbd.TakeThisOut@vic.com "It's not the pot that grows the flower
It's not the clock that slows the hour The definition's plain for anyone to see
Love is all it takes to make a family" - R&P. VISUALIZE HAPPYNET VRbeable<BLINK>
http://www.vic.com/~dbd/ - net.legends FAQ & Magic / I WUV you in all CAPS! --K.

> The 'theme decks' - or preconstructed decks - are not the whole set; they're
> made from cards in the set, but they do not between them contain all the cards
> the Lorwyn set has. You can buy booster packs or 'tournament packs' - starter
> decks - of Lorwyn that contain randomized cards from the set in various
> commonalities. If you want to see what-all cards are in Lorwyn, Gatherer
> (gatherer.wizards.com) can show them to you...

Thanks Dave. I get it, I think!

I think I got particularly confused because the best UK online MTG
shop I have found (manaleak.com) doesn't seem to sell the counters
although it sells everything else individually. But there are lots on
ebay.com (though very few on ebay.co.uk) so I can see what it is we
are talking about.

Sort-of-related question, what do you guys do for the +1/+1, phasing
and other counters that you need to put on cards? Is there an
official or unofficial product for these too?

Oh, and what about life counters. The flimsy bit of paper that came
with my 9th Ed. starter set is rubbish! What do people that are
really into it use? Pen and paper?

And while I'm on a roll, a completely unrelated question, is there a
website like magiccards.info or Gatherer that also offers user
comments or other "this card is great" or "defeat this card with Bob's
Magic Arm Twist" type annotations?

Thanks for all your help everyone!

Thomas David Baker <bakert.DeleteThis@gmail.com> wrote:
>Sort-of-related question, what do you guys do for the +1/+1, phasing
>and other counters that you need to put on cards? Is there an
>official or unofficial product for these too?

Nnnnot really. The most common thing, I think, is little glass beads that
are flat on the bottom. Second-most common is dice of one sort or another,
turned so the number showing is the number of the appropriate counter.

>Oh, and what about life counters. The flimsy bit of paper that came
>with my 9th Ed. starter set is rubbish! What do people that are
>really into it use? Pen and paper?

Pen and paper works best. Here, dice, even 20-siders, aren't as good; they
tend to roll when the table is bumped. A collection of glass beads would work
for this as well, especially if you have one color for "1 life" and another
for "5 life"...

>And while I'm on a roll, a completely unrelated question, is there a
>website like magiccards.info or Gatherer that also offers user
>comments or other "this card is great" or "defeat this card with Bob's
>Magic Arm Twist" type annotations?

There are several Magic websites out there with strategy guides of various
sorts, but I've been out long enough I don't know where the current ones
are. You could always check the backlog at the Wizards Magic webforum...

Dave
--
\/David DeLaney posting from dbd.DeleteThis@vic.com "It's not the pot that grows the flower
It's not the clock that slows the hour The definition's plain for anyone to see
Love is all it takes to make a family" - R&P. VISUALIZE HAPPYNET VRbeable<BLINK>
http://www.vic.com/~dbd/ - net.legends FAQ & Magic / I WUV you in all CAPS! --K.

Thomas David Baker <bakert RemoveThis @gmail.com> sent:
> > The 'theme decks' - or preconstructed decks - are not the whole set; they're
> > made from cards in the set, but they do not between them contain all the cards
> > the Lorwyn set has. You can buy booster packs or 'tournament packs' - starter
> > decks - of Lorwyn that contain randomized cards from the set in various
> > commonalities. If you want to see what-all cards are in Lorwyn, Gatherer
> > (gatherer.wizards.com) can show them to you...

> Thanks Dave. I get it, I think!

Many thanks to Dave for varied explanations

> I think I got particularly confused because the best UK online MTG
> shop I have found (manaleak.com) doesn't seem to sell the counters
> although it sells everything else individually. But there are lots on
> ebay.com (though very few on ebay.co.uk) so I can see what it is we
> are talking about.

> Sort-of-related question, what do you guys do for the +1/+1, phasing
> and other counters that you need to put on cards? Is there an
> official or unofficial product for these too?

I haven't seen any specific counter products. I also haven't seen
counters for phasing, we tend to just put all the phased-out stuff to
one side, or sometime flip the card over, on the rare occasions where
it happens. I usually use D10 for counters on cards, except that I
sometimes make a distinction and use D4 for -1/-1 or other negative
counters. (I carry about a dozen D10 and 3 or 4 D4 around when I'm
playing Magic, they're pretty handy.)

> Oh, and what about life counters. The flimsy bit of paper that came
> with my 9th Ed. starter set is rubbish! What do people that are
> really into it use? Pen and paper?

A lot of people will use D20 or the same-shaped "Spindown" counter
for life. Some people use D30 for life, as life often goes up. I
tend to use 2D10 and set them up near my library to represent the
digits. If you're in a tournament, it's a good idea to track both
your own and your opponent's life total on paper.

> And while I'm on a roll, a completely unrelated question, is there a
> website like magiccards.info or Gatherer that also offers user
> comments or other "this card is great" or "defeat this card with Bob's
> Magic Arm Twist" type annotations?

I haven't seen one that's got individual comments. You get long deck
construction threads on message boards though. They tend to be geared
towards Standard and Extended metagame.

--
-- zoe

On Aug 6, 11:17 am, d... DeleteThis @gatekeeper.vic.com (David DeLaney) wrote:
> If you want to see what-all cards are in Lorwyn, Gatherer
> (gatherer.wizards.com) can show them to you...

Recently, stimulated by reading "What's New", I had been purchasing a
modest quantity of Magic cards to have enough that I might be able to
construct a playable deck.

One of the things I did was to purchase a few Chronicles expansion
packs, since they were available at one local store for a price that
was not too unreasonable.

They also had Homelands expansion packs; those were also a vintage
item, but they were sold at prices that hadn't gone up, but were
instead comparable to those of current packs. I think Apocalypse Chime
explains that, although I note from the web site that Eron the
Relentless was in a current tournament deck of good repute.

Anyways, Gatherer was quite helpful in clarifying one point for me.

From Morningtide, I had a powerful card that let me create a second
creature under certain circumstances. It said to use a creature X
token. The trouble is, though, it didn't describe the creature; for
that, I was able to buy (for 25 cents) the requisite token at a local
card store - which avoids arguments or having to look that creature up
in some book.

From Homelands, though, I was puzzled by Trade Caravan. Were the
currency counters something generated by the card itself, so that I
could just write "$" on a tiny square of paper - the same way +1/0
tokens and the like can be produced? Or did I have to *get* them from
somewhere, just as I have to get mana from land?

Searching for the word "currency" in the rules text with Gatherer let
me see, without bothering the rec.games.trading-cards.magic.rules
group, that the former was the answer, as there was no other card that
had rules which involved generating currency.

John Savard

On Aug 17, 3:39 am, Quadibloc <jsav....TakeThisOut@ecn.ab.ca> wrote:

> Recently, stimulated by reading "What's New", I had been purchasing a
> modest quantity of Magic cards to have enough that I might be able to
> construct a playable deck.

This week's "What's New" comic

http://www.airshipentertainment.com/growfcomic.php

speaks to the prospects for world peace, something needed in troubled
times.

John Savard

Quadibloc <jsavard RemoveThis @ecn.ab.ca> wrote:

> From Morningtide, I had a powerful card that let me create a second
> creature under certain circumstances. It said to use a creature X
> token. The trouble is, though, it didn't describe the creature; for
> that, I was able to buy (for 25 cents) the requisite token at a local
> card store - which avoids arguments or having to look that creature up
> in some book.

Yes it did. Whatever that card is, it had a complete description of the
token. For example, consider Wolf-Skull Shaman:

Kinship - At the beginning of your upkeep, you may look at the top card
of your library. If it shares a creature type with Wolf-Skull Shaman,
you may reveal it. If you do, put a 2/2 green Wolf creature token into
play.

The token is a creature, its creature type is Wolf, its name is Wolf,
its color is green, and its power/toughness is 2/2. That's it.

Or consider Walker of the Grave:

When Walker of the Grove leaves play, put a 4/4 green Elemental creature
token into play.

The token is a creature, its creature type is Elemental, its name is
Elemental, its color is green, and its power/toughness is 4/4.
--
Daniel W. Johnson
panoptes RemoveThis @iquest.net
http://members.iquest.net/~panoptes/
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