Magic: The Gathering

Magic: The Gathering (MTG) is still very much a popular game, even though it was released more than 10 years ago. It is a card game played between two players (called a "duel"), each with his own deck of cards (usually customised by the player). Each player gets to draw a certain number of cards from his deck, which he can then play out.

Creating decks was fun and required brains. First, you decide on a theme, an effect that you wanted to use. Then, you start adding cards that achieve those effects into the deck. Next, you add in supplementary cards to complement those main cards. And of course, you need to add in land cards, since they provide the mana that you need to play your cards.

I was introduced to the game by friends from Lothlorien. And I still have the cards from the older editions of the game, which right now could be worth a lot more than I can imagine. I don't play MTG anymore, since to play, you need to constantly keep your deck updated (there are many sets available, including expansion sets), which can be both taxing financially, as well as taking time to learn about the new cards and how to use them. Besides, it is hard to find time to play too.

But it was fun. And you didn't need that much time. All you needed was a deck of cards. The only challenge I had back then was in finding people to play with, since it wasn't catching up amongst my friends yet. Most of them had better things to do than spend time and money on game cards. Which probably explains why in the end, I stopped playing too. But for my computing project, I wrote a program to help me keep track of the MTG cards in my collection. Sad to say, that program has since been lost, as I didn't keep any hardcopy of the program listing, and the computer it was on has since been discarded.

The official MTG site
A promising MTG freeware game