Magic:

The first time I played Magic was during 5th edition.  A friend of mine introduced me to it by showing me some cards, and I observed a couple of games.  I took my money from my high school computer lab job and went about buying several packages of cards, and amongst my circle of friends, learning the rules.

This process should not be skipped by any Magic player, as it is educational, fun, addictive, and a very good reason to get together with friends.  Yes, there is ridicule from the dullards of society, but, what won't they ridicule?  Anything that requires intellect is under fire from the mentally inept around you, chess club, books, role playing games, video games, anime, all of it... It is a sad state when the collection of morons is so great that one must be bold to undertake an innocent and fun hobby, but, it is nonetheless the state we are in.  Regardless, if you have not tried it, GET SOME CARDS AND PLAY.

The game can be enjoyed on many levels.  As a collector, you'll find yourself trying to locate rares and interesting or thematic cards.  As a casual player you'll find yourself building decks that employ esoteric strategies to defeat your opponents and have fun while doing it.  As a competitive player you'll be throwing cards out of your deck and refining it with cutt-throat precision at each loss, and seeking new opponents regularly.  

The Problem:

Sadly, for all the fun of it, many players will arrive where I have with the game: Continuously frustrated.  I am part casual and part competitive player.  I enjoy having fun with the cards, but I like to win at least a solid percentage of the time.  Due to the nature of the game, being a collectibles game, occasionally a friend will "outbuy" you.  Rare cards are generally more powerful, and, more expensive, such that a well-made deck of rares beats a well-made deck of uncommons or commons.  This can lead to a bit of an escalation effect, where you will find yourself blowing large amounts of cash at a local hobby store and leaving with only a handful of cards.  Then, of course, your friends can always play against those cards by spending more money (or finding a devilishly cheap strategy that undermines you specifically).  This makes Magic amongst friends a very frustrating event, sometimes.  

A typical Magic Game in progress:

One of the biggest problems for casual players of the game is "Net Decking".  This is when your opponents use the internet to research strategies, read deck lists of tournament winning decks, and otherwise use knowledge of the game not of their own design in order to gain an edge against the people they play with.  This, being done by a player with ample spare cash to blow, will leave a very bad taste in your mouth if you play them frequently, as there is no answer within the game that can be made up by practice or logical deck construction.  It comes down to money and research time  on the internet, rather than strategy and creativity.

Your friends who play this way are not to blame alone.  Wizards of the Coast designs the game such that not all cards are created equal in order to drive revenues as people buy up boxes of "booster packs" looking for a lucky find of a good rare (or now "Mythic Rare") card.  This means that many of the cards that you get will be decidedly "Sub-Optimal"... or, easily replaced in your deck by a different card.  If you read the tournament deck lists, you'll find a solid collection of about 24 cards that appear in just about every top 5 decklist.  It forms sort of a pyramid of strategies that are available, where there are hundreds of deck types and strats at the bottom tier 30 or so deck types that are really solid, and then maybe 10 "tournament win capable" decks in any block.

Furthermore, the "Tournament Legal" card list is generally comprised of the latest editions and all "blocks" since.  This allows Wizards to conveniently phase out entire blocks of cards and force interested players to buy new sets each year, and the real catch is, the newer the set, generally, the more powerful the cards or the better the "answers" to strategies defined in prior "blocks".  They establish an arms race and provide the weaponry.  Smart business tactic, but, it leads to a very sour game, since it's almost a game of "who is willing to spend $100 on a single deck build?"  AKA, "Franklin decking".  

"I can't seem to locate my bitterblossom, guys, I think I lost it under my giant pile of money."

Now, several aspects of the strategies that need nerfed really hard to help fix the game could be delved into, but, I'll save that for another article.  There is a solution to this right now, though.

OCTGN:

For a long time, some developers have been creating a tabletop card game interface for use over the internet.  One of the games that can be played in said interface, amongst people who have themselves downloaded "card sets"... is Magic the Gathering.  Downloading card sets may or may not be illegal, I really don't know, nor care, honestly, but it certainly can enable the game to be played without the "money scheme" that's been built into it by Wizards.

Enter OCTGN.  Armed with this free client, you can play full games of MTG with all the newest sets, up to CONFLUX as of this writing.  It is a perfect tool for testing deck builds without spending hundreds of dollars.  The deck builder alone is a nearly invaluable tool, as it functions so quickly and smoothly, without waiting for card images to download or pages to refresh, that I can't think of a single tool that matches it for this purpose.  There once was an old program called Apprentice32 that was very much like OCTGN, but I don't know where that development path went to... if you know, please comment :).

Here's what OCTGN 2.0 looks like: