One of the things that makes Magic: The Gathering such a great game is that it's always changing. This goes without saying, right? Take preview weeks for example. Whether you are a Pro Tour champion or only the champion of your kitchen table, everyone loves geeking out about new cards. Other changes in the game include new formats, new art, new artists and flavor text writers, new deck designs, shifting metagames . . . it goes on and on. The point is that Magic is a game of change, and for the most part, that's a really good thing.

But what if, one day, the game changes in a way that's not so great?

Have you ever lost your Magic group? I'm guessing most players experience this at one point or another. For some, it's when they went to college and left a thriving community of Magic players in their home town. For others, it's when they graduated from college. (Long nights of Commander in the dorm are a common casualty of emerging adulthood.) For still others, a career change forces a move, or a favorite card shop goes under. There could be any number of things that break up a Magic group. It's not always easy to bounce back from changes like these.

My group changed about a year ago when one of the members moved. Our too-small group sort of disintegrated after that. What made it worse was that my friend was moving because of a series of bad decisions. It was a tough time. Our weekly Magic games were one very small casualty among a long list of more serious problems.

It took me a while (was I in mourning?), but I eventually started looking for a new set of players to meet on the battlefield. I began playing Magic once a week with a couple of coworkers during my lunch break. This was the beginning of something new. One year later, I can say that the change has been great—a gift even—but changing from one group to another came with its own set of adjustments. When you move in with a new roommate, you have to learn the roommate’s expectations for the space you share, the person’s likes and dislikes, the person’s hopes for how everyday interactions will go. Similar things can be said about joining a new Magic group.

Here are five big ideas I've taken away from the last year. I hope they are transferable to whatever experience you might be facing. For me, Magic is more about hanging out and having fun than being overly competitive. This list focuses on enhancing that part of the game.

Learn the Playstyles of Your New Group

My old group included a handful of Cube drafters who preferred to draft each time we got together, and they preferred to try (or invent) weird formats. We were constantly drafting, building quick decks, and then tearing them apart. We were endlessly tinkering with our Cube lists. The new group includes a handful of ex-Standard players who almost never change their decks. I have essentially moved from playing with a couple of Johnnies to a couple of Timmy/Spikes on a regular basis. This has big implications for how I approach our game times! (If you're unfamiliar with these terms, read this article about common player profiles by Magic designer Mark Rosewater. And then read this follow-up article.)

Design Decks That Feed off the Other Players Styles

For maximum fun, try to create games and experiences the others you play with will love. The players in my new group are pretty competitive, and they play creature-heavy decks. So, I try to bring decks that are equally competitive and either bursting with fatties or running over opponents with tokens (no Cube-inspired Johnny decks here). As an aside, always, always, always avoid the temptation to build decks meant to foil someone else's—unless you can do it in a good spirit.

Observe the Unwritten Rules of the Group

Find out the answers to these questions:

• Do they cut decks before a game or ignore each other’s decks?
• What are the mulligan rules?
• Are food or drinks accepted near the battlefield?
• Is it cool to share dice and tokens or do you need to bring your own?
• What amount of trash talk is cool? And what amount would be considered annoying?

Let Your Own Style Be Influenced by the Others

For me, this meant I started playing more like a Standard, Constructed player. I didn't keep very many decks constructed before joining this group because I was always cubing. Now I keep a Standard deck constructed all the time just in case somebody wants to test his or hers against mine, and I focus on quick, creature-driven decks.

Be a Leader in Fun

One of the constraints of the new group is that, most of the time, we play during our lunch break. We don't have a lot of time, so we rarely play Commander or do a Draft. We also often have an odd number of players and end up in multiplayer games, which typically take longer than our forty-five-minute lunch break. This means that when we initially started meeting, we played a lot of three-player games that were never finished.

So, with these constraints in mind (short time plus probable multiplayer setting), I constructed the following deck. It's full of random, chaotic elements. It's designed to benefit everyone at the table (increasing the fun) and ramp into crazy-big creatures as quickly as possible. As odd as it may look, it's won more games than it's lost. If you’re looking for a way to speed up multiplayer games, consider some of the gems in this list.

Multiplayer Speed R/U/G ? Casual | Andrew Rogers

• Creatures (26)
• 1 Axebane Guardian
• 1 Deadly Recluse
• 1 Dragonlair Spider
• 1 Etherium-Horn Sorcerer
• 1 Guard Gomazoa
• 1 Monastery Flock
• 1 Noble Benefactor
• 1 Noggle Ransacker
• 1 Rumbling Slum
• 1 Selvala's Enforcer
• 1 Terastodon
• 1 Tornado Elemental
• 1 Verdant Force
• 1 Wall of Blossoms
• 1 Zhur-Taa Druid
• 2 Acidic Slime
• 2 Bloodbraid Elf
• 2 Elvish Mystic
• 2 Overgrown Battlement
• 2 Shardless Agent
• 1 Maelstrom Wanderer

• Spells (8)
• 1 Decimate
• 1 Unexpected Results
• 1 Whims of the Fates
• 1 Dictate of Karametra
• 1 Guild Feud
• 1 Sulfuric Vortex
• 1 Wild Evocation
• 1 Howling Mine

• Lands (26)
• 3 Mountain
• 4 Island
• 5 Forest
• 1 Contested War Zone
• 1 Exotic Orchard
• 1 Frontier Bivouac
• 1 Rugged Highlands
• 1 Terramorphic Expanse
• 1 Thornwood Falls
• 3 Kazandu Refuge
• 3 Simic Guildgate
• 1 Concordant Crossroads
• 1 Revelation

Buy This Deck

It’s not uncommon to drop Howling Mine, Dictate of Karametra, and Concordant Crossroads in a single game. Nothing will earn your opponents’ attention quite like giving them extra cards, extra mana, and hasty creatures. Let the madness begin!

The next deck is the first one I constructed specifically for my new group. The decks they were bringing were efficient, deadly constructions from the Innistrad and Return to Ravnica days of Standard. I tried to build a deck that could match them in power but that would still run well in multiplayer games. As I mentioned, I’m not much of a Constructed player, so I felt a little timid in my ability to brew up something that could compete. I decided to modify the Sorin, Lord of Innistrad deck from Duel Decks: Sorin vs. Tibalt.

Orzhov Tokens W/B ? Casual | Andrew Rogers

• Creatures (14)
• 1 Blood Seeker
• 1 Emeria Angel
• 1 Leonin Arbiter
• 1 Soul's Attendant
• 1 Suture Priest
• 2 Vampire Nighthawk
• 3 Phyrexian Rager
• 4 Doomed Traveler

• Planeswalkers (1)
• 1 Sorin, Lord of Innistrad

• Spells (21)
• 1 Harm's Way
• 1 Mortify
• 1 Reciprocate
• 1 Sundering Growth
• 1 Swords to Plowshares
• 1 Unmake
• 1 Zealous Persecution
• 3 Midnight Haunting
• 1 Assassinate
• 1 Death Grasp
• 1 Lingering Souls
• 2 Day of Judgment
• 2 Spectral Procession
• 1 Arrest
• 1 Griffin Guide
• 1 Intangible Virtue
• 1 Sword of War and Peace

• Lands (24)
• 12 Plains
• 9 Swamp
• 1 Godless Shrine
• 2 Orzhov Guildgate

Buy This Deck

Thanks to the extort ability, Orzhov is a ubiquitous deck in multiplayer settings. My preference is not to go this route. It’s too control-oriented and can really slow games down. Given that I was playing a couple of Timmy/Spikes with a short window of time to finish the game, I avoided extort and went for tokens and creature removal. Here are a couple quick notes about this deck: The Sword of War and Peace is awesome, but more often than not, Zealous Persecution will earn you the win; and to increase the fun, replace a few of the Spirit token-makers listed here and replace them with copies of Rousing of Souls.)

Change is intrinsic to Magic, and it’s one of its best features. Change is also inevitable in our lives outside the game. How we deal with change is what makes the difference.

Have you ever changed Magic groups? How were your groups different than each other? What changes did you make (if any) in the way you approached the game?

Or, have you ever been in a season without a regular Magic group? How did you participate in the game during that time period?

Tell me about it below.