Last week, Stephen looked at digital Magic options. This week, I thought I would take it a step down from digital and look at video options. At least some of my Zoom meetings should be fun!

The Decks You Will Play

This is not something you really think about until you are just about to sit down, but it makes sense to consider it and decide if your deck will translate well to a game where your opponent is not sitting across from you.

My Ol' Buzzbark deck is a fairly obvious example. Half of the abilities on the card describe you tossing dice on to your opponents' creatures. That is not going to work when their cards are on a screen. In fact, throwing dice on my creatures isn't all that great either. The whole point of Buzzbark is the spectacle. Others enjoy the deck because it involves something very different than you see in a usual Magic game. Watching me throw dice on cards through a camera image just isn't as much fun. For the deck to be truly enjoyable, it needs to be in person.

Any deck that steals cards from opponents is going to be more difficult. This isn't to say that you shouldn't do it, but you need to be aware of the limitations. Playing Lobotomy is going to be nightmarish. Stealing an opponent's creature is going to involve creating a lot of tokens

Cards that aren't commonly used and have four or more lines of rules text may be awkward, as it will involve regular reminders and a lot of "what does that do again?"

Decks that involve constantly shifting life totals can be rough too. If your deck involves you gaining a life and everyone losing a life when a creature enters the battlefield, you can just watch to see if everyone is actually remembering the subtract their life total. With video, you may not be able to see the life totals, so you'll be reminding everyone to change their life total all the time. If you think the, "did you pay two for that?" Rhystic Study question is annoying, hearing, "I gain one and everyone loses one," over and over again is a great reminder of who is benefitting every single time a creature hits!

The Setup

This is a little more personal and dependent on your setup. My friends and I are using Logitech cameras. We adjust the height of the camera over our playmat so that it shows only the playmat. You really want to make the card images everyone is seeing as big as possible, so showing a pile of tablespace isn't optimizing. You can opt to show less of your playmat, but keep in mind what parts can't be seen. Putting your Sol Ring and other mana rocks in a spot where everyone can't see them makes threat assessment more difficult than it should be.

For the camera, one friend who works in AV has an arm that he can lock in at the right height. The rest of us make it work. My setup involves an empty Harpoon IPA box with a couple of deckboxes holding a piece of wood that a camera is C-clamped to. Perhaps a picture is in order here:

For the microphone, the laptop mic seems to do just fine. My friends prefer a standard gaming headset, which limits the likelihood of feedback. As long as you can be heard clearly and aren't creating a bunch of white noise on the call, you should be fine.

How you choose to view the game also depends a lot on your setup. When we were looking at this initially, I pictured trying to see the cards on three opponents' playmats at once on my laptop screen and was sure that wasn't going to work for me. I got a cable to connect the laptop to my TV and suddenly the problem was solved!

Once we started playing, I discovered it was a problem that had an easier solution. Zoom has an option that allows you to double-click on one person on the screen to expand their image to the entire screen and keep it there, even when others are talking! This makes it much easier to analyze an opponents' board without them know you are focusing on them.

Most of the players in our group use this to see a person's screen on a larger monitor. So while my setup is unwieldy and takes up a whole room, they are sitting at a desk with a monitor just past their playmat. You can decide what makes sense for you.

Even with the big screen, actually being able to read the cards is difficult. The camera quality isn't always the best, and my connection can lag and blur the screen, so I run with a backup plan. I run my iPad with a deck-building app open during the game. When I run into cards I don't recognize or just know off the top of my head, I add then to the "deck" in the app so I can readily read the card without having to ask constantly what each card does. Knowing that Grenzo, Havoc Raiser's ability works when any creature that player controls does combat damage to a player is a handy thing. Getting a reminder that Vial Smasher does its thing with the first spell that person casts on each turn, not just their turn, was nice to know too. And no, I don't happen to have any idea what Etrata, the Silencer does.

For all of this I use Decked Builder, but another friend uses Archidekt's sandbox function. Just go with whatever works for you, as long as it lets you go back to those cards again and again.

You will also likely want a pad and paper. I have a set of erasable token cards that I use for all manner of things. I track commander damage, turn order, and create card size tokens that everyone can easily read.

Your Platform

Most virtual meeting platforms are going to do what you want. You will want a way to see everyone's screen at the same time, and a way to focus on one person's screen. Once you have that, you are good to go. Most platforms have a monthly fee.

My friends and I have been using Zoom and it is working well for us. Zoom gave me two free, unlimited sessions before demanding I pay. My friends are each signing up in turn with Zoom, so we are hoping to milk these free sessions to cover our weekly games for a little while!

If you have other options, let me know!

Gameplay

The first thing I noticed was how reliant I was on the seating order in the room! With everyone online, and Zoom moving our images around the screen, we needed to determine a play order beyond who was playing first. We opted for a simple high roll to lowest roll to determine the turn order. After a couple of turns around the table, we had it down, but it is best to write it down. An unexpected benefit was that you could randomly change the order of play after every game. This meant that you weren't stuck playing right before or right after the best player in the room for every game you play.

Trust was obviously an even bigger component as well. Your hand of cards is rarely on the screen, so basic cheating could be done with no effort at all. When someone asked how many cards each player had in hand, more than one of us jokingly said none. I'd like to think that this wouldn't be an issue since these are your friends and you are playing a casual game, but it is there.

Vigilance was also very important. Your opponents are less likely to remember the triggers on your table than they would be if they were sitting across from you, so you need to be aware and make sure the game is happening like it is supposed to. I played a Terashi's Grasp on my opponent's turn and it wasn't until the stack resolved and I put it in my graveyard that I noticed it was a sorcery and we had to back things up. Each of us are trusting that our opponents are playing their own cards correctly, so I needed to stay aware.

Finally, the first night or two, expect games to take longer. You will be announcing more triggers. You will be looking at board states in a way that you aren't used to. Things are just going to take longer. The first night we tested it out, we intentionally only had three of us, just to see how the interface would work and if it made sense. Our test game involved two new decks and the game, which would have taken barely an hour, was almost two hours.

The following week, things were already much better. We added a fourth player to the games and everything seems to run a little better. The game was still long, but our comfort level with the platform and playing that style was definitely up as well.

I'm not here to tell you that I think this is a great way to play Magic. Playing face to face is still the best way, by far. However, for those of you, like me, who continue to be stuck at home, this is a great way to make the best of a bad situation!

Bruce Richard

@manaburned