#mtg advice

Last night I was looking up card values for my Magic collection. I’m considering selling some cards in order to buy an Oculus Quest when it comes out.

Oftentimes, a player, especially an intermediate player, will be stuck with decision paralysis and anxiety to take a course of action because they're afraid that their opponent might have a particular answer. This usually happens when a player has gotten good enough to actually know what cards are in the given format and what's possible to be in the opponent's deck. Usually, it's good to play around certain cards, if it means you're less likely to get absolutely derailed if you don't.

However, one of the tricks you have to learn if you want to improve past this intermediate level is to "Make them have it." Sometimes, if you continue playing around a particular card, they haven't even had to use it and may have achieved their goal for several turns, setting you back anyway. Sometimes, you have to just initiate the question and make them have the answer for it. Sometimes they even don't have it, and the game turns very quickly from there on. But the longer you wait, the more likely they are to draw a card to deal with what you're trying to do, so it's best to make them have it, on occasion.

For how this relates back to the real world, I suffer from anxiety a lot, and I know at least a handful of my followers do too. Sometimes it may seem like no matter what you do, the universe is just gonna screw it up, so what's the point, right? Well, you have to weigh the pros and cons after a certain point. If the likelyhood of something failing is really small, and the advantages for success are really high, sometimes you just have to say "Fuck it," and make the universe have it.

I’m wondering, is there an easy way to order a certain card type by order of printing? For example if someone were say, collecting every drake and wanted to put them in a binder in print order so they wouldn’t have to constantly update the binder by alphabetical order, would there be a way to look that up other than by hand going through each set? (I mean I guess figuring out set order isn’t that difficult, but it would make it easier to look them up that way, also the weird supplemental set printings etc)

Or maybe just any advice in general on collecting?

Now he wants to chat about Magic (which is awesome) but he’s asking me for deck building advice, and I am admittedly terrible at building strong decks. (I tend to build for flavor more than function.)

So I told him I would post his questions on my blog so people smarter than me can answer them.

Here is his first question:

“What are some good consistent mana ramp options for my Scion of the Ur-Dragon commander deck?”