Magic Online gets a facelift.

I am a former cardflopper and proud of it.  If you don't know, "cardflopper" is geek-speak for someone who plays collectible card games (CCGs). This is as opposed to "dicechucker" or someone who plays role playing games like Dungeons & Dragons or Shadowrun, etc. (and to be honest, I was one of those for a while too).  There are many collectible card games out there, most notably Pokemon, Yu-Gi-Oh, and the granddaddy of them all; Magic: The Gathering.  Magic is a geekboy's wet dream.  It encompasses a multiverse full of wizards, warriors, fantastic creatures, magic spells and artifacts - everything that those who wear a "precious" on a chain around their necks think about before they go to bed at night and again when they wake in the morning.  And yes, there is a CCG based on the Tolkien trilogy as well.

There is a reason that I am a "former" cardflopper and dicechucker - technology.  Once modern video games became as amazing as they are, there was no need to search for a group of fellow nerds to play D&D.  And once Wizards of the Coast (WOTC) launched its online version of Magic: The Gathering there was no need to sit in a hot card shop full of sweaty fat guys and wisecracking teen nerds in order to get my Magic on.

Now WOTC is getting ready to re-create Magic: The Gathering Online (MTGO) when it releases the third iteration of the software presumably sometime this summer.  Magic Online 3.0 is currently in open beta testing and we were invited to take a look at the new interface, play some virtual drafts, and see just what's so new and different about this revamped Magic Online.

As an avid MTGO player (I still play about an hour a day) I am as interested as anyone in what version 3.0 would have to offer.  And, like anyone who has been playing MTGO for longer than a couple of years, I have been concerned about the impending release due to the debacle that ensued when WOTC launched MTGO 2.0 in 2003. 

The software was unleashed on the MTGO community without really being ready back then and what followed was several weeks (perhaps as long as two months) of server crashes, game crashes, missing cards (cards would inexplicably disappear from players' collections and then reappear sometime later - all of that was essentially set right) and other problems that caused genuine nightmares for anyone who played the game regularly.  It may be difficult for a non MTGO player to appreciate, but imagine if you logged into World of Warcraft to discover that your level 50 character was suddenly a level 1 and all of your rare items had vanished.  To risk sounding like a soft drink ad; yeah, it's kind of like that.