Magic the Gathering

The following section describes the game concisely (from Wikipedia online encyclopedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magic_the_gathering) :-

Magic: The Gathering (colloquially "Magic" or "MTG"), is a collectible card game created by Richard Garfield, Ph.D. and introduced by the company Wizards of the Coast in 1993. Magic inspired an entirely new game genre, and has an estimated six million players in over seventy countries worldwide, as well as a successful Internet version1. The game is a strategy contest which includes an element of chance due to the random distribution of cards during shuffling.
Each game represents a battle between very powerful wizards called "planeswalkers" who use magical spells, items, and fantastic creatures to defeat their opponents. Though the original concept of the game drew heavily from the motifs of traditional fantasy role-playing games such as Dungeons & Dragons, Magic as a game bears little resemblance to role-playing games.

The game has an official tournament system, in which the game is played for cash and scholarship prizes, and the game has a number of professional players. The cards themselves also have value, much like other trading cards, but in the case of Magic, a card's value is based not only on scarcity and intangible aesthetic qualities such as the quality of the card's artwork, but is primarily a function of its game play potential, with more powerful cards carrying a correspondingly greater value.

I first came across this game in 1993/4 when it was released as the 'Unlimited Edition' and the expansion set 'Antiquities' had just arrived. At that time I was in the roleplaying society at Aberdeen University and everyone started playing this weird card game. I tried a couple of games and bought a deck. Then I was hooked and ended up spending a few hundred quid and a few hundred hours on the game over the following 2 years. I even read the comics and one or two of the novels. Then I saw sense and aborted before I ended up playing people half my age and became bankrupt.

I also played the PC game for a short while that simulated the card game and then much later I got the XBox game. This was real time rather than turn based and proved an entertaining game in itself. This changed the game dynamic totally and after a while you got stuck on the same screens fighting the same opponent and end up wanting to spend the time building a deck, playing a real person or putting another game into the XBox.