Bannings can happen in sanctioned tournament formats, for many reasons. Cards also rotate out of formats like Standard and Extended.

But there are also sanctioned formats like Legacy and Vintage where cards from all of Magic's history are legal (aside from the banned & restricted list).

And you can always play a non-sanctioned game with someone in which you need not follow any banned list.

Buck- I don't play MTG, but I started playing some card games that I highly recommend - Munchkin and Gloom. Both are hilarious and fun.

Dominion is also pretty highly regarded (I've only played the iPad app, which isn't great).

+ 1. :D

Can someone tell me about this game? Is there skill to it? I know some poker pros who at some point or another been really into this game.

Yeah, there's tons of poker pros who came up as Magic pros. Magic is an incredibly skill-testing game. It tests similar skills as poker and chess, but because of the nature of the game there are so many more types of cards/effects to know about in a given play format. When I watch the best professional Magic players play I am often in literal awe.

It's so, so skill-testing and rewarding.

Both of those were featured on Wil Wheaton's celebrity table top gaming web series, "Tabletop". Steve Jackson was one of the guests on the Munchkin episode (Munchkin is a Steve Jackson Games creation).

I used to play MTG shortly after it was created (mostly Revised Edition and a few of the expansions that came out around that time). It's a great game, but I haven't played in 15 years or so.

A collectable card game I liked even more than MTG was called Vampire: The Eternal Struggle (originally called Jyhad). It's based on the Vampire: The Masquerade RPG world. A typical game lasts quite a bit longer than a MTG duel and is better with 4 or more players so it's harder to get people together to play, but it's outstanding AFAIC.

EDH is awesome.

Yeah, I like that show. I've been playing both games since I saw them featured there along with Tsuro and Zombie Dice. Thinking about playing Catan and Ticket to Ride as well. Just haven't had the cash to buy either one yet.

Some of the most filthy, smelly, disgusting people play Magic: The Gathering. Sometimes it makes it difficult to concentrate.

This is true of gaming culture at large. So many gamers are unhygienic, vile, misogynistic twerps. It turns people off from a lot of fantastic games.

Dominion is superb. Very different feel from Magic, however. It's not a tap/resource type game at all.

Christ, it frightens me how similar we are (other than your misguided love for DICK Cheney).

I played with original Magic cards. My buddy who owned them had a friend of his who opened a game store and those original, limited first edition Magic cards were given to him for a shit-ton of store credit and gave the store instant cred for getting off the ground.

Meanwhile, I was big into Jyhad for a while, before I had to go off and get a career. Some friends of mine are starting back up again. Our first game in 15 or so years is this Saturday. I'm going with a Malkav/Tremere steal/bleed deck to start. We'll see. I'm sure it will suck, but hopefully everyone else's will too, and stealth/bleed is hard to screw up.

Another good collectible card game (which Dominion is NOT, for those who don't know), was Battletech. It was outstanding for 2 players.

The Middle Earth Collectible Card Game was also very, very good, but could be LONG.

There's a fantastic online engine for MECCG. You have to know all the rules and everything yourself, but it's a great interface.

Settlers of Catan is good. There are many variants/expansions.

The others I'm not familiar with.