what is casual ?

this may sound like a pretty easy to answer question but is it realy ?

as some of you may know i have a bit of a magic cirsis at the moment. this however got me thinking about casual and what that realy means.

the simplest definition of casual i could come up with is this:

casual is a game of magic where everyone has a good time regardless of the outcome.

but then i thought if i am in a tournament and loose a match but still had a good time is that casual ? my be i made all the right plays but the matchup was unwinable. may be i came realy close to actualy winning this matchup. may be there were several awsome moments, like freak topdecks, carefuly set traps that worked well but did not do enough to pull it through etc. ... that could be a very enjoyable match and my opponent would surely have fun too. but is that casual ?

hmm since casual is often precived as an anti-pole to tournament play the above definition is just not good enough because it can be applied to tournament games also. so here is another definition.

casual is any non-tournament game.

thsi definition is obviously flawed. playtesting for tournaments is not what i consider casual. also beating about a newbee with your power-9 vintage monster does not sound fun to me. more like pathetic. so here is attempt no. 3:

casual is a format that is played for fun with decks of about equal strength.

ok how do you mesure that precicely. when you sit down with some random person to play a casual game do you compaire the powerlvl of your decks first ? no this does not work either. how about this:

casual is the collective soup of magic games that can not be categorised in another way.

ok that definition actualy kind of work. problem is it doesnt tell us anything about casual. if you sit down with someone and agree to play a casual game the number of prespectives you could have on that are almost limitless. most of them are not even competable with otheres. some players jsut hate combo or control and almost never enjoy playing such decks. other players hate cardpiles feeling that a deck should have some thought put into it. some love silverborderd cards, some only play theme decks etc. etc.

is it just me or does this happen in your playgroups also that people have diffrent concepts of casual and that leads to someone not enjoying the game because the concepts are too diffrent ? my be im just not tolerant enough, may be im just too inflexable but may be i just spent more time thinking about how casual works than others do. what i realised is that casual does not actualy work smoothly. its a format of compromises, anoyance and other things that can ruin your fun.

how do you keep haveing fun in this format that by its mere existance should be doomed not to work at all ???

may be im just wired and socialy crippeled. if however casual is that uncombinable format as wich i see it, i wonder how other people solve that ? is it just blissful ignorance, adaptability or does it frustrate smeone else the same way it frustrates me ?

I would say casual is when all of the following are true:

- You are not playing in a tournament
- You are playing for fun, like with friends or at a club, no prizes are involved
- You dont use a deck full of broken cards like P9s and such

So the first 2 conditions are pretty clear, last one is bit less because decks can have different stengths like you said, but I think as long as you dont just overdo the broken cards it is still casual

The casual player plays on the kitchen table for the majority of their time playing Magic. They enjoy a multitude of formats, including sanctioned and unsanctioned ones. Casual players rarely tread past their comfort zone of competitive play, which mostly comes down to these events:

FNM
Prerelease

They'll occasionally enter a PTQ, but never with the intention of doing anything other than having fun. They essentially know they have no chance of winning the whole thing, but they aren't entering for the sake of knocking other players out of contention.

Another characteristic found in most casual players is that they do not enjoy countermagic nor land destruction. They find it to be 'unfair' and 'broken'. House rules are often made. Casual players often do not purchase booster packs for the purpose of drafting, instead they prefer to just open them. They are, in essence, the biggest "spenders" in Magic as far as sealed product go. They also enjoy cheap $1-3 singles and mostly purchase big, fun multiplayer cards. They have zero interest in things like fetchlands, dual lands, etc. and are more than pleased to trade those away for cards that they can use to have fun with on the kitchen table.

But what when the "Competitive" player wants to go play some fun games with his friends? Is it still considered competitive play for him or is he "Casual" for those games?

Basically am asking if a player has to be exactly one category casual or competitive or he can be both or maybe one at one time and other the rest.

No, not necessarily. You can play whatever you want. I play Cube on a consistent basis, mostly to moneydraft.

ok i asked what is casual not what defines a casual player for a reason. as can be seen by the few posts of you two already is that that can turn into a prolonged discusion of its own. probably a very interesting one too but not the one i was hopeing to have here.

Well, in my group of friends, "Casual" is where we sit at a long coffee table and just play our decks. We're a bunch of teenagers without jobs so it doesnt really matter what deck, unless someone makes proxies (for example, one of our friends made a turn 3 dragonstorm with 4 Bogardan Hellkites. -_-). We do use the same decks (unproxied) in tournaments and stuff, and we still do a decent job (4th-6th place out of about 15-20 people). To us, casual play is the way to go for any local tournaments or to just play.

I personally think that a pre-construct deck vs another pre-construct is casual. Just a simple classic 8 turn game of magic. Thats how it used to be for me.