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 ?