I quit playing Magic right about the time Ravnica came out (i bought a Fat Pack and didn’t even open all of it – speaking of, I *am* trying to rid myself of the 4,500 or so cards i currently have on hand; my plan at the moment is eBay, but i’m open to other ideas if you have them), so I don’t really know if it’s a fun set to play with or not. Seems mostly that it would be rather diverse and interesting.

Regarding Settlers, I’m fully down with any type of the game we play when y’all are out here. Lately I’ve been clued in to a computerized version called Pioneers, which is open source and can be played over the ‘Net. However, I don’t think there is a Mac version of the game; there is a Windows version of the client, though. If you’ve got a Windows or Linux box, maybe some Saturday we can get organized and play a round or two. Pioneers also has the Seafarers (at least most of it) expansion built in, along with a bunch of interesting scenarios. It’s worth checking out. Try pio.sourceforge.net.

The real brilliance of the Type-P is that it literally doesn’t matter what you use. You could do Type-P with Revised starters and boosters if you still had them, so long as everyone had their own Revised P-decks or no one used banned or restricted cards. I’m not familair enough with the various blocks to say for sure but I’m guessing that most of the people I watched play or played against were using a variety of decks from as far back as the Mirrodin block.

Nikki is becoming more dangerous to me (in financial terms that is) at cons: She picked up the 5-6 player expansion for Settlers so perhaps when we come out to visit you guys for the holidays we can get a full-family Settlers game going with Mom and Dad. She’s also trying to do the eBay thing for a cheap copy of Seafarers of Catan which adds a bunch of water tiles to the board which you cross with little ship markers (that act a lot like roads). Plus they also put a pirate ship on there in addition to the robber, so it adds a few new elements. Pretty fun.