Magical focal points and gaming decks

I'm honestly not sure where to put this thread.

While the dominant use of tarot and oracle decks are for use as divination, many of us do use them as a focus for ritual work, directing energy toward certain goals and such, sometimes internal work, sometimes external.

Tarot and I believe some oracle decks have been adapted to role playing games, and some RPGs draw on the tarot for inspiration.

I'm curious regarding deck based RPGs and strategy games, such as Magic: The Gathering, as just one example.

Does anyone else use them, or elements of the RPG system as a way of focusing energy and directing it toward specific goals?

For myself, I've only recently gotten addicted to collecting MTG cards, after having collected tarot for many years. And as well as learning to play the game, I've been adapting the game to my own meditation and magical purposes, constructing a deck with creatures and spells that can symbolically represent my own goals.

Basically, I do my ritual work as if playing the game. Draw a hand of seven cards, play a land card each time I have one (this is where my World-Creation geekiness comes in, each land gets a name, usually after some character or entity that I like, but perhaps after a quality), and the journal is a creative writing project describing this forest, mountain, swamp, plain, or body of water, and the particular qualities it represents.

As with the game, the lands are a place where energy grows and can be used by the creatures and spells that are in my hand. I draw one card each day, or two if I skip a day.

This gives a sort of semi-random approach, or a way perhaps for the universe to nudge me toward particular goals, depending on what card is drawn.

I do use the point system, to a degree. It suggests how powerful this particular energy form is.

I've only just started on this. In this manner of use, creatures aren't fighting, they're working together toward goals, and thus they don't die as in the game. I suspect as I reach goals, either the energy form representing that goal will be retired, or perhaps repurposed. Cord trimmed, energy returned to the "land".

So, out of curiosity, Does anyone else do anything remotely resembling this?

I have been working with tarot for awhile and I have loved it. I have a friend who recently asked me if I wanted to start playing Magic The Gathering. We have gotten together a few times to play but I am getting way drawn into the cards more than he as I watche the interaction of the cards as we play.

Wondering sometimes if there isn't a stranges sense of playing this game and seeing connections is like what happened in the very beginning with tarot.

I like a lot of ideas in this post. I was a a conference where Barbara Moore spoke of a spread that is played out like a poker hand. The reader and the client are each given a set of predetermined amount of cards. Her example used five. The reader places the first card down then the client lays a card down in response. Then the next and client responds likewise. I have used this a couple of times and had some good success.

Playing Magic I get a sense that this same dynamic can be a work. As each player creates a deck they are choosing cards that express on at least some level their personality and the way that intereact with the world. I see so much potential to that.

Breaking down the game and the different cards is taking up some of my free time as I consider who all the parts work in a divinatory pattern. (I almost said how they would work but they infact do work.)

I am in the beginning stages of planning out my goals for 2015 and I think that I will be giving this a big load of thought of how I might invest some intentional time to study and practice.

Starting with searching out on the web anywhere others have posted or written about MTG as a divination tool.

Onyx.