Been a while, huh? I promised myself
that I wouldn't write any articles here that I couldn't be sure would
provide a unique or valuable perspective. There are lots of places to
read about games, comics and geeky films/novels/TV online, that I
pledged that I'd write when my opinion was relevant to folks who
don't already know me well. That also came with "no promising
blog updates if none are forthcoming." I've got a few ideas now,
so in the coming weeks and months I'll be doing some writing, with no
guarantees as to update frequency. What I've been up to since I last
wrote is a return to a few geeky hobbies that I used to be into years
ago, but not since until recently. I'll be writing a few articles on
these subjects, but both topics (Collectible Card Games, especially
Magic: the Gathering, and Miniatures wargaming, especially Warhammer)
are too large for a single article. Gotta start somewhere, so Magic's
up first.
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| I prefer not to think about how much I've spent on this game, but I can't say I didn't get a good value for my money. |
The year was 1993, and I was at my
third Gen Con (which would be my last one with my father and younger
brother, as I started college that fall,) mostly there to play D&D.
I registered for various events and seminars, but everywhere I went
in the Milwaukee Convention Center, the scene was the same.
Everywhere there were people sitting at tables where there was no
event scheduled, or even on the floors playing a game I'd never seen
before. It was some sort of card game, but each player had their own
deck. Magic didn't need word of mouth in those first few days, people
were too busy playing it on any flat surface they could find with
anyone who had a deck to bother evangelizing. I headed to the hall
and picked up a starter deck and a booster pack of Magic cards, what
we'd now call "Alpha Edition." I didn't actually play
Magic at Gen Con, there wasn't time to figure out the game and attend
my scheduled events, but I looked over the curious cards and read the
rules.
College was a great time to be a gamer,
at least for me. I quickly found a gaming group and was playing D&D
and Shadowrun as often as I could (which was a little too often to
keep up my studies, especially once I moved into a dorm room.) When
one of the guys in the group got a job at a game store in early 1994,
he brought Magic to campus with him. Some of us had a few cards, had
maybe tried it, but with Revised Edition and The Dark, it blew up big
that spring. Through the rest of that first year and the summer that
followed, we played a LOT of Magic. Some of us quit in frustration
at the release of Fallen Empires (a set so bad that nearly 20 years
later you can still buy unopened display boxes of packs for well
under retail,) but we all got back in for Fourth Edition in the
Spring of 1995.
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| If only I'd kept this, I could now buy a used car. |
I attended a few tournaments, as I was
playing one of the early dominant competitive decks, a red/green deck
based around a card combination that could end the game on Turn One
with a lucky draw. My "Channel Fireball" deck won its share
of games, but when key cards in it were banned, I found myself unable
to stay current with purchasing the cards to build a new competitive
deck. I tried a few other tournament concepts that didn't do very
well, but it was pretty much back to "kitchen table" magic
for the next few years. Once the college friends started to get
married, move on to jobs and such, playing magic at all seemed
expensive and not really worth it except on the rare occasions that
we all got together and felt like bringing out the old cards again.
Money got tight, I sold off the expensive cards from my old
tournament deck, and that was it.
Except it wasn't. When I got into
games retail, I stayed away from Magic Cards at first. I remembered
how expensive they could be. A friend I met at the store got me into
buying pre-constructed decks as they released for a "buy this
once and then put it away" kind of playing, and I did that for a
year or two, maybe buying a booster pack when curious. A customer
helped me trade for enough cards to make a semi-competitive
tournament deck which I played and did okay with for a bit, until the
mighty banhammer hit a key card in that deck, too. Back to the
kitchen table. I kept the tournament deck together to dust off and
smack people around with on occasion, but I bought fewer and fewer
cards, with no real desire to have more.
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| My favorite setting in the M:tG Universe, it returning when it did seems like fate. |
In the year immediately before the
Hobby Shop I managed closed its doors for good, I briefly got back
into Magic when I discovered booster drafting. We'd get together,
draft a few packs and build decks and play a few rounds of swiss for
a prize pool of about a pack per player split between the top 2.
These small drafts were in the original Ravnica Block, and I loved
the characters, the setting and the two-color guilds, I even read the
novels. The 3rd set in the block came out, and we just
never managed to get together for that last booster draft. I kept the
packs, unopened, and put them away for years. I was pretty sure I was done, and for over six years, I was right.
Four months ago, two things happened. A
friend (from that original group at college) posted to Facebook about
playing Magic with his wife and daughters. Around the same time, my
wife met a group of Magic players at the college where she's returned
to finish her degree. We started talking about the game, dug out my
old collection from the 4-5 different boxes and closets it had been
scattered to... and just like that, I was back. I learned about the
current tournament formats, got my friends into EDH (also known as
commander) and started working on a tournament deck, learning what
parts of my collection still held value. Magic is regarded as a rich
man's (or woman's) game, but I've done okay on relatively little
money, and I'm a tournament player again. The specifics of that
journey are best left to a second article.
After 20 years, Magic proves to be one
of those games for me... I never really quit, I just go into periods
of remission.