Magic Origins week.

I apologize I haven't updated my blog in a long time, and here we are, and all I'm going to do it blab and not share a deck.

Dailymtg.com, the official magic site, is talking origin stories today. I figure I'll transcribe some of my origins, lest they be forgotten.

Growing up I collected baseball cards. To be honest with the whole world right now, I have no idea why. Before baseball cards I dabbled with coins, and stamps, but my interest waivered. When I was around six years old, a neighbor gave me a huge box of '81 topps baseball cards, and explained how some people collect them, and why. So I began collecting baseball cards. Then I had to try and learn about baseball, and then of course I had to maintain an interest in it. Keeping up with stats and games and plays. Watching it on tv, reading sports illustrated, and of course Becket. Here's the trouble, I never really cared for baseball. AT all. So I collected, I know now, for the sheer act of collecting. It's something I like to do. All my life I collected comic books, even though I'm not a stickler for buying and selling them now. I liked collecting coins, and stamps. I collected Hess trucks growing up, and during my long stint in the baseball card collecting world, where I was a half-phoney, I even branched out to football and basketball cards. I was mad about collecting in general, but masked it by being a baseball card collecting fanatic.

Nothing rivaled my collecting prowess of baseball cards. I even used to go to baseball card clubs after school, trade with friends, and if I met someone who was a ne'erdowell, I'd even get ripped off in trades because i couldn't keep up with the facade of a baseball fan, so i had no idea that this player's cards just dropped in price because his average sucked this year.

My best friend at the time was Ben. We used to hang out because we both collected baseball cards, liked 'watching sports' and had synergy because we were both flowering nerds. We found out we liked the same videogames. I had a sega, he had a snes, so we had opportunity to play all the new games together. I used to go over and play with his snes all the time.

One day, in the midst of my disillusionment with myself at not really being a baseball fan yet collecting the cards like mad, I went over to Ben's to play super nintendo and so forth. This was late '94, towards xmas. He said "hey you heard about magic?" and I said "no, what is it?" he said, "oh it's awesome, it's the great card game. My brother and I started collecting it. we have a bunch of cards, let's build you a deck and play."

So first, I watched him and his brother play. This was all 3rd edition and dark cards, some unlimited, a couple of legends cards thrown in.. I rememer seeing a spinal villain and lots o f lightning bolts. Their decks were not 60 cards, each was like on the cusp of 90, because all of these cards we so so new, and they both wanted to try them out.

We had a hard time picking two colors to work with, because we all wanted to try them all out. However I distincly remember my first play through, Ben cobbled together a gigantic deck of green and white cards. I remember playing crap commons, like bears and banding benalish heros, and then coming across some of the good stuff, like wrath of god, or cockatrice, or howling mine.

I don't even recall, 15 years later, if I won or lost, I just remember loving every second of playing that game. I remember seeing Ben's brother Dave slap down a cosmic horror and how we all thought it was insane amidst a field of mon's goblin raiders, drudge skeletons, and holy strengthed savannah lions. We played all day and I was taught various rules.

I came home and I'm sure I blabbed more about magic to my parents that day then anything else I had ever spoken of in my life. They were badgered enough that when 4th edition hit stores in april of 1995, and I had grown tired of 4 months of playing with my friends cards, that they let me start collecting magic. I walked into the only card shop in town, and I remember buying two boosters of 3rd, two boosters of 4th and two fresh crispy new 75 card starters of 4th. I also bought some dark and legends cards out of the case. I bought a spinal villain of my own because I both loved and despised blue. I bought a dark the fallen, dance of many, and I even bought a marsh goblins because the idea of a gold card was so crazy to me, that I had to own at least one. I remember buying a playset of blue elemental blast and red elemental blast, and I splurged and bought one of my first true magic-loves, Sol Ring. I bought loads of extra lands, all with money I had saved.

I walked out of the store and my dad said, "that's a lot of money you spent, but now you're good to go right?"

And I remember thinking.. Not even close, but saying "dad this is a collectible card game. I'm gonna be collecting it for a while" I then remember my dad telling me I already collected baseball cards, and I promptly told him at that moment I could give a care about baseball or its cards or collecting any of those at all. I haven't purchased a baseball card since, and they promptly went into card boxes and were filed away, to the point that I still have them today.

I came home, cobbled together some clunky decks, taught my sister, she humored me and played once in a blue moon, and then I called Ben.

At this point, our magic skills were not stratagem.. they were, oooo this looks cool, put it in. Ben, his brother Dave, and I were my whole magic play group, for as long as I can remember.

We each played with huge, 150 card decks. We had no control over our urge to play with everything we came across that we liked. We each played 3-color decks.

Ben's favorite color was white, and then he liked blue, followed by green. So he clearly had the most white cards, almost as many blue, and then a smattering of green cards that his brother hadn't managed to get from him in trade.

Ben's brother Dave's fav color was Green. He then liked red, and then white. He liked big creatures, burn/removal, and white for disenchants and life gain.

My favorite color was, and always will be, black. It's evil, and I've always strived to be good irl, but in fanatsy relams, give me evil. I want to be lex luthor or a drow. Black had skeletons and zombies and death, and it had extremely powerful cards like demonic tutor, and terror, and hypnotic specter. and it had black knight to Ben's white knight. I latched onto black. For my next color, I agreed with ben... blue. I liked unsummoning and countering and casting the braingeyser I got in my packs of 3rd. My final color was red, because I liked disentigrating creatures to nothingness. We had a house rule that we wouldn't cast an x damage / drain life spell right to the face, we'd always try to win by creature damage with the occasional lightning bolt to the face, but nothing as uncouth as disentigrate for 8, drain life for ten.

So I had a massive 120-150 card deck of red/black/blue. Shuffling was hard, and getting enough mana was either overboard or never enough, but we loved to play. When Ice age, chronicles, fallen empires and homelands hit, we traded out cards for better cards, but they always stayed gigantic, and it reminds me of the innocence of beginning the game.


The last pack I bought before the great hiatus was a couple packs of tempest. I hadn't gotten much weatherlight and Ben and Dave didn't play much anymore. My deck had progessed to strict black/white. I still didn't go for green, even though today I consider it on par with black, and find it to be the best support color, and indeed, probably have more themed mono green decks then any other color mono-deck.

Magic was considered universally uncool in the halls of my schools growing up, so i never tried to branch out and find other players. As Ben and dave waivered, and we hung out less, my collection was put in a plastic card-collecting box, and stored under my bed.
In senior year I sold all of my cards, through want ad digest, and used the profits to buy a set of drums, to replace the set of drums i sold to buy one of the first ever commercially released cd burners (can you say 1x duplication speed, 400$?). Magic faded from my life.

Freshman year of college was insane.
Sophmore year i awoke through the fog to realize my best friend, Moshe, played magic, as did all his friends at home, as did a bunch of our friends in college. Here it felt like old times, using their cards to make decks, not having a collection of my own.
Finally, I saved up enough money, went to dragon's den, and bought precisely enough cards to build a black/blue deck, with skeleton ships and helm of obediences in tow.

In a pack I had bought, I opened an undermine, Foil. it was cream of the crop back then, and I had people jumping through hoops to trade for it. Moshe's friends from LI all wanted it, and I remember getting a doppleganger and a Verdeloth the ancient among other things.

Verdeloth. I stared in amazement at it... It spoke to me, called forth my love of thallids from the old days of playing, seeing Ben and Dave pile out fungus and saprolings.
Now I had to build a green deck.
A saproling deck.

I went back to dragon's den, and bought Saproling symbosis x 4, spontaneous generation x 4, and elvish farmers, then went nuts on my friends commons and uncommons boxes, and filled in the rest. Now I had two decks.

I started collecting regularly. When torment hit, I bought a booster box. When onslaught hit, I bought 2 and half booster boxes. And I kept my collection growing strong, til I'm here, with over 40 decks, most of which my friends refuse to play because they consistently kick ass.