So as many know, a big thing in my life was Magic The Gathering. It still is, but nearly to the level it reached at one point. How did I get there?
In ’08, high school was as most are: lacking entertainment. My school activities were basically just tennis and whatever classes I had. One was Speech. The next year I would join the debate team and then quit partially into senior year. Well, sophomore year, a lot of the nerds are running out of things to do on school downtime and someone has the bright idea to bring their Yugioh cards. We all had them lying around our houses somehow, so we started playing. A lot. Lunch was gobbling food and then dueling each other. During debate the next year we’d play between rounds sometimes. It grew, we got at least a dozen people on and off to be playing. Sometimes people we didn’t know would watch because there was almost nothing else to do.
Junior year, I took journalism. One kid in there who was a friend and I cannot remember his name had Magic cards and was sorting them. It was UR creatureless control. I hadn’t actually looked at magic cards before but was interested. He walked me through some of it. I quickly got a deck (one of the old core set ones with a big sphinx foil) and it turns out a few of the yugioh kids also had magic cards. Not all of them though. Big names of these nerds included Darian, Ryan, David. Darian was fundamentally opposed to MTG, a YGO fanboy through and through (he would occasionally try and learn, admit he thought it was (even more) fun, but still not really want to get into it). So we started playing more often, eventually started going to some FNMs. Through the year we had lots of changes occur and we grew as players. More of us switched from YGO and only played occasionally. I joked with Darian because I kept mostly old cards in a deck that still managed to beat him despite all the new mechanics and cards he’d incorporate. It felt good.
I want to say around senior year or the summer before, a local regular at the store Roy T. gave me a playset of most of standard commons and uncommons. It was definitely at this point that I started making more viable decks (I was particularly fond of Valakut and Ally decks) and also started playing more, improving faster, getting to know more players too. This is one of the things that keeps me going through the end of high school. I didn’t have too much to worry about workwise as I’d gotten early acceptance to a few colleges (if you’re reading this and still in high school, do all your apps in the summer before. Trust me. You avoid the stress of apps on top of schoolwork and it saves so much of brain).
I was in senior year making it to multiple Pre-releases and releases, along with 1 or more weekly tournaments. If you were in Dallas around this time, you’d know about the short but powerful existence of Gunslinger Games. Dallas had some great stores already, but GG provided a store where people were much more competitive because they had a much higher payout but it was punishing if you didn’t win. Most stores had swiss prizes or a broad but low payout. GG would distribute the packs to top 8, usually around 2 per person would go into the pot. Then they would most likely split unless someone was feeling especially lucky (it was only split if the vote was unanimous) and losing first round of splits was usually 3-4 packs still. What I loved though is that for the most part, the players were as kind as any other store outside a match, and in the matches weren’t rude but were not forgiving. It was definitely a trial by fire if you weren’t on top of all the game’s mechanics and the meta, but it was a great way to get better. You would see someone who had maybe played for months at other stores go to GG for a month and they were miles ahead from where they were. I also got to see more unique brews and rogue decks instead of converted kitchen table decks. I don’t mean to sound like I hate kitchen table decks, but there they would quickly get shaped into rogue brews and more viable competitive ones rather than just the cards were available to someone.
Near the end of senior year I didn’t play magic as often at school. Part was I grew a lot faster than my friends because of how much more I was playing, and even then I wasn’t that good. Another reason was that I was regularly changing what I wanted to play and had the ability to switch decks, whereas most of my friends had maybe one deck and a half completed one besides it but never followed through. I went to a GP or and SCG open when it came around, even drove out to Louisiana once for a PTQ. I was diving into other formats by then. Eggs was my modern deck and I fucking loved it. I was one of those assholes cheering for Cifka as he won worlds. It was a wild time, watching this little $50 deck win Modern. I would occasionally solitaire that at school when I was bored and no one else was around. This is also when I started trading more. I now had a small collection, but was winning enough that my collection grew and I absorbed prices and numbers. I’d rapidly turn 6 $1 rares into 1 $6 rare and before I knew it I had staples. At one SCGO I was trading for a dual and I practically snapped out of a fog, realizing just how far my collection was coming my heart skipped a beat.
Freshman year of college, KU. I made more friends through magic than everywhere else combined, despite there being only 2 stores. It was a much smaller environment and I hated it. Astrokitty comics held a very laid back fnm, you could buy in with a dollar rare. It was a cramped room in the sense of movement, but an abundance of windows and ceiling height made it feel relaxing. Hometown was two rooms. The front was a U shape where you would walk in at on tip, squeeze between the desk and shelves, and make your way the windowless backroom. I went here more often though because there was better prize support and more challenging people. Trading was also much more profitable here since the players had better collections. I went almost weekly to FNMs, probably 3 times to Hometown for every Astrokitty. Hometown recently shut down and I don’t want to spend another paragraph or two ranting about my time there.
My summer home was littered with magic. 2-3 tournaments a week since GG hosted multiple standard weeklies and it was also fairly easy to get a draft pod together. I think Cardfight Vanguard was picking up attention around this time. It was ok to learn but I didn’t feel like learning an entirely new meta, however I knew enough at the time that someone could give me a deck and I’d be capable of holding my own. My regular magic friends were the Roy Spires Fan Club (ironically named because Roy S did not have fans in any sense, only enemies) (this is also not the same Roy who gave me cards before). It was a good summer. I think we prepped for a big tournament together, full days of playtesting, cubing, and other past times of young adults.
When I went back to school the next year, it was only for a short time before I withdrew. I was not doing well. Probably one of my lowest points of life. What kept me going was that almost every day I could get out of the house, talk with people at a game store or someone’s house, and definitely having a decent friend group. This went on until spring, where I took a few months to get myself together. Before I was convinced Magic wasn’t helping me while looking back I see it definitely kept me grounded. Before leaving, I entrusted my collection to Roy T. to sell (which, while not being a great decision to sell 99% of my paper cards, he was definitely the right person for the task) and I moved to Chicago. Around a year and a half after moving here (2ish years ago), I started playing MTGO again. Not very regularly, but it was fun to get a few drafts out of $12 or so. As of lately, I’ve picked up my pace a little. Had 8 or 9 trophies just in Amonkhet drafts. Now seeing if I get back into paper at some point.
I definitely left some things out. One is Matt. I met him senior year of high school at GG, and he happened to live in Lawrence where KU was. So it was a talking point. We became good friends and I cubed with him a lot, sometimes getting a few other locals to hang with us. I think out of sheer value, he might have had one of the best collections in the city at the time. Drunk cubes are definitely a good way to spend time with friends.
My short lived second time up at KU, I started trading up much faster. In just a few weeks I’d gotten a few pages of material gone and had around 4 playsets of restoration angels. People at that point thought I was collecting them and would offer more to trade and I just wanted higher value cards, but the idea was lost for a while. It was cute though and eventually more decks played them so everyone knew who to come to. When NPH came out earlier, I told myself that Mental Misstep seemed like the card I should collect. 20 copies in it skyrocketed in price and I decided I could trade them away and pick a new card instead.
I’ve shared more stories before on streams and with friends, but I think this was a pretty good summary of my experience with the game.
Bamboo Shots of the Mind 