Sullivan Library - Ten Years Later (and Two Decks for Standard)

Ten years ago today (as I write this), I was riding in a car with Patrick Chapin and Nate Heiss, taking an epic Magic: the Gathering road trip from our successful Pro Tour: New York finishes (Patrick and I tied for Top 8, but finished 9th/10th), to our respective homes. I still remember sitting in that car for hours, making up songs and laughing.

It’s kind of crazy as I sit here thinking about it. I still remember the journey so very well…

I was riding high on the success of that Pro Tour, Pro Tour “New Jersey,” the Urza’s Block Pro Tour that was ostensibly supposed to be Pro Tour: New York, but was being played out in Secaucus. I played, perhaps unsurprisingly, Ponza, using Goblin Welders defensively against a room full of Tinkers, finishing in a virtual tie for Top 8. Patrick had played Snap-Hermit, the incredibly innovative deck that would play and replay Deranged Hermit, and could either beat you down, or simply go off and Stroke you to death. For the life of me I can’t remember what Nate Heiss was playing, but I’m sure it was something awesome.

It was a make or break Pro Tour, for me, and I’d spent months working primarily with former Magic player Zaid Maxwell. When I won the last round against Pro Tour bad guy Trey Van Cleave, Mike Flores jumped into the air and hooted and hollered, but I kind of hushed him; who knew how it would play out, and instead I sat outside of Top 8, and multiply-banned player Casey McCarrel would take the whole shebang.

It was a mixed weekend. I was riding high on the finish, but still deeply disappointed that I didn’t lock down a Top 8 to my resume. Patrick felt similarly, I think, but his disappointment was a different kind, I’m sure — he’d already had the successes, but I also think that he’s likely to have had a higher set of goals and expectations he was trying to meet than I was. Somewhere in the tail end of Sunday night of the Pro Tour, Patrick and I set out to standardize the rules of Mental Magic (the so-called “Pro-Tour Standard MM”), and decided that we would run an epic road trip. He lived in Michigan; I lived in Wisconsin, but what the hell, right? Nate Heiss was down too, and I was pretty sure that the three of us would have an amazing time.

Our first leg of the journey, on Monday, began with a quick run from New York to Philly. Like most self-respecting young Magic players, we were up fairly late, and we decided we needed some breakfast (also known in most quarters as “lunch”). We decided to drop in on Philadelphia player Richie Frangiosa.

This was a different time. Like most people, we didn’t have cell phones, and so we stopped into downtown Philly looking for pay phones. Nate was manning the phone, and he kept saying, “No, seriously, I’m not getting through to anyone! This number doesn’t work!”

We decided to give it one last go, and call again at the next phone we stopped at, but once again, Nate would tell us, “No. Seriously this number must be wrong. It doesn’t work!”

It was right then that I heard a voice.

“Adrian?”

Behind us was the one and only Jon Becker, gussied up to the nines in a smart-looking business suit. He was chomping on a big cigar, and had a surprised smile on his face.

“Patrick! Nate! What are you three doing here?”

We told him that we were roadtripping from the Pro Tour westward, and that we were trying to get a hold of Frangiosa for some times, but that we couldn’t get ahold of him.

“Richie? One sec.”

Becker pulled out his cell phone, and a few moments later told us that we’d all get together at a nearby Irish pub for food, drinks, and a draft (of course). When we mentioned how Nate hadn’t been able to get ahold of Richie, Becker compared the number we’d been using to the one he had.

They were the same.

“Nate!” Patrick and I both cried out.

“What? What? I don’t know. Hey, at least we’ve got Becker with us now, right?” he smiled.

One of us playfully hit him, and he acted like he was wounded, and we all laughed and walked with Becker to the pub.

I don’t remember how the draft went exactly, but I do remember Richie’s surprise at seeing us all there. We sat in a back corner nibbling down food and guzzling drink, Magic-ing it up in high-geek glory. A small gathering had been made, and while I can’t remember if we had a full eight or only six, it was pretty awesome, though we had to make do with proxying our land up on our sideboards.

Richie decided we had to spend the night at his place, just over back in Jersey territory. We all agreed it would be fun to game the rest of the night, and we headed back.

It was a pretty sparsely decorated place. In all of my years gaming, one thing I’ve noticed about the homes of people who play a lot of Magic is this: they’re often either very, very cluttered, or very empty. A lot of this has to do with the “bachelor” aesthetic that many Magic players have, at least in their younger years. Taking the time and money to make a fully decorated place is often a lot less interesting than simply having the space to draft or play, period. Richie’s place was definitely on the empty side, but when I came in, I did notice two things that were quite different than many a Magic-player home I’d seen:

1 — The guitars hanging out prominently, in easy reach to play
2 — Brian Schneider

I’d had no idea that Richie and Brian were roommates. Brian Schneider playing guitar would accompany much of the night, when he wasn’t gaming.

We spent the night doing what happens a lot after Magic events: sharing bad beats and talking about whose deck was actually the best. Someone started ribbing on Patrick and I for having played 61-card decks at the Pro Tour, and we gave our defense of our lists. As I’ve written before, sometimes there are good reasons to play 61 cards – most commonly because of a paucity of resources. I don’t remember how convincing we were then, but actually being on the same side of an issue with Patrick was definitely deeply satisfying.

At some point, one part of the conversation had degenerated into “my deck was better,” with Patrick claiming that his would beat me in the heads up. I was sure he was right on this count, but claimed that it didn’t really matter. After all, we were the only ones playing each of our decks in the whole tournament (it’s possible that edt was running a version of Patrick’s deck, and I know that Wakefield was running a bastardized version of mine, but hardly one I would call optimized). It seemed to me what mattered more was how our decks were situated for the metagame. He nodded, “Uh huh, uh huh. Let’s play.”

Yeah, he smashed me.

He beat me nearly every game, except those where I drew something like three Arc Lightning, or two of them into a resolved Wildfire. I won those, but it really wasn’t that pretty. I don’t know if maybe it was the guitar playing or what, but somehow it got us making up a song. The main refrain would be something that Patrick, Nate, and I would sing the whole rest of the week:

“Arc Lightning / Is very, very, very deadly / Arc Lightning / Is very, very dead-ly”

After infinite gaming, we crashed out sometime in the dead of the night.

The next morning we began our next leg of the journey into Ohio, to hit up Pittsburgh, home of CMU.

Any trip to CMU among Magic players requires a visit to “The O” — The Original Hot Dog Shop. This was the center of the Magic universe back then in many ways. Team CMU was insanely good, packed with future R&D members like Heiss, Buehler, Lauer, Turian, Globus, and Forsythe, but one must not forget the many others like Andrew Cuneo (Draw-Go, anyone?), Elliot Fung, Dan Silberman, and others. “O”-Fries were the thing of legend, and it was here that many early playtest sessions were held, up until Gauntlet proved too distracting to Erik Lauer. (Sadly, “The O” recently closed…)

Working for Wizards would still be a thing of the future, and many of the CMUers were about. Nate showed us around, and I got to eat some of the legendary fries, and play in the very space that had birthed legends of the game. We got in some board games, and eventually had our first split in the road trip: Nate was going to head home, but Patrick and I still had a way to go. After thinking it over, it seemed like he and I should part too — I would take the bus home to Madison from here, and he’d continue driving alone. That night, though, we’d spend in Chateau Buehler.

Anyone who knows Randy and I, knows that he and I disagree a lot. A lot, a lot. It had never been more apparent to me than that night, though, as we discussed the classic question: what are the best creatures in Magic history and in what order.

Eventually, we settled on knocking them down by converted casting cost. Largely inspired by ideas from Brian Kowal, I was a huge proponent of Quirion Ranger and Granger Guildmage as candidates for top slots in the one-mana argument. Quirion would get some traction with Patrick and Randy, but they would have none of it with Granger Guildmage. I would tentatively suggest Goblin Welder, but of course we all decided that he wasn’t a good candidate for even the Top 5.

Disagreements continued throughout the night, in a mostly friendly fashion. Randy and Patrick typically agreed, and I typically dissented, but overall, a lot of fun was had chatting in Randy’s apartment. Where Richie’s had been mostly bare, Randy’s was indeed that opposite style of house — cluttered everywhere with books. I think Randy was still in graduate school at the time, but I’m not 100% sure of that. Regardless between him and his wife, they had filled the place up, and they were kind enough to take me to the bus stop in the morning when I woke up. Patrick, of course, made it home safe and sound on his own, and I also made it home without incident.

The next couple of months were a swirl. I went to Nationals later that month, to disastrous results, largely caused by a complete lack of sleep. I remember one match in particular, where I drafted what I thought to be the best deck at the table, and proceeded to fail to pay for echo on turn 2 and 3, for a Pouncing Jaguar and an Acridian, respectively. I only barely lost that game, but exhaustion clearly knocked the crap out of my brain.

Earlier in the weekend, something pretty huge happened. I helped coverage-man extraordinaire, Jack Stanton, run the coverage of the U.S. Open, the then-title for the LCQs of the day. By the end of the weekend, Rob Hahn offered me a job at the Dojo, in New York City.

For those of you who don’t know what the Dojo was, suffice it to say that it was the website that launched the idea of collecting Magic knowledge and strategy in one place. Frank Kusumoto took all of the collected wisdom that was available out in the wilds of USENET newsgroups and put it all together on a website. You can see what that early website looked like, here. Its look would change a lot over the years.

Magic strategy was so rough hewn at this moment in history, you could expect that a tournament would largely be populated by people who had no idea what was good. For most of us, USENET was that first leap in technological advantage. I cut my teeth writing about Magic theory and trying to contribute to the history of the game by making people understand it better. When the Dojo launched, it was the next technological advance. I fervently believe that holding a StarCityGames premium account makes you all the more likely to do well at events, but as much as that holds true now, it was far more true of readers of the Dojo, if only because so few people were taking the time to actively read about the game.

I had already used USENET to form Cabal Rogue, a think tank of some of the best people I could find who were having success with original ideas. Cabal Rogue today is basically a slumbering beast — too many of its members just aren’t playing any more — but I’m still proud of its legacy. Some members you might recognize include Brian Kowal (Boat Brew), Sol Malka (The Rock), Jamie Wakefield (Secret Force), Andy Wolf (Wolf Pack Pox), Craig Sivils (Squandered Stasis), Bill Macey (Stompy), Mike Flores (Flores Hatred), Joel Priest (Snuff-O-Derm), Nate Heiss (Squirrel Prison), Elihu Feustel (Sandsipoise), Ped Bun (“Maher” Oath), me (PT Junk, Sullivan Solution), Rob Hahn (Psylum, Inc.), John Shuler (the most amazing tournament report ever), Rashad Miller (Spirit Stompy), Ben Dempsey (Temporary Solution), and Jacob Janoska (Dangertron Blue). Membership rotated throughout the years, and I’m sure I missed several people, but the vast majority of the membership was drawn from the pool of USENET writers who were making waves.

Where Cabal Rogue e-mailed each other privately, the Dojo took that same pool of talent, and much more, and packaged everything on its site, archiving USENET initially, and eventually hosting new material, unique to the Dojo. It was in this era that our understanding of early Magic theory was born. Card Advantage and Tempo are two of the concepts that have lasted the longest. It was right around tax day, ten years ago, for example, that Mike Flores wrote one of the best articles of all time, “Who’s The Beatdown?”.

I made a lot of mistakes out there in New York. It was the chance of a lifetime to go out and work as the Managing Editor of the Dojo, and I absolutely had to take it, even if it meant leaving my beloved Madison, WI. Initially, I probably didn’t put in all the work that I should have, and by the time that I really feel like I had begun to do that, the Dojo was already in what I would characterize as a death spiral (even if it would take a little while). Still, though, I have a lot of regrets about how I carried myself back then. I was 22, and didn’t really know what I didn’t know.

Looking back now, on that crazy road trip, and my time in the Dojo, I have to say that Magic is one of those things that I’m so glad is a part of my life. How many people actually travel the world? “See the world” really is a meaningful part of the Pro Tour. Working for the Dojo opened up a lot of other writing opportunities as well. I’ve been really lucky to have written for very nearly every magazine and website of note in the game’s long history.

Much of the beginnings of my success started on the weekend of that road trip, singing Arc Lightning, eating O-Fries, and arguing with Randy Buehler. Magic is one of those things that can be a truly rich part of your life. I’ve been playing, now, for over fifteen years. I’m looking forward to the next fifteen.

Special Bonus section!

Here are two decks I’ve been working on in Standard. I hope you like them!

Bloodbraid Beats

Adrian Sullivan

Test deck on 05-10-2009

Standard