Spring break, 1995. In New Orleans, spring break comes between Mardi Gras and Jazzfest each year. For those who don’t know, Mardi Gras is a month of parades in New Orleans, where people on floats throw plastic beads and metal coins (dubloons) to the crowd along a parade route. The floats are decorated according to their Krewe’s theme, and are designed throughout the course of the entire year. For instance, the Orpheus Krewe might have an”Under the Sea” theme, where all eighteen floats are dedicated to the aquatic life – you might get the”King of Atlantis” float, or the”Little Mermaid” float coming past. Over a million tourists flood the city each year for Mardi Gras, and it’s the largest legal mob scene in America each year. Mardi Gras culminates on Fat Tuesday each year, which always falls on the day before Ash Wednesday.
In April, you have Jazzfest. Jazzfest is a large collection of artists playing a week’s worth of music on several different stages. The genres present range from jazz to rock to folk to country to big band, and all types of music in between. I’m not a fan of live concerts, so in eight years of living in New Orleans, I never once attended a Jazzfest. Again, hundreds of thousands (if not, by this point, millions) of tourists flock to the city to attend Jazzfest.
This put our official week off from school in March each year. In March of 1995, I flew back up to New York. On one of my day’s off, I went into New York City, and went to Jim Hanley’s Universe. I picked up a couple of graphic novels that day, but more importantly I found out that there was a major Magic tournament that was being held that Saturday in the city. The top prize? $1,000 cash. Wow! That was a lot larger than the Have-A-Hobby Fallen Empire box tournaments, or the bi-weekly cash tournaments that had been held at the library in Metarie. I’d brought my favorite deck with me to New York in hopes of finding people to play with, and this was surely what I was looking for.
All through the week, I tinkered with my Black/Red Orcish Spy/Millstone deck.
Ben’s Orcish Spy/Millstone Deck, circa 1995:
Creatures:
2 Atog
4 Hypnotic Specter
3 Orcish Spy
4 Sengir Vampire
Spells:
4 Animate Dead
1 Black Lotus
4 Dark Ritual
1 Demonic Tutor
3 Disrupting Scepter
4 Hymn To Tourach
4 Millstone
1 Mind Twist
1 Mox Emerald
1 Mox Jet
1 Mox Pearl
1 Mox Ruby
1 Mox Sapphire
1 Sol Ring
1 Storm World
4 The Rack
Lands:
4 Badlands
2 Mountain
3 Strip Mine
7 Swamp
Sideboard
3 Shatter
3 Gloom
4 Red Elemental Blast
2 Deathgrip
3 Terror
I remember distinctly the changes I wanted to make – did I want additional reanimation spells with Dance of the Dead? Was it time to add Lightning Bolts to the main deck? Did the deck need more lands? Would Mishra’s Factories work well with the deck? In the end, I believe I took out the three Disrupting Scepters and two Atogs, and added in four Lightning Bolt and a fourth Orcish Spy.
Finally, the Saturday of the tournament arrived. My commute to the city would be a quick train ride from Great Neck to Penn Station via the Long Island Railroad, and then a short walk to the tournament site. Something was wrong that morning – I began the day by throwing up. My head ached, and my body felt feverish. I took my temperature – 101 degrees. Crap! You’re not supposed to get sick during your spring break! Even worse, I was going to miss the Magic tournament. I’d been looking forward to it all week, and here I was about to be waylaid by a bout of bronchitis.
“No”, I thought to myself,”this was a once in a lifetime opportunity to win $1,000 and I was not going to let a little thing like body-crippling sickness get in my way of winning that money!” I took a bunch of daytime Nyquil and made my way into the city, barely cognizant of my surroundings all the while. With only my deck in hand, I came to the hotel and had no trouble finding the location of the tournament. This was because the line was several hundred people long, and snaked down a flight of stairs and into the lobby of the hotel.
The line was longer than the line to get Superman #75, packed tighter than a Mardi Gras parade, and sounded louder than the first stage a Jazzfest. At least, these were my perceptions as I stood there, wanting to get off my feet until the first round started, my head completely burning with sickness.
I finally made my way to the front of the line and registered for the tournament, a process which took about half an hour. I semi-recognized the people working behind the counter, but I absolutely couldn’t place where I’d seen them before. They were frantically running around, screaming instructions at one another. If I were more aware, I might have made the connection – but I did not at the time, and it would be nearly a year later before I would realize that these people (Glen, Brian, and Karla,) were the same people at Jim Hanley’s in November of 1992 and the same people who would I would see some months down the road at Neutral Ground.
The tournament began, and the format was Type One, single elimination. The turnout? Over six hundred people. This was before the Pro Tour, before Grand Prix, and was an event relegated mainly to the Magic players of the Northeast. I want you to consider how insane this turnout was by modern standards. There was virtually no internet advertising for this tournament. If you were from out of the tri-state area, the only way to find out about the New York Magic tournament was through word of mouth. Over six hundred people had shown up to play Magic, and I had come from a pool where eighty was considered a great day!
I quickly trounced my first two opponents, and took as much time as possible to lay my head down between rounds. The medicine was helping slightly, but I still felt completely out of sorts. It was in the third round where everything became lucid. The pairings were announced, and I trudged up to wall to see the name and seat of my next opponent. A smile crossed my face. My head instantly cleared. Out of the hundreds of people in the room, this was a name I recognized.
Shahrad Sassouni.
This name might mean nothing to anyone else who reads this column, but Shahrad was a former friend of mine from Great Neck. After I began going to school in New York City, I had a complete and utter falling out with my group of friends from Long Island. These were the guys I was friends with all through grade and middle school, and the falling out was particularly nasty. Maybe it was a natural progression of things – they were a group obsessed with Dungeons and Dragons, while I was beginning to pursue other interests at the time. Maybe I wasn’t an easy person to get along with. Maybe separation was made easier by the actual physical separation I had by attending a different school – they spent their days together while I was off in Manhattan. Either way, it was real, and it hurt.
Shahrad was one of the people from my former group of friends. I hadn’t seen him in years. I sat down, and Shahrad was already at the table. I couldn’t help but smile as I shuffled up my deck for the first game. It wasn’t because I’d seen an old friend for the first time in a while. It wasn’t because I thought that fences could be mended and old wounds healed. It was because I knew, without a shadow of a doubt, that I was going to completely kick his ass this match and I was going to enjoy doing it. This was revenge. This was revenge for leaving me in the cold, for tearing away my comfort in the world while I was transitioning in life. This was payback for being beaten up by our ‘friend’ Joe in Josh Levin’s basement the last time I saw this group. I was going to win, and that was that.
My deck was in control and I let him know it. I don’t even remember what deck he had, other than it consisted of large creatures. I Hymned him on the second turn, and had myself a 3/4 Serra Angel on turn three via Animate Dead. I also had a Hypnotic Specter that turn as well, thanks to the magic of Dark Ritual. I beat him to death with those two creatures in short order. In the second game, I had the absolute God draw – on the first turn, I Mind Twisted his entire hand, thanks to a Lotus/Dark Ritual/Mox draw. On the next turn, I animated one of his creatures again. On the turn after, I animated a second creature. That game was over before it even began.
I shook his hand and gave him the”better luck next time” line, and then reported the match result. It didn’t matter that I was completely sick, or that I still had five rounds to go in order to win the tournament – I had just beaten someone who I felt had wronged me in the past, and it felt good. I lost in the next round to mana screw – although how could you not with my deck – and then started back home, my fever beginning to act up again. I didn’t win anything on the day, but I had gotten my first taste of big tournament experience, and had gotten to knock out somebody for whom I had a personal dislike.
Petty? Yes.
Extremely satisfying? Even more so.
Ben can be reached at [email protected]