Over the past three days, I’ve tried to give you some insight into how I went from Guy Who Had Never Seen a Magic Card to Guy Who Writes for StarCityGames.com about Cheap, Rogue Decks. I did this because there are people who want to know why I do what I do. Others have never met me but are still convinced that they have me pegged simply because they’ve read my writing. I fear that they’re dead on.
As I said before, humans are complex. No one wants to feel that they can be so easily pegged. I have a sign in my cubicle that reads:
You are special.
You are unique.
Just like everyone else.
The sad fact is that, regardless of how complex we feel we are, we can all be quickly assessed, and the assessor usually won’t be very far off of the mark. For example, a lot of people think that I have a chip on my shoulder. They’ve read my stuff, and they’ve read between the lines. “If he likes winning and likes playing Magic, why else would he insist on building cheap decks?”
Yup, I do have a chip on my shoulder. A big one. I always have, as long as I can remember, anyway. When you’re the shortest, fattest slowest kid in your grade and your last name is Romeo, you tend to get picked on. A lot. When you’re forced to go to the local, private, preppy “rich kids’ school” and everyone knows that the only reason you get to attend is because your Mom teaches there (we got a major discount/scholarship) and not because your parent have money, you’re an outsider. Chips upon chips.
Then, a wonderful thing happened. I went away to college. Tulane in New Orleans. Just like Ben Bleiweiss, except a decade or so earlier. The funny thing was that, among all of the very, very rich kids at Tulane, I learned to be at peace with not having money. (It’s funny how much philosophy I absorbed – real philosophy, not Chicken Soup philosophy – when I was actually in engineering school.) I realized that, while money was obviously necessary (you have to pay for rent, food, water, et al, right?), there were indeed more important things in life. I could look around at all of the unhappy souls who had more money than I’d ever see to know that. It’s not that I’d mind being rich. On the contrary. I’d love to have so much money that I could just buy things for the people I love whenever I wanted to. I just wasn’t going to waste my life trying to get there. Trust me. No one lies on their death bed saying, “I should have worked more overtime.” Most likely, if they have regrets about wasting time, it’s about the time they didn’t spend with family and friends. I didn’t want to be one of those people.
I went to law school hoping to change the world or, at least, help a few folks who hadn’t been as fortunate as I’d been. That didn’t quite work out. Turns out that ethical lawyers aren’t very employable in Tennessee, even when they graduated cum laude while working full-time to put themselves through law school. (It was harder to find a legal job than it was to find an electrical engineering job. I wouldn’t take an engineering job from anyone who built munitions or weapons systems. Not easy to find a job that fit that bill in 1988.) At 32, I found this great game called Magic: The Gathering. It was a game, but you could also be creative with it. The songwriter/musician/writer in me loved that. The collectible cards part of Magic reminded me of collecting baseball cards as a kid. I loved holding a deck of Magic cards. I loved the feel of the cards in my hand as I shuffled and drew. (I hate sleeves; I want to feel the cards, not the sleeves, in my hand.) I was in heaven. It was almost ruined for me when I found out about tournaments. There, I met people wielding money as weapons, almost literally. Magic is a war game, after all. At first, it appeared to me that the person with the most money to spend would win. Of course, I now know that this isn’t completely true. It is, however, typically true. Pro-Tour caliber decks are expensive. Sure, once in a while a top-tier deck is cheap. Decks like Blue/Green Madness, though, are very, very few and extremely far between. Winning tournaments means spending money on the rares.
I was a bit depressed by this turn of events. Rares come in packs at a ratio of one for every fourteen other cards. It seemed a bit heavy-handed to play with twenty or thirty rares in a sixty-card deck. On the other hand, how could I blame people for wanting to win? When I’d played baseball, didn’t I always do everything (within the rules) to win? Of course, I did. The rules of tournament Magic didn’t limit the cost of the deck or the percentage of rares (although, I still think there should be a format that does).
Yet, it still felt unfair. If there’s one thing about me that people need to know to understand why I am the way I am, it’s that I hate unfair. I would do my best to teach these guys – and the whole world – a lesson about money and winning Magic games.
Kinda prideful, isn’t it, thinking that I could reshape the Magic-playing community and show everyone that cheap decks could beat expensive, well-tuned decks? That’s another thing you need to know. I have a pretty big ego. Of course, I’m still trying to build cheap decks that can win more than they lose. I’m stubborn that way.
There you have it. I’m a stubborn, egomaniac with a chip on his shoulder and no money, and I want the world to be fair even though I know it’s inherently unfair.
Recipe for disaster, doncha think? I mean, there is no way that I, Chris Romeo, can change the face of tournament Magic. I know that. I truly do.
Yet, I keep on doing it. All for you. Or maybe just for me. Could be both. Could be neither. We don’t really know, do we? Can you ever know me?
Along the way, the downside (i.e. my lack of success at the game) has been more than offset by the upside (i.e. I’ve met some wonderful people). I’ve already told you about the Allens yesterday. There’s also Bill Bryant, one of the best Magic players I know. He decided the night before States 2002 to play this new Astral Slide deck that he’d heard about. He’d never played it before. The next day, he came within one game of making Top Eight. Through Bill, I also met Charles Dykes, another rogue deck guy and the designer of Ravager Affinity. Charles is the guy who continues to try to play Pyroclasm during my combat phase. Someday, I’ll teach him. I play more Magic at Charles’ house than anywhere else. His wife, Jen, is more than accommodating to us loud geeks during playtesting, though I do notice that we now play in the garage rather than the dining room. At least when the weather’s not gorgeous like it is now. (Note the gang: we owe Jen a big thank you present.) There’s also Joe and Kerri Al-Khazraji. Joe and Kerri (more often Kerri) are our tournament organizers. They were the couple who had the secret wedding in December, the one I was invited to but didn’t go to since I thought it was just an engagement party. Instead, I had to visit family in Podunk. I missed a belly dancer, dagnabbit!
Tune in tomorrow – same web site, same column – when I get lighter with some funny, great, and horrible plays and answer some of the e-mail and forum comments generated by the past four days.
Chris Romeo
CBRomeo-at-Travelers-dot-com