Shortly after landing this job, I began my reign of terror as a writer, pushing the envelope to write a weekly strategy column while occasionally slinging mud, getting people to start to read the Neutral Ground website for columns, tournament reports, and other information as the newborn site grew into a popular website. Entirely too soon after starting there, I was branching out to write two columns a week because I felt I was well-informed enough about the game to have something deep and introspective to say every three to four days. What can I say – I thought a lot when I was working, and I saw a lot of people play Magic and talked about it a lot, and played tournaments for free as often as I could. Being the guy behind the counter really did teach me a lot about the game and let me get a lot better at it, though I’d already gone through most of my growing pains before getting to that point in my life. I tried to "make it", as a player and as a writer. As a player, I fixated on the Pro Tour and my quest to get there, and as I continued to fail at that goal for several years, the goal became to get there before I quit this game. As a writer, the goal was to work for Wizards doing event coverage, and I did do that… just once.
I’d hoped to get a big break as a writer, and start doing event coverage. One year, Worlds was going to be in Toronto, not too far out of the way for a road trip with Doctor Pustilnik. I’d made arrangements to share a room with Becky Hiebert and two others, not knowing it was going to be a sleep-in closet barely big enough to sleep four, even when two of them are on the floor. I had a laptop, freshly bought for the occasion at least in part because my “other” computer was the same machine I’d bought in ’95, which I have only this past month finally retired in favor of a machine that isn’t run off of hamster-power. And that’s all you needed to do coverage: your own laptop, because they were in short supply, and your own person, preferably with pulse but not necessarily required. You also have to be in with the right people, and I’d been most definitely “out” for the longest time, but here I thought was the big break into doing coverage with Josh Bennett and Toby Wachter. It was a good five days… it was great, even. I was never asked back, with no hint as to why other than that my writing style for coverage was too verbose and too dull, telling more about the technical plays than really sounds interesting on the page and less about the interplay between opponents than they were hyping at the time.
I got home afterwards and realized that was one of my two goals done before I stepped back from the game, my pride and hubris requiring both of them before I went into the West, as the elves say. Everything continued apace, with some difficulty writing my senior year through homework, tests, senior projects, graduation, and a full year of the death of failed relationships. Nothing thrilled me after a certain point – I enjoyed what I was doing, but there was very little left that I felt actually tied me to the game, especially since somewhere in there I had learned entirely too much about Vampire live-action roleplaying and found that eating up more and more of my time. At the very end, Vampire began supplanting my interest in Magic altogether as I started running my own game in New York City, on the eleventh floor of the same building that houses Neutral Ground. I’d had all the chances to shake the monkey off my back I was going to get, being within one draft of a Grand Prix Top 8, ninth at Regionals, the Top 4 of a PTQ, always bowing under some pressure or another or just not winning. Regionals I missed on tie-breakers by .15%, the Grand Prix I went “on tilt” before it had even been invented per se and abandoned the draft strategy that I’d come in with in favor of nothing good in particular, and decided I couldn’t retrieve my draft after a seventh-pick error. The new goal was, as I saw myself stepping back from the game, make the Pro Tour and either make my name or step away.
I finally did make the Pro Tour in Team Limited on a team with Seth Burn and the little-known Kevin An. And the experience of getting there thrilled me in a way that Magic hadn’t for a long time, much as I liked the annual change of season into season always giving me a new puzzle to figure out and a new chance to succeed. As an Internet writer I did fabulously, looking at the world differently than most of the rest of the Magic players around well enough to pick out advancing trends and support ideas with banal statistical evidence whenever possible. As a player, all the work wasn’t coming back with results, and I knew I was slipping away when the rewards just weren’t there to keep me connected to the world around me. Magic was changing; people were disappearing to other games or to Poker, and things were slowing down where other parts of my life were picking up and feeling incredibly vital, making me wonder why I still played this odd relic from a childhood better off forgotten.
One last splash of color, and then things went gray… and I left.