When we left off yesterday, I was fifteen, stupid, and had just enough money to be a danger to myself. Money doesn’t make you smart though, so I stopped buying packs after my first trade-rape experience. The local whiz, a kid from a rich neighborhood named Kia, offered me the card of my dreams (an Italian Al-abara’s Carpet, with which I was going to dominate the coffee-table games of my brother and his friend Daniel Chung, who hadn’t caught on to the fact that Serras and Sengirs were good yet), and all I had to do was give him the Rare out of the pack of Legends I’d just opened, and that seemed like a good deal because I was trying to get lucky and open that card anyway. It was only a Nether Void – it counters your spells, it can’t be good. It even admits to it, right on the card, and I’m no dummy (or so I said at the time), so I made the trade immediately. Or at least almost immediately; I may or may not have asked "Do you have this in English?" before finally accepting the trade. It would go wonderfully next to my Tawnos’ Coffin and power up my Black/White deck (though back then, I thought of it as "my deck") to make me an unstoppable fiend.
I was the kid who skipped his senior prom to play in Regionals, because it had never crossed his mind throughout high school that a girl might be something one needs to eventually puzzle out in this world. The rationale at the time was that I hated everyone I went to school with except for a dozen people I wasn’t particularly close to, and two friends who I was, and those two friends were going together, leaving me alone with a low expectation of that changing over the course of the evening. My decision was the easy one, finding a distraction that weekend (Regionals) and deciding I can’t go to a prom that Saturday night when I was playing in a tournament that afternoon. If I did well, I couldn’t attend, and the tournament was more important to me of course. Ah, how easy it was to rationalize never having to crawl out of my shell back in those days.
If you had to look at two of the cards I put into it and try and call it something that other people were playing at the time, I played a deck that could be best described as Willow-Geddon. I was done by 2:00, plenty of time to go home and get ready for the prom, if I’d had any intention of going to it once in my four bitter years of hating the rich snobs I grew up with.
This was very typical of the early me, and endemic of several years of my life. Somewhere in there, I started writing about Magic on a board of free-thinkers called Beyond Dominia, under the arrogant-as-hell nick of "Gandalf", and later took a shot at writing tournament reports (likewise arrogant-as-hell) on The Dojo. Eventually, I wrote something worthy of the front-page, and tried that as a regular column when a few others had done so successfully. The quiet ones always turn out arrogant, at least in our society of geeks, and that was me in a nutshell: angry, smart, and feeling he had something to prove to the world at large. By then, I’d had a PTQ Top 8 under my belt, and started over-analyzing Magic on the Beyond Dominia BBS, which is how I met Seth Burn initially. I figured out Cursed Scroll was good in Sligh before anyone in NY knew aside from Hashim Bello, and I finally had a solid success at Magic, making the Top 8 of the U.S. Extended National Championships playing a Pox deck I’d blatantly stolen from one Erik Kesselman (The Kessel-Gimp in Neutral Ground parlance). I used it to do bad things to good people, like Mike Pustilnik, which earned me the right to be ritualistically dissected by Jon Finkel himself in the Top 8.
Back then, as now, I always thought I had the edge on people who thought about these sorts of things a lot less often than my obsessive self, and had figured out that I wanted to protect my Cursed Scrolls and Racks enough to sideboard Hanna’s Custody when I thought my opponent might try Disenchanting them, so I threw in some Scrubland[/author]“][author name="Scrubland"]Scrublands[/author] in to support them. In my match against Jon – never to be repeated again – he drubbed me soundly game one thanks to numerous play mistakes and the fact that Land Tax trumps Bottomless Pit. By the end of game two, he had pulled my Custody over to his side of the board with a smile to tell me he’d used my sideboard card better than I had while he destroyed me.
My comfort after losing to the undisputed (at the time) best player in the world was that I’d once seen him pick his nose and wipe it in his hair on the big screens at the Pro Tour, an event I most likely imagined but otherwise used to rationalize not worrying about the fact that I lost to someone miles and miles ahead of me at this game. The things you tell yourself to make you feel better can be pretty preposterous, and somehow I was still bad enough to have a "you’ll get him next time" approach to losing to Finkel. Not too long after, I needed a job that wouldn’t screw up my college class schedule too much, and what follows odd hours as well as gaming does? The fates had their way, and I started working at Neutral Ground the following semester. In addition to all the homework I wasn’t doing there, I got to watch a lot of people play Magic.