At the end of yesterday’s column, I was telling you about my crazy, stupid early days in Magic (Winter 1998 – Spring 1999). They had nothing to do with winning or figuring out the best cards for our decks. It was about hanging out with the gang.
Friday night was date night (for those who had them). Magic night was Saturday night. Saturday night was for getting together at my apartment or Jason’s condo and playing Magic around a kitchen table, music thumping (or blaring, if you lived next door), alcohol and chips flowing.
We didn’t care about making sure we had four of every “best” card in the deck. We just wanted to play. Our decks were usually more than sixty cards. At any point in the game, Jason or my brother Jonathan might tap their decks, signaling a halt in play for a smoke break.
“Wait a second! You just wanted to play? You didn’t care about tuning your deck? What kind of Magic player are you?”
Okay, to be fair, none of us wanted to lose. Who does? But, winning wasn’t the be all and end all of playing Magic. As long as we played well, didn’t completely roll over, had fun, maybe made a cool play or two, we were good even if we didn’t win a game all night. Why? How could that be? Because we were hanging out with our friends.
We had our pet decks and silly ideas. John, for example, had a Goblin-Wall deck that he sometimes still whips out. He’d run four Wall of Stone, four Wall of Spears, and many Goblins. Those included four Goblin Masons, even though he was almost assured to be the only one ever running walls. Whenever he had to kill one of his own Walls because a Goblin Mason died, he’d say, “That’s okay; it’s part of my plan.” To this day, after six years, we’re still wondering what that plan is.
As often happens, big creatures would rule the day since none of us owned Wrath of God. (To be more precise, John owned a couple, but he didn’t play White.) Jason loved getting his Child of Gaea out on the third turn (first turn – Forest, Llanowar Elves; second turn – Forest, Priest of Titania; third turn – Forest, Child of Gaea). Of course, he hated it when Jonathan would cast Dark Banishing on it or Remove Soul while he was casting it. As we all know, though, if you’re the biggest threat, people will be gunning for you.
We’d get in four or so games in a night, depending on whether anyone had to make a beer run or whether we had enough food. I use the word “food” loosely, of course. There were no vegetables involved, even on the pizzas. The only thing “healthy” about any of it was the “lite” beer and the fact that pretzels have no cholesterol.
Alcohol was the second-biggest reason we didn’t play with expensive cards. You see, John had a habit of pouring his drink – no matter how often we told him – on the table on which we were playing the games.
“John, how many times do I have to tell you to pour it over by the sink?”
“Don’t worry. I’m not… whoops. Sorry.”
I have many cards that smell like Samuel Adams Honey Wheat and Michelob Genuine Draft.
Magic was actually relaxing and fun at that point. You see, we knew nothing of tournaments.
Then, we lost our innocence. We had a rules question. I think it had to do with whether the “you” on Urza’s Armor meant just the player or the player and all of his creatures, too. Don’t laugh. We didn’t have anyone to explain the rules to us, and those ridiculous little books that came in the Urza’s Saga tournament decks weren’t a whole lot of help, either. Since we didn’t have anyone to ask, we turned, as people often do today, to the internet. We found a group that answered rules questions. Those nice folks told us about tournaments. We located a store in our area that held weekly tournaments.
About six months into our Magic “careers,” we decided to head down to a store called The KGB (Knoxville Gaming Bureau) that, it turned out, was owned and run by a guy I had known for years through the comic book scene, one Ziggy McMillan.
My brother and I were pretty stoked. Jonathan had been playing this Blue/Black Shadow deck that seemed to own me and the rest of our gang, even in multi-player free-for-alls. We couldn’t block anything, but he sure could deal with our stuff. If he couldn’t kill it or bounce it, he countered it. Me, I had a Red Land Destruction deck. I’d make it so you couldn’t play anything and then burn you out or kill you with a Hulking Cyclops. Those were the days.
This was in the Summer of 1999. We got rolled like a drunk lottery winner in the French Quarter. Everywhere we turned, there were Powder Kegs and Masticores and Yawgmoth’s Bargains and – Holy Ship on a Shingle! – are those enchantments actually attacking?
It didn’t take us long to realize that we needed some other cards if we wanted to do well in tournaments. Our decks packed with commons and uncommons (and the odd rare that we just happened to have gotten from a random pack) were no match for the decks we’d faced. No problem. We could just buy them right there at the store.
Whoops.
No, we couldn’t. The prices were too high for us. We couldn’t afford ten, twelve, fifteen, or twenty bucks for a single card. Some of the decks we saw had five or six different cards in that price range, and there were four of each of them in the deck. We couldn’t justify those prices, not when my brother’s whole deck cost less than a set of Cursed Scrolls. We had other things we had to do with our money. We had rent to pay, electric bills, insurance, food. You know, mundane stuff.
It was on the way home that we decided that we’d have to come up with cheap ways to win if we still wanted to play in tournaments. I can still remember the conversation:
“Can you believe how expensive some of those decks were?”
“Yeah. I’m pretty sure I could win if spent my entire month’s rent on one deck. You know what, though? I wonder if they could win without so many expensive cards in their decks.”
“Probably not. The real question is: can we?”
“Oh, man, it would be so cool to beat some of those guys with thirty-dollar decks. They’d just cry like little girls.”
We agreed that, if we were going to play in tournaments, we would just have to use the cards we had and somehow make them work. It was either that or simply not play in tournaments. We couldn’t give up tournaments, though. We were too competitive, and we’d been bitten by the tourney bug. We’d just have to win on our own terms. Even if we couldn’t win the entire tourney, we could at least use the cheap cards that we had to beat some of the four-hundred-dollar decks once in a while. It was our mission.
Soon, it became my obsession.
Tune in tomorrow – same web site, same column – for the fifteen-dollar deck that ruined the local scene for the Most Unstoppable Decks Ever.
Chris Romeo
CBRomeo-at-Travelers-dot-com