The Origins theme week over at MagictheGathering.com has had me waxing nostalgic of late. I’ve been playing Magic a really long time – since Unlimited and Arabian Nights packs were available for purchase – but I often forget just how disconnected that time is for many of those who play the game now. That really hit home recently when discussing Maelstrom Pulse and comparing it to Vindicate. Jay and I were of the opinion that, while Pulse is a great card, Vindicate is clearly better. Michael Rooks disagreed and didn’t seem swayed by the idea of being able to hit a land made the card so much better. “Of course, I wasn’t around to play Vindicate so that might be why I’m not seeing it.” That kinda rocked me back on my heels – Michael, one of the top local players, had never actually played Vindicate, a card that I really don’t consider to be old school.
Then I realize Apocalypse came out in 2001 — eight years ago! Man, time flies…
My Magic journey began in late 1993. At the time my gaming habits were schizophrenic – I had friends I played RPGs with (D&D, Beyond the Supernatural, Dark Sun), including board games, and then I had my card-playing friends (Bridge, Spades, Hearts, Canasta). There weren’t many friends who liked both, so I split my gaming time between them.
One day in November 1993 I was reading White Wolf, a magazine that covered the World of Darkness RPG games like Vampire, Werewolf, and Mage. It also did reviews on games by other companies, and I ran across fantasy-themed card game called Magic. There was an obvious high-fantasy flavor to the game, which of course appealed to my love of D&D. Yet it was played with cards, which of course appealed to my love of card games – shuffling up and playing what you’re dealt. Then I read another interesting twist…
It was a collectible fantasy card game. As someone who used to collect Star Wars cards and Comic Books, Magic was throwing a third hook deep into my psyche. I had to get some Magic cards!
I was only aware of one hobby store in Richmond at the time, the place where I picked up my role-playing stuff, so I ran on down there after work one afternoon, and sure enough they had some Magic. I bought 2 starter decks of Unlimited and four booster packs of Arabian Nights. It was tough not to just rip all the decks and packs open, but I saved a deck and two booster packs in the hopes I could get one of my buddies to buy ‘em and try the game out with me.
Cracking open the starter deck, I was blown away by the artwork and flavor text on the cards, the arcane symbols, the mysterious rules terminology – it was all so incredibly cool. A sizzling Lightning Bolt, a Benalish Hero, an Unsummon spell… and then I saw it. One of the rares.
I just stared in awe. I knew instinctively that this was one bad-assed creature. While the other creatures in the stack of cards had stats like 1/1, 2/2 or 3/4, this guy was a friggin’ EIGHT/EIGHT! He looked like Swamp Thing on metabolic steroids.
And he trampled! I wasn’t sure exactly what that meant, but it sounded even more bad-assed.
He was also incredibly Green – look at all those Green mana symbols, in his casting cost, in the rules text. He demanded Green mana every turn or he dealt damage to you.
Not only a trampling bad-ass… he was a dangerous trampling bad-ass!
Yeah, I was hooked in deep.
I convinced by good friend Nuge to buy the other packs, so we took ourselves over to The Village Café to drink some beers and figure out how this game worked. Our decks were horrible, a menagerie of colors, no concept of mana curve and too few lands. Even reading the rules, we couldn’t quite figure out how to play Interrupts at first.
But we had an awesome time; we were both hooked.
We did a little trading of lands and colored cards, with me trying to get more Forests and Green cards to build around my Force of Nature. I didn’t realize the mistake of trading my Terror to Nuge until he hit my big boy with it. What?! I was stunned; how could a force of nature be terrified?
The next day both of us went up to the shop to buy some more cards; turns out he was getting kind of low so he limited us to 3 packs apiece. Seemed reasonable… but once we opened packs and started seeing more and more of these Magic cards, we wanted even more! Also, the Arabian Nights packs were actually running more than their suggested retail price of 1.99 because the owner was unable to get more from the distributor. We bought a few more Arabian packs for 3.99 but weren’t too happy about the price increase.
Nuge called me about a week later and told me he found another place that sold Magic cards, a comic shop not too far away called Dave’s. We drove out there, and sure enough he had Magic packs! We could get 10 packs of Unlimited, but his Arabian packs were selling for 5.99 – outrageous! I grudgingly bought one just because Arabian Nights had such cool, flavorful cards.
Not long afterwards I got all my long-time role-playing gamer buddies hooked on Magic too. Each week we’d get together on a Friday or Saturday night, bring a bunch of beer and snacks and gather ‘round the table for a big 6-8 man group game. All of us would have bought another pack or two since the last time we got together, so there was always the pleasant (or sometimes unpleasant) shock of discovery of some new card popping out there.
We also played for ante, a rule that was included in the original game that has long since gone away. Group games were particularly exciting because everyone would flip the top card into the middle of the table (and you’d pray for a land to show up off yours) and the winner of the game would get at least a couple new cards. Sometimes we’d get to drinking and talking smack and declare a “Death Match,” where when you killed someone you got to flip through their deck and pick your ante. Needless to say, many favorite cards got passed around through various decks, because it was bad form to get a card in ante and not play with it (and thus make it available for future ante).
Playing for ante probably sounds half-insane to newer Magic players, but at the time we really had no concept of the value of “singles.” Sure, you had your favorite cards, but if you lost them in ante it was usually not too difficult to trade it back if you really wanted it.
I have a great “bad-beats” story that involves ante. One night in one of our group games, I ended up flipping into the ante stack a weird new card I’d recently opened, a little ol’ artifact called Mox Pearl. I wasn’t real sure about the Mox Pearl – sure, I could see the value of acceleration, playing a land and the Mox in one turn – but it also seemed extraordinarily vulnerable. At the time, several players were packing Nevinyrral’s Disk, and all I could see was that the Mox was like a land that could get Disked away – how awful was that? So it didn’t break my heart when Al’s girl Jill won the game and scooped up the ante stack.
The next game was the last game of the night, and I ended up winning. I was particularly excited because Jill’s ante was Serra Angel, one of the few that anyone owned. I personally had never opened one. Jill was particularly upset to lose the Serra Angel because it was one of the best multiplayer cards around. Not only was it a decent sized creature, not only did it fly over the heads of most of our creatures, but it didn’t tap to attack! So it could smack somebody on the attack and yet still play defense against the rest of the table.
Jill cornered me as I was packing up. “Bennie, your Mox Pearl was a rare, right?”
“Yeah.”
“I’ll trade it back to you for the Serra, straight up. Serra’s only an uncommon.”
I winced a bit. I’d really hoped she wouldn’t have asked for it back; I’m a nice guy and I was raised to be chivalrous so if a woman asks me to do something for her it’s hard for me to say no.
But I soooooo wanted to experience the power of playing Serra on my team.
“Okay, sure – but can you do me a favor? Let me play her once and then I’ll trade her back to you, okay?”
Jill was a little disappointed, but it was a reasonable request.
Sadly, that Mox never made it back to me. At the time there was this new dude that would come around and play a little Magic with us on occasion. None of us knew him very well; one of us had run into him at the hobby shop and he’d asked to come play Magic with us, but what he seemed most interested in was trading. What we didn’t realize until later was this guy was in touch with the budding new competitive Virginia Magic scene, and was very much aware of the value of certain cards in duels. Many of these cards weren’t nearly as valued to us as multiplayers, and so he gradually relieved us of our Moxen and Time Walks and Mind Twists and Psionic Blasts and Juzam Djinns and hooked us up with Cockatrice and Shivan Dragons and Control Magics and Nevinyrral’s Disks and Contract from Below.
Jill even got two Serra Angels for that Pearl Mox.
It wasn’t until a year or two later when I discovered Scrye Magazine’s price guide. Flipping through there I was shocked at how much the Moxen were going for – $25, for one card? That was insane! That has to be a mistake… and yet each time I picked up the magazine, the Moxen crept up a couple dollars in price. Black Lotus was rising higher even faster. It didn’t take long before I realized how badly all of us had been snookered by that shady trader who had long since moved on.
And yet we’d still had loads of fun with all those “sub-par” cards that we’d gladly traded for, because those cards tended to be dripping with flavor. We were all hard-core role-playing gamers, and each of us tended to assume a certain style of play depending on the cards we put in our decks. For instance, Al used to terrorize us with a Mono-Black “necromancer” deck featuring all the undead (Skeletons, Bog Wraith, Sengir Vampire and such) he could scrounge up. He particularly liked to Terror our big monsters and then Animate Dead to have them join his undead army. In response I built a Mono-White deck I called Knights of Redemption that featured lots of anti-black cards, and played it very much in the spirit of Van Helsing anti-undead crusaders. Yeah, it was pretty vicious against Al’s deck, but he could often win some other players as allies to help keep him alive. Sometimes though, they were glad to have Necro Al go down in holy flames.
I’ve since moved away from investing as much into the flavor of the game and much more into neat card interactions. But I’ve missed that flavor and bringing an RPG sensibility to the game. So I’m shaking things up a bit for the next EDH game, happening next Saturday at Richmond Comix.
When Karrthus, Tyrant of Jund appeared in Alara Reborn, I decided to retool my Bladewing the Risen EDH deck, adding green and switching to Karrthus as my general. I’ve also been pulling together cards that feel more like they belong in a Dragon deck. I usually pack Sylvan Library in my Green decks, but what do Dragons care about libraries? I’ve also been grabbing more proactive cards with the intention of being a predator deck – once I have dragons hitting the board, I’m going to be on the hunt for prey. Maybe it’s someone who looks weak. Maybe it’s someone who’s messed with my (Karrthus the Dragon’s) stuff and has evoked my Wrath. Maybe it’s someone who’s in the wrong place at the wrong time. But somebody is going to get smoked.
To quote Smaug the Dragon from The Hobbit: “My armour is like tenfold shields, my teeth are swords, my claws spears, the shock of my tail a thunderbolt, my wings a hurricane, and my breath death!”
Sure, being overly aggressive isn’t usually the best way to win a big EDH game, but my goal isn’t to win – it’s to put the Dragon in EDH, to evoke the spirit of Smaug, to both amuse the other players and maybe terrorize some of them just a little bit, to force each of them to figure out – are they going to be prey? Are they going to curry favor? Or are they going to be a dragon-slaying hero?
So, EDH fans, I ask you – what sort of “dragon-style” cards would you include in your Karrthus deck, other than the obvious Dragons? I have not yet finalized my deck and so I’m certainly interesting in hearing your ideas in case I’ve missed something cool.
P.S. Standard
Before I wrap this up, I did want to touch on Standard real quick. Last week I laid out the evidence that Standard isn’t nearly so diverse and healthy as the conventional wisdom seems to suggest in the hopes of getting through to people at Wizards for future set considerations. Many of you came through in a big way in the forums, adding to the conversation, and I want to thank you for your contributions. Since then, Grand Prix: Seattle has come and gone, completely crushing the new Alara-heavy combo deck Cascade Swans out of existence with a completely unsurprising resurgent Lorwyn-fueled Faerie menace.
And yet there were two decks that made the Top 8 that I found very intriguing. The first is the one that ended up winning:
Creatures (29)
- 4 Doran, the Siege Tower
- 3 Gaddock Teeg
- 4 Treefolk Harbinger
- 4 Wilt-Leaf Liege
- 4 Noble Hierarch
- 3 Qasali Pridemage
- 4 Knotvine Paladin
- 3 Dauntless Escort
Lands (21)
Spells (10)
I’ve always liked Doran and have done fairly well with him in various decks since Lorwyn, and while this deck owes a good deal of power to Lorwyn block, it also makes good use out of a lot of Alara block cards. I especially like the 4 Path/4 Pulse removal suite, giving the deck incredibly good and flexible threat response. The card that really has me curious is Knotvine Paladin. Just reading his abilities and stats has left me underwhelmed; sure, in ideal circumstances he can “go large” but I can’t help but figure even in those situations he’ll just get chumped, and meanwhile he gets swept away by Fallout and Infest with all the infinite number of other 1 and 2 drops. Is the mana not good enough to run the awesome Putrid Leech?
I also really liked this one:
Creatures (19)
Lands (26)
Spells (15)
Sideboard
When we were working on our Cascade deck at the beginning of Alara Reborn Standard, I pushed my deck down this path of a more “aggro” vision, but I obviously didn’t get to this point. This deck looks like a hoot to play despite the Cryptic Commands (grumble), and I just so happened to have picked up 3 Syggs about two months ago.
Anyway, this week’s FNM is Standard and I was planning on playing this interesting Scapeshift/Lord of Extinction deck I’ve been noodling around with, but it’s still very rough around the edges and untested… and now I’ve got these two powerhouse fun decks to tempt me. Which one of these would you recommend?
That’s it for this week – have a great weekend!
Take care…
Bennie
starcitygeezer AT gmail DOT com
What I’m listening to:
Valentino, by Diane Birch
Low Rider, by War
I Like You So Much Better When You’re Naked, by Ida Maria
Love and Happiness, by Al Green
Lapdance, by N.E.R.D.