Me and Magic - an Autumn Romance

So, I got into Magic the Gathering a lot later in life than almost everyone else I know who plays it. I wasn't even aware of the game in the 90s - after college, I made friends with a few people who played it casually - they tried to get me into the game, and I'd play a few hands with them, but it never really got its hooks into me. I could tell right from the beginning that it wasn't nearly as much fun playing with their decks as it would be to play with my own - the game play side didn't appeal to me nearly as much as the creative deck building portion. However, I had zero interest in spending hundreds of dollars on a single game when there were so many other things I could spend "fun money" on. That was me and Magic for 5-6 years - something I'd play once every few months while we were waiting for the last player to show up for D&D.

Then last March, shortly after my 28th birthday, one of the guys at work decided he wanted to get back into Magic, and talked 5 of us into buying a box, splitting it up, and doing a few drafts with it. "We won't play Constructed" he said. "We'll limit our financial exposure" he said. "None of us will end up dropping hundreds of dollars on the game" he said. "It'll be fun!" he said. He talked me into it. We split a box of Shards of Alara five ways.

He was wrong about everything except the fun - it was a LOT of fun. The cards had these crisp, clean borders, more interesting art then my friend's older cards, they weren't all faded and worn, a bunch of them were these cool gold cards, and there were a lot of BIG creatures. Swinging Hellkite Overlords and 8/8 Masters of Etherium at each other was a lot of fun. I went Esper in our first draft, picking up some cool robots, and managed to win a couple matches, ending up 3rd out of 5. Second draft I don't remember as well, but I think I went Naya and was 3rd out of the 5 of us again. Anyway, once that was done, I actually owned some magic cards, and had a couple ideas for some decks. I bought a few booster packs and increased my collection, built an Esper deck, and went back to the friends I'd been playing occasionally playing Magic with and proudly announced that I had a deck of my own to challenge them with. I of course got my clock cleaned 9 out of 10 times, but I'd gotten the bug. I got some more boosters, and decided to splurge on a fat pack of Conflux. One of my friends donated a few hundred "extra commons" to me. I made my artifact deck better, and I built two more decks - one revolving around Mayael of the Anima and giant beaters, and a Bant exalted deck with Ardent Plea and Jhessian Infiltrator. I kept buying a couple of boosters a week, and when Reborn came out I immediately got another fat pack.

Eventually, I bought my first singles - I decided I needed Master Transmuter enough that I would spend $20 on four cards (a gigantic overpayment in my opinion at that time, but I needed her). I ripped apart my Esper deck and rebuilt it as a "sick" combo deck centering around her. The reward was immediate - within a couple of cycles of tweaking, my artifact deck was feared at our kitchen table - if my friends saw my Sphinx of the Steel Wind sleeves coming out, they put their "Birds" and "Dragons" decks away and reached for their "Graveyard" and "Oath of Druids" decks (not to be confused with Legacy/Vintage caliber Reanimate or Oath decks).

That was a lot of fun. We kept playing Magic, 3-4 times a month, and we kept brewing decks. Eventually, we all had to start upping the power level of our combos a little bit to keep up with each other. Group game politics were key.

After a little while with this, I decided to take my Bant deck down to the local shop and play at a Friday Night Magic event. I didn't expect to do very well, but I was interested to see how it would go. The second round, I played against a real Bant deck - we both had Rhox War Monk, Seaside Citadel, and Ardent Plea, but he had Birds of Paradise, Noble Hierarchs, Rafiqs, and Finest Hours. My deck cost under $100. His cost much much more. I got destroyed in swift order. My other 3 matches were about the same, though there was a much greater variety of decks delivering the beatdown to me. I decided that it would cost way too much to be competitive there and went back to the kitchen table.

Back at the kitchen table, things started to get a little incestuous. We all knew each other's decks, and as we all gradually upped the arms race, the combos started to become more and more intricate. My friend's "Sacrifice" deck started to feature 20 minute turns as various tokens into various machines and spit out more tokens which did other things. My "Thoctar-Ball" deck could wipe out every creature in play and deal lethal damage to everyone in one turn once it went off. It got a little more stale and a little less fun, and we started playing a little less often.

About that time, my buddy Ian came up to me with a brand new idea: "Let's play Standard" he said. "Lorwyn is rotating in two weeks, there's a new set, we won't need to worry about not having any cards from Lorwyn" he said. "We'll be a team and pool our cards, so we won't have to spend as much money to get the rares" he said. "That sounds like a great idea" I said. The week after Zendikar came out, I had a White Weenie deck, he had a Vampire deck, and suddenly we were doing a whole lot better than 0-4 at FNM. I started buying cards in boxes instead of fat packs, and the singles I picked up cost more like $40 than $5.

Long story short, I spend too much money and too much time on Magic now, and I wouldn't change a thing. Yesterday my DCI rating broke 1800 for the first time (which is not that impressive, but I'm still oddly proud), and tomorrow night I'm driving down to Indianapolis for Regionals on Saturday and a PTQ on Sunday. Hopefully I'll do better than my 1-3-drop/2-3-drop performance at the StarCity 5K (my only previous semi-major event). (This time I know my deck well enough that I won't need notes to tell me what to sideboard).