A little bit of Magic

I can clearly remember, back in the days of my youth, this one particular event.

It had been my birthday and my best friend at the time gave me a roll of quarters. I used to go to the comic book store1 on a semi-regular basis at the time and on the next visit soon after this one birthday, I had that roll of quarters burning a hole in my pocket.

I walked into the comic book store and after looking around a bit, grabbing the few X-Men comics that I was into at the time, I walked up to the register. It was there that I saw something that would end up changing my life. It was a Starter deck of 60 cards of Revised Edition Magic: the Gathering. I believe that at the time it cost just slightly more than the $10 worth of quarters that I had in my pocket and had to ask my mother to help me with the rest of it, but I just had to have it.

I had been reading a magazine called Wizard at this time, as it was the preeminent magazine for comic books, but it did cover over things as well. It had been in an issue of Wizard magazine that I first learned of the existence of this card game. I have been a gamer pretty much all my life, starting with video games, so this card game caught my eye and intrigued me.

I bought it. I didn’t have anything truly valuable in the deck. Even by today’s standards. But it was a start. I never did find anyone to play the game with back where I lived at the time but I did try several times to do so. What’s really funny is that I tried then to get my best friend to play the game, but he wouldn’t… until years later after I had moved away and he moved further north. I guess he didn’t want to play with me. That didn’t stop me from getting more cards however. My mother even bought some for me without me ever asking for them!

I didn’t get to play the officially with the paper cards for years, but I did end up buying the MicroProse PC adaptation. I loved that game and it was through it that I officially learned how to play the game. I would just sit in the deck builder, build decks and play the AI. I rarely played the “core” game that the game included, something that I actually mostly regret now.

I didn’t get to play real life Magic all that much until my family moved over to where we still live today. Here, I finally found others that played the game and I started buying cards like crazy. I was working at a local attraction place at the time, in the redemption center, when I met guys who will just slightly younger (by like a year or two) who were into the game. I played a few games with the guys, but no matter how little I got to play, I was buying cards.

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Then a little while later, I got a job at a local McDonalds, where I met a gentleman that I am going to simply call Donnie. I got to talking to the guy and soon found out that he played the game. He was about four years younger than I, but upon finding out that he played too, we challenged each other to play. We brought cards to work the next day and played a game during our lunch break.

We became fast friends, with M:TG in common, and started getting together to play often, him inviting others to come play occasionally as well. And it was at this time that I really began to take the game seriously. This was the time frame that I started to really buy large amounts of cards. Before this, I’d buy packs, maybe two, three or four at a time. But I would eventually realize that I could buy entire booster boxes. Back then, they cost maybe $75 roughly, it wasn’t that bad.

I will add here that there was no local game store in the area that I live. I live in a small town that’s at least close to an hour away from the closest big city. This made it hard for Donnie and I to find places to play the game outside of his own dwelling. I still lived with my parents at the time, so playing there was out of the question (I was in my early 20s…). We’d play just about anywhere we could find but we also made trips to the city on occasion to find game stores.

But then, Donnie got stupid. Now, I am not here to draw anyone through the mud, so I am only going to talk briefly about this. One day, I get a phone call and headed over to Donnie’s place. That was when I found out that Donnie and another guy decided in a weak moment to steal someone’s M:TG cards. This whole situation ended with Donnie going to jail for a few days2 and soured me almost completely on M:TG.

Just before all of that, I did get into Magic Online, which is an online version of Magic that is still up and running to this day. After that happened with Donnie, if I ever played Magic, it was on Magic Online since my circle of friends pretty much revolved around Donnie. I ended up eventually walking away from even Magic Online. The last cards that I bought before that was Tenth Edition cards, so this would have been around mid-2007.

I took a long break from Magic for a while. But one day I was in the Wal-Mart that was next the place that I working at the time. This was roughly early to mid-2015. I found sets and cards there for sets that had been recently released and I just couldn’t help myself. I started to go crazy again, but by this time, finally, a local game store had finally opened up in my little town and I had someplace that I could go and play at!

But it didn’t last long, only about a year. But during this time, I had attended my very first pre-releases, Friday Night Magic and other events revolving around the game. I had reconnected with Donnie and tried to get him back into the game, but I wasn’t very successful. But I really enjoyed this time playing Magic again. I even got one of the really rare full art non-basic “pain search land” from the Zendikar Expeditions set, which I think was the card Polluted Delta3. I had sold it to someone who bought a booster box for me as a trade.

But I went through some rough stuff in my life at this time, so I couldn’t keep up with Magic anymore and I had to leave it yet again. Strange how life does this to you, right?

Then again in late 2021, I once again found myself getting really into Magic. A new game store had opened up in area that I was living in at the time and when I saw it the first time, I just HAD to stop and in less than three months, I was in there playing mostly board games and trying to get games of Dungeons and Dragons going. But eventually, watching others play Magic got me back into playing and buying. The first set that I got to really buy a lot of was Kamigawa: Neon Dynasty and I got to do pre-releases and the such once again and was loving it. But alas, it didn’t get to last.

I had left for two years (actually, it was more like 20 months) and when I returned, I needed a job and I actually did get hired on at the store… for about three weeks. Bad crap happened, I lost the job. But thankfully, I recovered pretty well. That was two years ago this month in fact. I never got back into Magic at that point (I bought a tiny bit and even got to run a single Magic draft that I also had to play in to get it off the ground). I stayed away from the store for close to a year at that point.

Since then, I have stayed away from Magic. Until here recently. I have a coworker at work that has got into the game through his girlfriend and it’s has inspired me to get back into the game. I bought some cards for the new set that just came out and everything. But it also has me wanting to go through all of my old cards and organize them and maybe start recording what I have. Honestly, I am giving serious consideration to beginning to sell some of the cards, but I have a LOT of cards that I have gathered over the years. But we’ll see….

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