Chapter 1: How it all Began

I remember opening my first starter deck seven years ago. As I looked through my first set of sixty cards I was filled with a sense of discovery. I had no idea what each card did; I didn't have a feeling for which cards were more important than others; I didn't understand why I had so damn many of these simple looking land cards!

Over the last few months I had seen so many people at my local comic book shop pouring over this game called Magic--totally enthralled with it. I was naturally curious as to what this game was which was pushing out all the sports cards that usually sat in the glass cases at the sports card shops. So one fateful day, for a reason a can't recall, I decided to buy an Ice Age starter deck. Little did I know the time, money, and dedication I would devote to this game in the coming years.

I remember getting back from the card shop and sitting on my bed trying to figure out how to play the game. Even though there were probably plenty of people at the comic shop who would have gladly instructed me as to how to play I guess I was somewhat embarrassed to ask, so I took it upon myself to teach myself how to play. Fortunately, the instruction booklet that came with the game was very good and I learned how to play right away. I found the practice game given in the booklet to be especially helpful. I guess all those boring looking land cards are integral to the game afterall!

Now that I had some idea on how to play, I needed someone to play against! So I quickly recruited my friend Phillip to come over and try the game out. He enjoyed things with fantasy themes and was a video game addict, so I knew he was exactly the kind of person I could get hooked. At first we just split up my deck to play, but it wasn't long before we went back to the card shop to get a few more packs. In those next few months we had some fun and very memorable games.

One of my favorite parts about first starting Magic is limited card pool that you are faced with. You can't just dump four of each card into your deck because you don't have four of any cards! In fact, you would put ten of some cards in your deck if you could because it isn't printed in your rule book that you can't do otherwise! So you're left with these hard choices about what to include and not include in your deck. (Should I use that Glacial Wall or should I use Prismatic Ward?) Its these same kinds of interesting deck choices that keep me coming back to booster drafting time and time again.

My first deck was largely influenced by a few cards that I had got in my first starter deck that had immediately struck me as being very strong. The first two were Johtull Worm and Scaled Wurm. These two bad boys were the biggest creatures that me or any of my friends had ever seem. And as anyone who has just started playing Magic can tell you--big creatures are the key to victory! Another of my favorites was the classic Icy Manipulator. This card was so cool--it could stop anything. (If only it had a better looking picture.) But my best card by far was none other than Lhurgoyf. Whenever I was lucky enough to get this guy into play I all but expected my opponent to give up. One could slow the mighty Lhurgoyf down by chump blocking him, but that would only make him bigger and just delay the inevitably defeat.

Given the cards I have listed above, you can probably guess that I, like most beginning magic players, used green as one of my colors. The next color I added was blue because our games would often slow to creature stall and blue's fliers would give me a way to get in those last few hits for a victory. Finally, I added white because it had the ability to protect my beefy creatures.

My friend Phillip had a very different philosophy to deck building. He was not as easily impressed by green's raw power. He was a blue mage, and the only color he would ever even think of putting in his deck was blue. This often meant putting in suboptimal cards because of our limited card base--he didn't care. His favorite card of all was Tim, also know as the Prodigal Sorcerer. Most of the time Phillip would defeat me by locking up my ground assault with a few walls and patiently waiting until he could get out three or four Tim's. Then he would either slower destroy my army or just send the damage at me for the victory. He also played lots of counterspells because he loved to control the game. The funny thing was that when we first started playing we thought when I spell was countered the targeted spell was put back into the player's hand and not into his graveyard--and we still thought counters were strong! You can just imagine how astonished I was a few weeks later when I learned that the countered spell actually goes in the graveyard. Counterspells are broken!

After a few weeks we started to become bored with our few cards and decided to expand our collections. We would buy packs here and there, but as our collections grew we found the cards in the packs to be less and less useful. It was time to buy some singles. Buying your first singles is an interesting decision. No longer are you just putting whatever cards you can into your deck. You are now making conscious decisions to craft and mold your deck into a more efficient killing machine. And this means thinking about strategy such as the synergy of the cards in your decks and balancing the casting costs with your mana base.

So Phillip, my brother, my cousin, and I went to the local card shop (I had now hooked two more people into playing). We carefully looked over the cards sitting in the glass case. I rememebr being particularly amazed by the wide range of prices the cards had. After careful consideration I decided to buy three rares. The first was another Lhurgoyf. The first was was so good, that another one was sure to be good also. Then I needed some strategy to make the Lhurgoyfs better. So I thought to myself, "I need some way to put a lot of creatures into the graveyards to pump up the Lhurgoyfs." I found two mass destruction spells that would help this strategy--Wrath of God and Nevinyrral's Disk. So I bought one of each and I still have them both today. I can tell them from my other cards because they are both my only Unlimited versions of these cards.

So we continued to play with our new cards, bashing each other with our creatures, and having a great time. It was the Golden Age of Magic and whoever had the biggest baddest creature was sure to win. Right?