Chapter 2: Better Cards

My brother had found a magazine that listed some Type II decks from a recent tournament and began to experiment with decks similar to the ones he found there. The first deck he made a mono-black deck built on cards such as Hypnotic Specter, Dark Ritual, Hymn to Tourach, Terror, and Black Knight. I laughed at his deck--how could he hope to beat me with a pile of small common and uncommon creatures when I had mighty cards like Lhurgoyf and Shivan Dragon on my side (I'm older than my brother and had a job so I was able to afford more rare singles than him). So we each shuffled our decks, gritted our teeth, looked each other in the eye and began to duel. And you can probably guess what happened next.

I preceded to lose every game we played! My brother would often get our a first turn Hyppie and I would have to discard most of my big creatures before I ever got a chance to play them. All the while Black Knights and other small creatures would peck away at my life total until my brother could finish me with a drain life. And if I ever did get one of my badass creatures into play, it would die right away to a terror. (That's not fair--my $10 Shivan dying to his $0.05 Terror!) Something was definitely wrong here! I tried to make excuses for the losses. Maybe my brother was just getting lucky. But nomatter how much I tried to explain it away, it was slowly becoming clear to me--there is more to this game than meets the eye! There is more to this game than bashing each other with creatures!

I realized that I needed to change my game plan, but I wasn't sure what exactly needed to be done. So I did the obvious thing--if you can't beat them, then join them. I looked in the same magazine my brother had used to try to find ideas for how I could change my deck. I saw that many green and white decks were using a strange creature called Erhnam Djinn. He seemed to have a pretty severe drawback and was definitely not as big as my Scaled Wurm, but I figured I'd give it a shot. I also found Whirling Dervish (somewhat biased for games against my brother) and Llanowar Elves. I also took the advice of the magazine and narrowed my deck down to less cards (I used 61 cards instead of 80). The first game I played with my brother went something like this: first turn elf, second turn Dervish and attack for 1, third turn Erhnam and attack for 2, fourth turn giant growth, attack  for 10 and play more stuff. By the fourth turn I had already made my brother lose more than half his life. Maybe there was something different about these cards afterall.

Over the next few months my friends and I continued to alter our decks and playtest. We slowly began to understand the importance of efficient cards and versitile removal. I started to move away from white as a secondary color to green and used red instead. Red had all these versitile burn cards, especially Lightning Bolt and Incinerate, and I loved clearing the way for my Erhnam with it. I also added a Sylvan Library so that I could get to the cards I needed quicker. It was the golden age of magic and everyday I was learning something new and exciting about the game.

We drove all over the Silicon Valley searching for cards to add to our decks. Back then each card shop had its own perculiar collection of cards and searching for certain cards was often like searching for treasure. One day when I was searching a Rukh Egg to add to my deck I went into a shop in Almaden (the same shop where I found my Legends Sylvna Library) and asked the store owner if she had any Rukhs. She told me that she didn't but that there was a shop in Willow Glen that had almost any card I could ever want and that I should check it out. The store was called, "Place to Play."

I got a ride to this shop, but unfortunately it was closed. I looked longingly in the window at the large glass caase where their collection of cards sat and what a collection it was! In there I saw cards that I had previously only heard rumors of: Dual Lands and Moxes! This was definitely a cool shop!