Post by SwartDawgMillionaire on Aug 9, 2014 19:57:38 GMT -6
When I made this forum, I was really excited about Peasant the format. It was not without a small degree of nostalgia that I put together this site in the vein of many other forums, from The Source all the way back to the Magic Dojo.
Really, more than the strategy discussions having a forum offered, I was excited because we could connect about Magic in ways that we haven't in a long time. Does anyone else remember staying up well past one in the morning to "playtest" a "matchup" for a "tournament" that would probably never even happen, pretty much just so we could hang out with our friends?
I love my life today, and I don't want to trade it for anything. I'm lucky enough to work at my dream job, be married to a wonderful woman, and have a daughter who's closer and closer to sleeping through the night. But I don't see my friends as often or in the same ways that I used to.
While Josie was down for a nap, I was poking around the Internet a little bit, and I came across this article. This was pretty much what I was talking about when I put this section on the forum.
If you have time, read through the responses people gave. Then, if you have any more time, take some of it and answer this question: What has Magic been to you?
I'll go first.
When I was a kid, I had this tagalong brother who would follow me just about everywhere I went. He was close enough in age that it wasn't that strange to have your little brother with you (we're not talking him being in diapers when I was 10 or anything like that, but 4 years is still a lot of time when you measure life in single decades), but I didn't always like having him around. If you asked me, I don't think I would have told you that it was in anyway unpleasant, but older brothers seem to be programmed to resist at least a moderate amount when a younger brother wants to play.
There are some choice memories with Alex. Once, I goaded him so much that he came after me and my friend Robert with an aluminum bat. Another time I convinced him that if he could fit inside a big black trunk we used to keep toys in, I wouldn't lock him in.
I totally locked him in. Sorry Alex.
At some point, right around my 14th birthday, I decided that my brother was really important to me. I don't know why I decided that. He was the same brother he was the day before that. My mom had spent a long time telling me that I had better take care of him, because he was the only brother I had, and blah blah blah, words words words. I don't know what made it any more true that day than another. But it did.
Two years later, we'd more or less become close. It's still hard for a 16 year old and a 12 year old to have a lot in common, but we had a similar sense of humor (still do), and you know, are family. So we played video games together, and I didn't put him back in the trunk after he accidentally deleted my Final Fantasy VII save file. (Aeris and I were in love, but she had developed a leaking problem, which was probably due to being skewered with a really big sword. It was no obstacle to love.)
Then plot happened. A friend and I stopped by the Maple Grove Shinders and discovered that they ran Magic tournaments. Magic was one of those things that my friends and I would get back into every once in a while, usually in the summer time because we seemed to suffer a maturity regression during this period and liked to play games from our childhood. There was one summer I played through Diablo I like 10 times, even though Diablo II and the expansion had already come out. Jake (the friend) and I had been getting back into the game (hence the trip to Shinders), so we figured "What the hell?"
Someone at the store had been talking about the Food Chain Goblins deck that had been winning the last few weeks. Jake said he didn't know if our decks could be competitive.
"Really?" I asked. "Everyone and their little brother has had a Goblins deck in their life," said I, thinking of the 80 card Goblins deck I'd had (okay, still had and thought was pretty good, but it needed that 4th Raging Goblin).
[For reference:
60 Goblins*
1 Battle Squadron
1 Keldon Warlord
20 Mountains (or so)
*some of these were probably Orcs. I figured this was okay, because they were interchangeable in Tolkien, so why should I be any different?]
Jake agreed that the Goblins deck couldn't be very good, so we came back the next Wednesday armed to the teeth with mono colored decks. I played my Blue deck, which was actually kind of innovative, given that I hadn't heard the terms "metagame" or "mana curve" before. The premise was to use blue Tims to pick off little guys, and then use things like Abduction to take the big guys. It had a Bribery in it, but only one, and that one had been dropped in a toilet or something. I figured since I was a Blue deck, I should use blue sleeves, and bought my first stack of Dragon Shields.
I had a 5 card sideboard, which no one called me on. I didn't know that artifacts were spells, so I spent the whole tournament upset that I couldn't use my counters on them. Rats, I thought. There goes another one. I'm going to have to find a way to deal with that.
The deck went 3-1 (this was 2004, and Legacy was still called Type 1.5 and was about the most casual format you could find sanction for). I don't remember what I played against, but I'm pretty sure I would have called it "jank" if I'd known that word at the time. I didn't, so I was about as pumped as a shotgun in a marsh to have beaten them.
The first thing I did when I came home was tell my brother about it. We sat down together to build him a deck. Obviously, we couldn't use the good cards, because they were for me, so we put together a deck that used Flank Knights from Mirage alongside Meekstone and Juntu Stakes. It was Red, so it got red sleeves. Obviously.
We built a few good decks together during our early Shinders run. There was the Blue/White Aether Vial deck that used Keeper of the Mind in illegal ways (we didn't know). There was a Sligh deck (I'd heard this term somewhere) with like 15 Mountains and Kris Mage in it. Finally, there was a Blue/Green Madness deck that used Survival of the Fittest, which Alex used to great success for a while.
Something I was aware of at the time, but would never admit to anyone, was Alex was a better player than I was. He was the only one of us who knew how to draft at the time, and his technical play was better than anyone else's.
In a rare show of adolescent magnanimity, I started to identify with Alex's wins almost more than my own. I remember encouraging him to go play in the JSS back when there was a JSS, and he came back with bunch of cool stuff he'd gotten in exchange for a JSS backpack he'd won. Props Alex.
Three moments stand out to me as an older brother. I remember when my brother lost the toast he'd written for the best man's speech at my wedding, watching him (very unsuccessfully fight back tears as he stood there looking at me, ad libbing the whole thing).
I remember watching my brother take a homebrewed deck he called Junk Pile through an 40 person tournament to win some dual lands, and then having a subsequent mention on Star City Games (this is the link, but it seems to be down for some reason).
I remember watching him take another deck he'd created to the only extended tournament we'd ever played in, only to lose in soul-crushing fashion in the top 8. I don't know if I told him this, but that was one of the hardest games to watch I'd ever been a part of.
Over the years, we've been roommates for a year, collaborators on decks, best friends whenever we needed one. He was the best man in my wedding. I don't know that if we didn't have Magic in common, we wouldn't have been as close as we are, but I do know that pretty much any time we talk, we share a language that almost no one else speaks. It has words like "mise," "tings," "savage," "grumper," and "jank."
Something I've learned from Magic over the years is that the game is as successful as it is for one reason and one reason alone: it lets people be with the people they care about. I've spent literally hundreds (if not thousands) of hours of my life playing this game for no other reason than I wanted to hang out with my friends. I know that I'm always going to have something to do if I can get anyone to play with me. We don't have to talk about life or cars or insurance policies, we can just flip the old switch and shuffle cardboard.
What's your story?
Really, more than the strategy discussions having a forum offered, I was excited because we could connect about Magic in ways that we haven't in a long time. Does anyone else remember staying up well past one in the morning to "playtest" a "matchup" for a "tournament" that would probably never even happen, pretty much just so we could hang out with our friends?
I love my life today, and I don't want to trade it for anything. I'm lucky enough to work at my dream job, be married to a wonderful woman, and have a daughter who's closer and closer to sleeping through the night. But I don't see my friends as often or in the same ways that I used to.
While Josie was down for a nap, I was poking around the Internet a little bit, and I came across this article. This was pretty much what I was talking about when I put this section on the forum.
If you have time, read through the responses people gave. Then, if you have any more time, take some of it and answer this question: What has Magic been to you?
I'll go first.
When I was a kid, I had this tagalong brother who would follow me just about everywhere I went. He was close enough in age that it wasn't that strange to have your little brother with you (we're not talking him being in diapers when I was 10 or anything like that, but 4 years is still a lot of time when you measure life in single decades), but I didn't always like having him around. If you asked me, I don't think I would have told you that it was in anyway unpleasant, but older brothers seem to be programmed to resist at least a moderate amount when a younger brother wants to play.
There are some choice memories with Alex. Once, I goaded him so much that he came after me and my friend Robert with an aluminum bat. Another time I convinced him that if he could fit inside a big black trunk we used to keep toys in, I wouldn't lock him in.
I totally locked him in. Sorry Alex.
At some point, right around my 14th birthday, I decided that my brother was really important to me. I don't know why I decided that. He was the same brother he was the day before that. My mom had spent a long time telling me that I had better take care of him, because he was the only brother I had, and blah blah blah, words words words. I don't know what made it any more true that day than another. But it did.
Two years later, we'd more or less become close. It's still hard for a 16 year old and a 12 year old to have a lot in common, but we had a similar sense of humor (still do), and you know, are family. So we played video games together, and I didn't put him back in the trunk after he accidentally deleted my Final Fantasy VII save file. (Aeris and I were in love, but she had developed a leaking problem, which was probably due to being skewered with a really big sword. It was no obstacle to love.)
Then plot happened. A friend and I stopped by the Maple Grove Shinders and discovered that they ran Magic tournaments. Magic was one of those things that my friends and I would get back into every once in a while, usually in the summer time because we seemed to suffer a maturity regression during this period and liked to play games from our childhood. There was one summer I played through Diablo I like 10 times, even though Diablo II and the expansion had already come out. Jake (the friend) and I had been getting back into the game (hence the trip to Shinders), so we figured "What the hell?"
Someone at the store had been talking about the Food Chain Goblins deck that had been winning the last few weeks. Jake said he didn't know if our decks could be competitive.
"Really?" I asked. "Everyone and their little brother has had a Goblins deck in their life," said I, thinking of the 80 card Goblins deck I'd had (okay, still had and thought was pretty good, but it needed that 4th Raging Goblin).
[For reference:
60 Goblins*
1 Battle Squadron
1 Keldon Warlord
20 Mountains (or so)
*some of these were probably Orcs. I figured this was okay, because they were interchangeable in Tolkien, so why should I be any different?]
Jake agreed that the Goblins deck couldn't be very good, so we came back the next Wednesday armed to the teeth with mono colored decks. I played my Blue deck, which was actually kind of innovative, given that I hadn't heard the terms "metagame" or "mana curve" before. The premise was to use blue Tims to pick off little guys, and then use things like Abduction to take the big guys. It had a Bribery in it, but only one, and that one had been dropped in a toilet or something. I figured since I was a Blue deck, I should use blue sleeves, and bought my first stack of Dragon Shields.
I had a 5 card sideboard, which no one called me on. I didn't know that artifacts were spells, so I spent the whole tournament upset that I couldn't use my counters on them. Rats, I thought. There goes another one. I'm going to have to find a way to deal with that.
The deck went 3-1 (this was 2004, and Legacy was still called Type 1.5 and was about the most casual format you could find sanction for). I don't remember what I played against, but I'm pretty sure I would have called it "jank" if I'd known that word at the time. I didn't, so I was about as pumped as a shotgun in a marsh to have beaten them.
The first thing I did when I came home was tell my brother about it. We sat down together to build him a deck. Obviously, we couldn't use the good cards, because they were for me, so we put together a deck that used Flank Knights from Mirage alongside Meekstone and Juntu Stakes. It was Red, so it got red sleeves. Obviously.
We built a few good decks together during our early Shinders run. There was the Blue/White Aether Vial deck that used Keeper of the Mind in illegal ways (we didn't know). There was a Sligh deck (I'd heard this term somewhere) with like 15 Mountains and Kris Mage in it. Finally, there was a Blue/Green Madness deck that used Survival of the Fittest, which Alex used to great success for a while.
Something I was aware of at the time, but would never admit to anyone, was Alex was a better player than I was. He was the only one of us who knew how to draft at the time, and his technical play was better than anyone else's.
In a rare show of adolescent magnanimity, I started to identify with Alex's wins almost more than my own. I remember encouraging him to go play in the JSS back when there was a JSS, and he came back with bunch of cool stuff he'd gotten in exchange for a JSS backpack he'd won. Props Alex.
Three moments stand out to me as an older brother. I remember when my brother lost the toast he'd written for the best man's speech at my wedding, watching him (very unsuccessfully fight back tears as he stood there looking at me, ad libbing the whole thing).
I remember watching my brother take a homebrewed deck he called Junk Pile through an 40 person tournament to win some dual lands, and then having a subsequent mention on Star City Games (this is the link, but it seems to be down for some reason).
I remember watching him take another deck he'd created to the only extended tournament we'd ever played in, only to lose in soul-crushing fashion in the top 8. I don't know if I told him this, but that was one of the hardest games to watch I'd ever been a part of.
Over the years, we've been roommates for a year, collaborators on decks, best friends whenever we needed one. He was the best man in my wedding. I don't know that if we didn't have Magic in common, we wouldn't have been as close as we are, but I do know that pretty much any time we talk, we share a language that almost no one else speaks. It has words like "mise," "tings," "savage," "grumper," and "jank."
Something I've learned from Magic over the years is that the game is as successful as it is for one reason and one reason alone: it lets people be with the people they care about. I've spent literally hundreds (if not thousands) of hours of my life playing this game for no other reason than I wanted to hang out with my friends. I know that I'm always going to have something to do if I can get anyone to play with me. We don't have to talk about life or cars or insurance policies, we can just flip the old switch and shuffle cardboard.
What's your story?