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Editor's note: I've got my own confession to make here: I was a huge Magic: The Gathering nerd in middle school. Brian's account of his on-again, off-again relationship with the game has me itching to dig my old deck out of my parent's house. -Brett
A long, long time ago, in the ancient time known as 1994, I was but a hideously awkward teenager drowning in the abyss that is high school. I hadn't hit my growth spurt yet, my "look" consisted of a homegrown buzz cut and enormous Coke-bottle glasses, and I was firmly ensconced in the super-nerd subclass of my school's social strata.
Suffice it to say, I wasn't doing too well.
But at the end of my freshman year, a chance encounter at a party suddenly brought me in contact with a huge new group of friends. At first, they just invited me along to their Sunday afternoon pickup games of Ultimate Frisbee, but after a few weeks I started receiving invites to hang out at people's houses afterwards. Hanging out their living rooms, I made the pleasant discovery that my new friends loved games of all kinds.
Instead of spending our post-Ultimate Sundays in front of a TV, gossiping about our classmates, or complaining that there was nothing to do in our plain suburban town, we gathered around dining room tables, sat in circles on the floor, and played whatever games we had on hand.
Often we needed nothing more than a deck of cards. We played round after round of spades, hearts, and gin rummy, along with games that used their own specialized deck of cards, like Phase 10, Rook, and Set. Other times we'd break out a board game like Risk or Settlers of Catan -- and this was in the mid-1990s, when the only way to get that game was to import "Die Siedler Von Catan" from Germany and hope that somebody had been able to get their hands on a translation of the instructions!
And, a few months after my new friends brought me into their group, they introduced me to the newest fad to hit the "trad gaming" scene: Magic: The Gathering.
Released in August 1993, Magic brought a new model to competitive card games. Instead of drawing from a collective deck of cards standard to every game, players brought their own decks to the table. Each deck was constructed from a base set of hundreds of different cards, and each card featured its own characteristics, special powers, and contribution to the fantasy-based backstory of the game's universe.
Players could buy more cards from stores in starter decks or booster packs, which packed in rare, powerful cards with weaker common ones. An entire economy soon sprung up around the game. Players traded vigorously with each other, and shops allowed players to build their decks with exactly the cards they needed -- as long as they were willing to pay for them!
Thus the "collectible card game" was born, and I quickly got hooked as badly as anyone. Eager to catch up to my friends who had been playing the game for longer than me, I collected cards any way I could think of: accepting donations of hundreds of crap commons by friends who needed to offload their junk, buying pack after pack of boosters, and even paying outrageous prices for the rare, powerful cards I needed to round out my competitive decks.
Eventually, I had built a couple of pretty good decks, but my pride and joy was my mono-black power deck, filled with Nightmares, Dark Rituals, and my favorite, Demonic Hordes.
My friends and I got so into the game that we even played it at school during our lunch period. (While this may have been the equivalent to hanging an enormous neon sign reading "NOT THE COOL TABLE" over our heads, that's not the sort of thing that one cares about when there are far more important matters at hand, like whether to Lightning Bolt your opponent's Grizzly Bears or just burn him for 3 damage directly.)
Even as my friends started picking up new collectible card games like Jyhad or Spellfire, I stuck with Magic through and through -- until one fateful night.
Our group had met up at a friend's house for a gaming night, and I brought along my Magic cards as usual. In those days, I carried all of my extra crap in a long card box in case I needed any spares for trading, and my actual decks were carried in a separate, smaller box so as to not mix them up with the rest of the riffraff.
In the middle of a match, I suddenly noticed that it was a half hour before my curfew, and it took me a half hour to get back home! I hurriedly packed up my things, ran out to my car, put my card boxes on the roof, pulled my keys out of my pocket, unlocked the door, grabbed my box of crap, jumped in the car, slammed the door, buckled up, and tore off into the night, beating my curfew by mere seconds.
Astute readers might notice what I didn't realize until the next day: I never grabbed the box with my actual decks off the roof of my car before driving away.
