This thread is for the discussion of my latest article, MTGCast #83: A Draft a day keeps your rating ok!. We would be grateful if you would let us know what you think, but please keep your comments on topic.
Learned to play magic after picking up a portal starter and playing a game with my dad in the hometown starbucks. Okay, that was my first game, the actual learning process took place over several years playing with my friends, trying to figure out how stuff worked.
BTW, after starting with Portal, I had my mind blown the first time I saw an artifact or enchantment. "It's not a creature, but it stays in play?"
And instants? I can play stuff any time I want to? Crazy!
Portal didn't exactly do a good job of teaching people to play stuff at the end of their opponents' turns...
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A card game about Presidents. Stabbing each other. With knives.
Had some problems with this weeks link to the mp3-cast as the file under the link seemed to be empty. I'll be back later to see if I can get this to work.
But back to story time kids. I was an exchange student in CA 1994 to spring -95. Being one of (american) football players, I just noted that some of the 'geeks' were playing something with colourful cards. I even witnessed one allegation of cheating, since one player had managed to buy new cards and since those had not yet aquired the scratches and wear the older cards had (they played on concrete benches and sleeves were not used), all the new cards were marked. (The solution was to cause some 'accelerated wear' to the cards... So if you collectors wonder why many A/B/Ul cards are in such an awful condition, well now you know)
I still managed to lay my hands on some cards, that came with magazines (like Fylgja and Norrit) and I bought the Magic novel Arena (Which came with a coupon for Mana Crypt). Still I did not buy into the game, when I was offered the last batch of Legends boosters, when the comic book shop had received some boxes of product earlier that day.
Then I went back to Finland and my little brother asked me to buy some 4th edition starters for his birthday. One for him and one for me. My gift would be to learn the game and play with him and couple of his friends, who were thinking of getting into the game.
Long story slightly shorter, I got hooked and shortly had couple of 100 card monsters for playing casual (18 lands and one Dakkon Blackblade-special ftw). Four months later, I found the first tournaments and kept on going even when my little brother stopped playing late 1996 or early -97.
Our first games were also pretty special in how we understood the rules, but since that this is already pretty long post, so maybe I'll just save it for later. But suffice to say, that 4th edition rulesbook was a nightmare to read, since the print was in 6 pt font in this miniature booklet. Our salvation was having three people all reading the rules and pooling our understanding together. Still the damage prevention window stayed a mystery to us for quite a long time...
Whoo! I got a shout out AND I won a prize? It's a Christmas Miracle. That PTQ in Seattle was pretty big. I wish we had more limited tournaments like that around here.
Anyway, question of the week: When I was 11 I bought a bunch of Fallen Empires packs and cracked them open. They laid around my room for a month or so, until my older cousin found them. He tried to teach me how to play... but he wasn't too sure about the rules. We played some really botched matches and it was fun. I kept collecting for a while, building a pile of cards that resembled a deck... then I went to a tournament and had to relearn the game all over again.
I bought Scrye magazine for the X-Files ccg promo card (Mulligan, I think it was) and of course the magazine was full of Magic info: deck lists, strategy, pretty photos of the cards. I already knew about Magic because Spin magazine had published an in-depth article about the game and its players (not sure of the year, probably 95 or 96), but I hadn't considered playing it myself until I saw the articles in Scrye. Long story short: The card art was attractive, I liked the fantasy theme... so I started buying cards and taught myself how to play with the 5th edition rule book.
I'm probably one of the few people on the planet who got into Magic via the X-Files game. I still have a box of those cards too, if anyone wants to trade...
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"Right about now I am wondering if Fredy Montero needed a kidney, how many guys in Seattle would line up to oblige?"
-- David Falk, Seattle Soccer Examiner, March 2009
Had some problems with this weeks link to the mp3-cast as the file under the link seemed to be empty. I'll be back later to see if I can get this to work.
Hey Default User,
I made a snafu when cut and pasting the code this week, here is the correct direct download link and I messaged Woaplanne to help me correct the mistake.
I learned to play magic when i was on a cruise when i was 12. A friend of mine *who lives in new york* just bought a 7th edition starter, and from that moment on i was hooked. My first pack i ever open was mirrodin and was a pentavus i still have it to. It seems as though that was a very long time ago.
wow, I won something! I'll be sure to get a picture of us (hopefully with it) on the facebook sometime!
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Top 16 - 2012 Indiana State Championships Currently Playing: GBStandard - Golgari Safari MidrangeBG RBWModern - Mardu PyromancerWBR RLegacy - Good Old Fashioned BurnR
It was January 1995, I was a freshman in high school and I saw some other kids playing this neat-looking card game called Magic. I watched them play a bit and decided I wanted in.
My cousin (who was in my class) and I went to the local mall with about $20 each; he spent all of his money on Revised Edition starters/boosters, I bought a starter and Bush's Sixteen Stone CD (it was either that or Weezer's first album, I'm not 100% sure which).
We went back to his house and tried to teach ourselves to play by reading the rulebook, but somehow we confused our mana pools with our life points, so every time I played Drain Power, I won the game.
I remember getting Craw Wurm and thinking it was almost as good as the Shivan Dragon that a guy from school showed me.
I didn't really get into it at first, because I didn't have the money to spend on cards (I kept spending my allowance on CDs), but over the summer I taught two more friends how to play and got REALLY into it. I think the first cohesive deck I built was based around green mana acceleration (Fyndhorn Elves/Llanowar Elves), Instill Energy, Colossus of Sardia, Juggernaut, and Soldevi Golem.
Learned to play magic after picking up a portal starter and playing a game with my dad ..
Hmm, that's kinda how I started too. I wonder how much father son bonding Magic has created. Yeah, I was kinda jump started into magic since my father wanted to bond with me so we learned a new game together. After getting the 1st portal starter kit from our comic shop we slowly learned how to play. After we learned what we were doing we went down to buy some boosters and we bought some tempest....So yeah, we went from portal to tempest I hope you can imagine a fraction of the mental jump that was. Been playing steady casual ever since, but I didn't learn how to play competitive magic until I moved away from my play group around Ravnica, but that's a story for another day.
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I started in 1999 when I was in high school. I went into a classroom some of my friends hang out in during lunch, and I saw them playing magic. I became fascinated with the game, so I asked how to play. They told me that its easier to watch them play whie they explain. I remember one was playing elves and the other was going with blue counters. So after I got a grasp of the rules, I wanted to try it myself. One of my friends pulled out a box of about 800 cards and told me to pick out cards I liked and build a deck. He also let me keep the cards so I thought it was really nice. I went with the most awesome thing I thought was in the box, THRULLS!!!:D Now roughly 7-8 years later on I have 7 decks of my own (Including the thrull deck I built;)).
Oh and by the way there were 6 cards previewed, here is the card you mentioned in your podcast :
P.S. on the article its DrizzS with an S lol just lettin u know, oh and thanks for saying it right btw tom most pepole say it wrong!
Comment Contest,
i used to play yugioh! now i was a huge fan and when i started highschool my buddys played Magic not yugioh, so they started to teach me! so i never had my own deck and i traded my yugioh cards to a local pro for a Phasing deck full of flying mono blue creatures from Iceage/mirage for my yugioh cards, which i thought was great, soo basicly my actual learning story is that the first time i was told to tap a card i kept poking it expecting it to do something... which honestly i dont think im the first, so i learnt to tap a card by poking it on a pingpong table in my buddys garage! by Daniel Martin
I learned to play while at scout camp. I saw some people playing and they taught me. When I got home, I got some cards (revised was the new hotness then) and taught someone else so I could have a mini play group. As time went on, my play group ebbed and flowed, but I was always at least collecting more cards. Many of the people that I originally played with I either lost contact with or stopped playing.
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I am looking for Date Stamped promos from Khans of Tarkir block so I can finish my set. Check my wants if you have any.
Currently offering 2 non-foil Kolighan's Command for a Date Stamped foil!
I learned way back in middle school, after a friend showed me how to play. We would go to the local game store and he would let me use his cards, starting me out with what was probably the most crazily complex deck I could possible start out with - Peacekeeper plus ping effects like Rootwater Hunter and Prodigal Sorcerer. Pretty sure I would've won all my games back then (because everyone just ran creatures and no removal?) if I wouldn't constantly forget to pay for Peacekeeper. Blech, upkeep costs! My uncle (who was a big gamer in his day, though that game was the original D&D) got me my first cards of my own - a starter set which I then used to force my father to play with me.
I ended up falling out of Magic at the end of Middle School (as my friend and I drifted apart, though I think he's probably still hardcore into Magic), and then falling right back in once I was in College. But that's a different story!
Hey guys. Great podcast, as usual. I missed Dom though. His accent's just cool, I guess:D
I learned to play Magic back when Mirage had just come out, around '96. I was a freshman in high school. A friend got a friend into the game and my friend got me into the game. My first big creature was a Pearl Dragon. It's a little beat up, but I still got it.
Those little humble beginnings lead to a group forming about a year later. It started with 3 of us playing together. Today, it's 8 people. It may not be much, but Magic brought us together and has forged some of the best friendships I've ever had.
I started playing Magic about three years ago, all my friends had been big into it from the start and I finally buckled under and decided to learn to play. I remember opening a Scourge tournament pack and pulling a foil Silvos, Rogue Elemental and thinking it was pretty cool.
My story starts in december 2001, I was at a former high-school classmate's house waiting for him because I had to pick-up some animé. While waiting there was another
former high-school classmate waiting for him too, but to play Magic. While we were waiting, he tried to teach me, but the game didn't really hook me up at that time.
Later, somewhere around 2002, when the first specialized shop on D&D and MtG opened up in the country (as far as I know of), a former classmate from japanese class got into the game, and introduced it to me. During that time I got really interested, and we played a lot on weekends (mostly complete saturday, and sunday afternoons at his house). But since I only played on weekends I didn't buy any decks or cards, so I used his but didn't get the chance to alter his decks, so it was very limited on how we played, and didn't have the chance to try things out.
Since we were a small group and none of us was a pro (there weren't FNM in the country yet), we didn't understand some rules, cards, and played with weird rules (for some time we thought that if you didn't have cards in your hand, you would loose the game). It was actually fun figuring out things for ourselves as we became better players.
Then we became more involved with internet to see previews, combos, and more information from the game.
Finally, sometime after Mirrodin was released (october 2003), I bought my first MtG precon deck (Morph Mayhem from Legions, which I was somewhat good playing with). Since then, I've only bought boosters, fatpacks (ever since Kamigawa), and Ravnica's Dimir Intrigues deck.
PS. I'm actually considering quitting MtG since I don't play very much anymore, and if i ever get my hands onto WoW, I'll defintely quit.
ok im listening the cast and posting so here we go
Oh man! the theme song is back i like it
Im with you gavin, chamelon is ok but not going to fit everywhere. Now in my type 4 stack it could be sick.
Here is a question for everyone, "go to worlds or go to gen con, where would you go?"
curse you tarmogoyf!
I played some sealed yesterday and one gauy had two red commands (one foil), gale powder mage, baloonist, timber protecter (with 5 treefolks). Luckily he had to leave so we split for first.
rootgrapple... maindeck-able in sealed? I had one in my deck as an answe to planeswlakers.
pretty sweet prize pack, i will win something someday. then i will stop posting... naw ill hand out.
No great story here for my learn to play. I started playing in beta, didn't play for years then picked it up again in highschool when a friend had some cards in phsycology class. I had thought my lands had summoning sickness and that leonin scimtar was one of the most broken cards ever
Well, if your podcast did anything over the past few months, its made me join the MTGsalvation forums so I can comment on your awesome podcast and maybe have a shot towards some of those giveaways. First things first though, this weeks podcast is/was great, love the coverage, and I'm glad to hear that I get to hear MTGCast Christmas night as well.
Anyway, I'm thinking I want to go into a mammoth divergence of my Magic past, and being how I'm a bored vacationing college student who needs something to do at 1am, I think this sounds like a plan. My first inkling towards the very existence of Magic was when I was 8ish, and I was into Pokemon (this would be around 1998). The grandparents bought me a magazine that had a Pokemon feature in it and it was discussing Urza's Saga cards as well as some seriously-broken-yet-way-over-my-head decks that involved cards like False Prophet and Survival of the Fittest, as well as an article on how inexpensive cards such as Pestilence can be found at random garage sales, all you have to do is look. Anyway, I moved on from the magazine, never fully committing to Pokemon but never really giving magic much of a chance either, as it was just something I had never heard of and wasn't entirely popular at the school.
Fast forward now to 2001, I just entered 7th grade and my little sister Amanda came home from school all excited about a game she saw a few of her friends playing. She said that all she needed was 25 bucks and she could get each of us a deck to play, and so we could learn how to play together. So after a bunch of skepticism and ridiculous questioning as to who was getting the cards, how much fun is it really anyway, and whether or not its really a boy's game or just another Pokemon variant (at this point I had completely severed all ties with Pokemon cards), I gave her the cash and in about a week we had two decks. I had the Odyssey One-Two Punch deck (red green flashback based deck) while she had the Torment Grave Danger deck (blue black fill and then empty your graveyard deck). We had a terrible internet connection at the time, so after about an hour fo searching I found some rules online that I thought would teach us how to play. The rules happened to be absolutely terrible, with errors such as "you must repay a cards casting cost to attack with it" and that creatures would deal damage to the opponent if they were blocked and had a greater power than the opposing creatures toughness. These rules were terrible, absolutely terrible, but they sufficed for the two of us. I remember making plays like "well I discard obsessive research when I play it, so I can pay its madness cost to draw 2 cards" and "haste is just an unnecessary word on the card like 'converted' when they say mana cost and 'trample' on a bunch of my green creatures". Eventually she got tired of always losing to a green red deck that beat the smack out of her blue black weenies, and let me buy out her portion of the cards.
The next part of the story comes with going to school and meeting a few card buddies of my own, Sean and Phil. They played magic, although they actually knew the rules, so a lot of things like haste, trample, and even the concept of instants vs. sorceries, were explained to me. Somewhere along the lines I got a hold of the players manual and devoured it. Apparently mechanics like flashback and madness weren't always there and were just part of a specific block, as well as other mechanics that I had barely ever seen before, like flying, first strike, enchantments, artifacts, etc etc etc etc were explained ed nausium. I knew I needed to know more, I had to be immersed in the culture. So online I went, where I got to learn about a whole subculture that existed outside of my own little playgroup.
I remember my first trade, I traded my 4 Roar of the Wurms for this guys holographic Thorn Elemental, still in the wrapper and everything! Wowee! Its never fair to rip off n00bs guys, never fair. But it was all part of the learning experience.
It wasn't until I was in high school that I really got deep into articles. I started reading the articles on wizards.com/magic everyday, assuming that that was the only resource available to me to read up on new concepts like tournaments, drafting, card advantage, tempo, control vs beatdown, and sooooooo much more. Mark Rosewater became a common name, and somewhere along the line I decided, I'm gunna go to a tournament, MaRo convinced me. So I went to my first Sealed booster event, the Unhinged tournament. I did awful, came in 14 out of 17, but for my first tournament I figured it was just my own poor skills, so I had to do more reading. I poured myself over articles for such a long time, I learned how to draft even before my first draft a few months ago, I came in 3, losing only to one person, this guy who had a rating of 1750 or so drafting and had been playing since alpha, and even then, my biggest highlight was getting to hear him say "you're the biggest challenge I've had to face all night".
Over the years I've stumbled upon a bunch of other methods of reading about magic and immersing myself in MTG culture. mtgsalvation.com, manamaze.com, ccgdecks.com, ugmadness.net, essentialmagic.com, the list goes on and on and on, but the one thing that I owe it all to would be my little sister, begging me for the initial investment, and that terrible terrible website that had the most awful rules on the planet.
Anyway, now that I've gone and shared a ton of nostalgia, Merry Christmas to you all, and keep the podcasts coming!
The secret story of how i was started on magic.
It was near winter of the '96 (or 95), i was 13 or 14 years at that time. My family was preparing for vacations in a nice mountain lodgde in the south and i was looking around bookstores to get some stuff to read during the long trip and the cold days.
Enter the little and misterius bookshop! i get in ask for some books look at some. And then my eyes go over a box with small boxes and wierd packs inside it. It had some dust over it. I ask the old lady about it as i uncover the first little box, take out the dust and find some kind of giant snake/dragon draw in the front of it. Under the name MAGIC. I was sold in the instant.
I bought a 5th edition starter and runned home. I promised not to open until we where there but i couldnt resist. I read the littile booklet manual during the trip.
If i had read the manual before the trip i would have realized that it was only 1 deck. But then discovering the game with each step was priceless.
I read, read and practiced some games but i was lacking an opponent so i invited my brother to play (1 year younger than me). I explained the rules, he didnt trust me so he chequed them.
We shuffled, put the deck betwen the 2 of us and each one drew 7 cards. Yes, from the same starter set (that nowadays is called tornament pack so it was 6 lands of each type and lots of cards!). We played that each time you run out of hand you drew 7 new cards, and corrected that mistake fast as the games were too short!. Normally the winner would be the one to drop the scaled wurm as it was the biggest thing in the deck (force of nature was one of the rares but it was imposible to cast or sustain with lands of every color). After a week of crazy duels i came back to the store and bought some more packs that made the deck look giant. Some time later we discovered that we had to use one deck each player and my brother bougth an Ice Age deck with the same ammount of packs i had bought. And we fought like crazy for a year or two until magic was forgotten. Enter the '99, my brother enters home running, comes to me and tells me there is some kind of shop that just opened and carries me from the arm for like 10 blocks. I get there "paradise", a comic shop of our own. Magic and other games got into my life and have stayed with me until now.
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Green FTW, Thanks for the Sig!
Standard: GMGA-EG
Block (TS): WWWW
Working on RGLD for Standard
"Winning is just something that happens sometimes, having lots of fun... thats the true Gift of Magic"
First time I played Magic was either Unlimited or Revised (I don't know, since I didn't realise there was a difference at the time). It appeared at a regular boardgames meeting I went to. I play everything so gave it a quick try, but thought it was fairly rubbish.
I learned the game properly when Ice Age game out. A friend of mine proposed a Sealed Deck tournament as part of a gaming week we'd organised. Only a couple of the players had really played before, so the level of play was pretty low. I opened a Stormbind. Although I didn't understand how good it was back then I liked it enough to build around it. That and my double Goblin Snowman, which seemed almost as good.
I came second in the tournament - thanks to a combination of my cardpool and actually playing all my matches. But I really had no chance against the best deck in the field which featured the profoundly broken Shield of the Ages. I mean seriously, what were R&D thinking? Goblin Snowman is good defence, but that thing's unbeatable!
(I then didn't play again until I started playing online with the MtGO release of Onslaught.)
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(I'm on on this site much anymore. If you want to get in touch it's probably best to email me: dom@heffalumps.org)
Forum Awards: Best Writer 2005, Best Limited Strategist 2005-2012
5CB PotM - June 2005, November 2005, February 2006, April 2008, May 2008, Feb 2009
MTGSalvation Articles: 1-20, plus guest appearance on MTGCast #86!
<Limited Clan>
When I wrote this it sounded so stupid, and concieted, but I guess you could also see it as funny, and exciting.
The Cardproffessor's History of Magic Part1:
It was 7 years ago, I was a vivacious 6 year old who was going to his aunt's house for Christmas Eve. My cousin, a magic player, pulled me aside when I got there and explained to me a game. My eyes glittered with wonder. But then he began to explain and I was confused. That game was magic.
1 year later I returned and he showed me this game again. It was, of course magic. Although I didn't recognize it as the old game he had showed me a year ago, so that day I was introduced to magic again for the first time. This time I hap a bit more understanding and could wrap my mind around it a bit more. Still, the mind of a 7 year old tends to forget things pretty quickly, and so I did.
A couple of weeks later I remember going to a Toy store. There I found a box that had cards inside that looked awfully familiar. I wasn't sure why, but I suppose I related the cards to my cousin, who was an idol, I guess, and so I bought the cards. That day I pulled out the cards. Wiffing the smell of new cardboard I hastily ripped through the wrapping and started to play. That day I was introduced magic for the first time...for the third time.
Then 3 years passed. I had played a bit of what I now knew as magic, but not all that much. One day I went into school, to find some new kids I had never seen before playing what I could vaguely recall being magic. So, the next day I brought in my cards, and we played. They, having a bit more experience than I, always won (also it might have been affected that their decks were all affinity, and mine had stupid morph stuff, and some Kamigawa.) But determined I was, soI kept at it, and I became increasingly better. And that day in 6th grade I was introduced to magic for the first time, for the fourth and final time.
Ever since then I've gotten better still, and my first tournament occured, and a whole bunch of other stuff in between. Other games like Yugioh, Pokemon, Duel Masters, Harry Potter, Mighty Beanz, Naruto, Yugioh GX, Digimon, Yu-yu Hakusho, Bleach, V.S., and about ten zillion others have risen up, yet still magic stands true.
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All your youtube video viewing time are belong to us.
-Youtube.com/proffessors
I received the Worlds Prize Pack today... it is seriously awesome. Just digging through the treasure box seeing piece after piece was priceless. Thanks a million times over, Tom... I think I might wear the press pass around for like the next two weeks. AWESOME!
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BTW, after starting with Portal, I had my mind blown the first time I saw an artifact or enchantment. "It's not a creature, but it stays in play?"
And instants? I can play stuff any time I want to? Crazy!
Portal didn't exactly do a good job of teaching people to play stuff at the end of their opponents' turns...
A card game about Presidents. Stabbing each other. With knives.
But back to story time kids. I was an exchange student in CA 1994 to spring -95. Being one of (american) football players, I just noted that some of the 'geeks' were playing something with colourful cards. I even witnessed one allegation of cheating, since one player had managed to buy new cards and since those had not yet aquired the scratches and wear the older cards had (they played on concrete benches and sleeves were not used), all the new cards were marked. (The solution was to cause some 'accelerated wear' to the cards... So if you collectors wonder why many A/B/Ul cards are in such an awful condition, well now you know)
I still managed to lay my hands on some cards, that came with magazines (like Fylgja and Norrit) and I bought the Magic novel Arena (Which came with a coupon for Mana Crypt). Still I did not buy into the game, when I was offered the last batch of Legends boosters, when the comic book shop had received some boxes of product earlier that day.
Then I went back to Finland and my little brother asked me to buy some 4th edition starters for his birthday. One for him and one for me. My gift would be to learn the game and play with him and couple of his friends, who were thinking of getting into the game.
Long story slightly shorter, I got hooked and shortly had couple of 100 card monsters for playing casual (18 lands and one Dakkon Blackblade-special ftw). Four months later, I found the first tournaments and kept on going even when my little brother stopped playing late 1996 or early -97.
Our first games were also pretty special in how we understood the rules, but since that this is already pretty long post, so maybe I'll just save it for later. But suffice to say, that 4th edition rulesbook was a nightmare to read, since the print was in 6 pt font in this miniature booklet. Our salvation was having three people all reading the rules and pooling our understanding together. Still the damage prevention window stayed a mystery to us for quite a long time...
Set to default
Anyway, question of the week: When I was 11 I bought a bunch of Fallen Empires packs and cracked them open. They laid around my room for a month or so, until my older cousin found them. He tried to teach me how to play... but he wasn't too sure about the rules. We played some really botched matches and it was fun. I kept collecting for a while, building a pile of cards that resembled a deck... then I went to a tournament and had to relearn the game all over again.
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I'm probably one of the few people on the planet who got into Magic via the X-Files game. I still have a box of those cards too, if anyone wants to trade...
-- David Falk, Seattle Soccer Examiner, March 2009
Hey Default User,
I made a snafu when cut and pasting the code this week, here is the correct direct download link and I messaged Woaplanne to help me correct the mistake.
Working link to direct download ep 83
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My cousin (who was in my class) and I went to the local mall with about $20 each; he spent all of his money on Revised Edition starters/boosters, I bought a starter and Bush's Sixteen Stone CD (it was either that or Weezer's first album, I'm not 100% sure which).
We went back to his house and tried to teach ourselves to play by reading the rulebook, but somehow we confused our mana pools with our life points, so every time I played Drain Power, I won the game.
I remember getting Craw Wurm and thinking it was almost as good as the Shivan Dragon that a guy from school showed me.
I didn't really get into it at first, because I didn't have the money to spend on cards (I kept spending my allowance on CDs), but over the summer I taught two more friends how to play and got REALLY into it. I think the first cohesive deck I built was based around green mana acceleration (Fyndhorn Elves/Llanowar Elves), Instill Energy, Colossus of Sardia, Juggernaut, and Soldevi Golem.
I miss that deck.. I think I want to rebuild it
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Hmm, that's kinda how I started too. I wonder how much father son bonding Magic has created. Yeah, I was kinda jump started into magic since my father wanted to bond with me so we learned a new game together. After getting the 1st portal starter kit from our comic shop we slowly learned how to play. After we learned what we were doing we went down to buy some boosters and we bought some tempest....So yeah, we went from portal to tempest I hope you can imagine a fraction of the mental jump that was. Been playing steady casual ever since, but I didn't learn how to play competitive magic until I moved away from my play group around Ravnica, but that's a story for another day.
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Quotes:
I started in 1999 when I was in high school. I went into a classroom some of my friends hang out in during lunch, and I saw them playing magic. I became fascinated with the game, so I asked how to play. They told me that its easier to watch them play whie they explain. I remember one was playing elves and the other was going with blue counters. So after I got a grasp of the rules, I wanted to try it myself. One of my friends pulled out a box of about 800 cards and told me to pick out cards I liked and build a deck. He also let me keep the cards so I thought it was really nice. I went with the most awesome thing I thought was in the box, THRULLS!!!:D Now roughly 7-8 years later on I have 7 decks of my own (Including the thrull deck I built;)).
Oh and by the way there were 6 cards previewed, here is the card you mentioned in your podcast :
Epic Sig by: Myself
Mindsplicer of [House Dimir]
lol hope that clears up an important issue lol
Drizzs
P.S. on the article its DrizzS with an S lol just lettin u know, oh and thanks for saying it right btw tom most pepole say it wrong!
Comment Contest,
i used to play yugioh! now i was a huge fan and when i started highschool my buddys played Magic not yugioh, so they started to teach me! so i never had my own deck and i traded my yugioh cards to a local pro for a Phasing deck full of flying mono blue creatures from Iceage/mirage for my yugioh cards, which i thought was great, soo basicly my actual learning story is that the first time i was told to tap a card i kept poking it expecting it to do something... which honestly i dont think im the first, so i learnt to tap a card by poking it on a pingpong table in my buddys garage! by Daniel Martin
Drizzs
Sig By Zaphod
I learned to play while at scout camp. I saw some people playing and they taught me. When I got home, I got some cards (revised was the new hotness then) and taught someone else so I could have a mini play group. As time went on, my play group ebbed and flowed, but I was always at least collecting more cards. Many of the people that I originally played with I either lost contact with or stopped playing.
Currently offering 2 non-foil Kolighan's Command for a Date Stamped foil!
convert bulk into good cards? PucaTrade - https://pucatrade.com/invite/gift/21195
Ebay - decks/Promos/DVDs
Trade thread (constantly updated)
http://www.mtgsalvation.com/trading-post/details/337-pokerbob1s-casual-trading-emporium
I ended up falling out of Magic at the end of Middle School (as my friend and I drifted apart, though I think he's probably still hardcore into Magic), and then falling right back in once I was in College. But that's a different story!
What has happened to the Dominator?
Thanks to Spiderboy4 of [High~Light Studios] for the awesome sig.
I learned to play Magic back when Mirage had just come out, around '96. I was a freshman in high school. A friend got a friend into the game and my friend got me into the game. My first big creature was a Pearl Dragon. It's a little beat up, but I still got it.
Those little humble beginnings lead to a group forming about a year later. It started with 3 of us playing together. Today, it's 8 people. It may not be much, but Magic brought us together and has forged some of the best friendships I've ever had.
(Still no Fruitcake Elemental in the mail, but I'm still hopping)
My story starts in december 2001, I was at a former high-school classmate's house waiting for him because I had to pick-up some animé. While waiting there was another
former high-school classmate waiting for him too, but to play Magic. While we were waiting, he tried to teach me, but the game didn't really hook me up at that time.
Later, somewhere around 2002, when the first specialized shop on D&D and MtG opened up in the country (as far as I know of), a former classmate from japanese class got into the game, and introduced it to me. During that time I got really interested, and we played a lot on weekends (mostly complete saturday, and sunday afternoons at his house). But since I only played on weekends I didn't buy any decks or cards, so I used his but didn't get the chance to alter his decks, so it was very limited on how we played, and didn't have the chance to try things out.
Since we were a small group and none of us was a pro (there weren't FNM in the country yet), we didn't understand some rules, cards, and played with weird rules (for some time we thought that if you didn't have cards in your hand, you would loose the game). It was actually fun figuring out things for ourselves as we became better players.
Then we became more involved with internet to see previews, combos, and more information from the game.
Finally, sometime after Mirrodin was released (october 2003), I bought my first MtG precon deck (Morph Mayhem from Legions, which I was somewhat good playing with). Since then, I've only bought boosters, fatpacks (ever since Kamigawa), and Ravnica's Dimir Intrigues deck.
PS. I'm actually considering quitting MtG since I don't play very much anymore, and if i ever get my hands onto WoW, I'll defintely quit.
Mi blog: http://japoniano.blogspot.com/
Oh man! the theme song is back i like it
Im with you gavin, chamelon is ok but not going to fit everywhere. Now in my type 4 stack it could be sick.
Here is a question for everyone, "go to worlds or go to gen con, where would you go?"
curse you tarmogoyf!
I played some sealed yesterday and one gauy had two red commands (one foil), gale powder mage, baloonist, timber protecter (with 5 treefolks). Luckily he had to leave so we split for first.
rootgrapple... maindeck-able in sealed? I had one in my deck as an answe to planeswlakers.
pretty sweet prize pack, i will win something someday. then i will stop posting... naw ill hand out.
No great story here for my learn to play. I started playing in beta, didn't play for years then picked it up again in highschool when a friend had some cards in phsycology class. I had thought my lands had summoning sickness and that leonin scimtar was one of the most broken cards ever
Anyway, I'm thinking I want to go into a mammoth divergence of my Magic past, and being how I'm a bored vacationing college student who needs something to do at 1am, I think this sounds like a plan. My first inkling towards the very existence of Magic was when I was 8ish, and I was into Pokemon (this would be around 1998). The grandparents bought me a magazine that had a Pokemon feature in it and it was discussing Urza's Saga cards as well as some seriously-broken-yet-way-over-my-head decks that involved cards like False Prophet and Survival of the Fittest, as well as an article on how inexpensive cards such as Pestilence can be found at random garage sales, all you have to do is look. Anyway, I moved on from the magazine, never fully committing to Pokemon but never really giving magic much of a chance either, as it was just something I had never heard of and wasn't entirely popular at the school.
Fast forward now to 2001, I just entered 7th grade and my little sister Amanda came home from school all excited about a game she saw a few of her friends playing. She said that all she needed was 25 bucks and she could get each of us a deck to play, and so we could learn how to play together. So after a bunch of skepticism and ridiculous questioning as to who was getting the cards, how much fun is it really anyway, and whether or not its really a boy's game or just another Pokemon variant (at this point I had completely severed all ties with Pokemon cards), I gave her the cash and in about a week we had two decks. I had the Odyssey One-Two Punch deck (red green flashback based deck) while she had the Torment Grave Danger deck (blue black fill and then empty your graveyard deck). We had a terrible internet connection at the time, so after about an hour fo searching I found some rules online that I thought would teach us how to play. The rules happened to be absolutely terrible, with errors such as "you must repay a cards casting cost to attack with it" and that creatures would deal damage to the opponent if they were blocked and had a greater power than the opposing creatures toughness. These rules were terrible, absolutely terrible, but they sufficed for the two of us. I remember making plays like "well I discard obsessive research when I play it, so I can pay its madness cost to draw 2 cards" and "haste is just an unnecessary word on the card like 'converted' when they say mana cost and 'trample' on a bunch of my green creatures". Eventually she got tired of always losing to a green red deck that beat the smack out of her blue black weenies, and let me buy out her portion of the cards.
The next part of the story comes with going to school and meeting a few card buddies of my own, Sean and Phil. They played magic, although they actually knew the rules, so a lot of things like haste, trample, and even the concept of instants vs. sorceries, were explained to me. Somewhere along the lines I got a hold of the players manual and devoured it. Apparently mechanics like flashback and madness weren't always there and were just part of a specific block, as well as other mechanics that I had barely ever seen before, like flying, first strike, enchantments, artifacts, etc etc etc etc were explained ed nausium. I knew I needed to know more, I had to be immersed in the culture. So online I went, where I got to learn about a whole subculture that existed outside of my own little playgroup.
I remember my first trade, I traded my 4 Roar of the Wurms for this guys holographic Thorn Elemental, still in the wrapper and everything! Wowee! Its never fair to rip off n00bs guys, never fair. But it was all part of the learning experience.
It wasn't until I was in high school that I really got deep into articles. I started reading the articles on wizards.com/magic everyday, assuming that that was the only resource available to me to read up on new concepts like tournaments, drafting, card advantage, tempo, control vs beatdown, and sooooooo much more. Mark Rosewater became a common name, and somewhere along the line I decided, I'm gunna go to a tournament, MaRo convinced me. So I went to my first Sealed booster event, the Unhinged tournament. I did awful, came in 14 out of 17, but for my first tournament I figured it was just my own poor skills, so I had to do more reading. I poured myself over articles for such a long time, I learned how to draft even before my first draft a few months ago, I came in 3, losing only to one person, this guy who had a rating of 1750 or so drafting and had been playing since alpha, and even then, my biggest highlight was getting to hear him say "you're the biggest challenge I've had to face all night".
Over the years I've stumbled upon a bunch of other methods of reading about magic and immersing myself in MTG culture. mtgsalvation.com, manamaze.com, ccgdecks.com, ugmadness.net, essentialmagic.com, the list goes on and on and on, but the one thing that I owe it all to would be my little sister, begging me for the initial investment, and that terrible terrible website that had the most awful rules on the planet.
Anyway, now that I've gone and shared a ton of nostalgia, Merry Christmas to you all, and keep the podcasts coming!
The secret story of how i was started on magic.
It was near winter of the '96 (or 95), i was 13 or 14 years at that time. My family was preparing for vacations in a nice mountain lodgde in the south and i was looking around bookstores to get some stuff to read during the long trip and the cold days.
Enter the little and misterius bookshop! i get in ask for some books look at some. And then my eyes go over a box with small boxes and wierd packs inside it. It had some dust over it. I ask the old lady about it as i uncover the first little box, take out the dust and find some kind of giant snake/dragon draw in the front of it. Under the name MAGIC. I was sold in the instant.
I bought a 5th edition starter and runned home. I promised not to open until we where there but i couldnt resist. I read the littile booklet manual during the trip.
If i had read the manual before the trip i would have realized that it was only 1 deck. But then discovering the game with each step was priceless.
I read, read and practiced some games but i was lacking an opponent so i invited my brother to play (1 year younger than me). I explained the rules, he didnt trust me so he chequed them.
We shuffled, put the deck betwen the 2 of us and each one drew 7 cards. Yes, from the same starter set (that nowadays is called tornament pack so it was 6 lands of each type and lots of cards!). We played that each time you run out of hand you drew 7 new cards, and corrected that mistake fast as the games were too short!. Normally the winner would be the one to drop the scaled wurm as it was the biggest thing in the deck (force of nature was one of the rares but it was imposible to cast or sustain with lands of every color). After a week of crazy duels i came back to the store and bought some more packs that made the deck look giant. Some time later we discovered that we had to use one deck each player and my brother bougth an Ice Age deck with the same ammount of packs i had bought. And we fought like crazy for a year or two until magic was forgotten. Enter the '99, my brother enters home running, comes to me and tells me there is some kind of shop that just opened and carries me from the arm for like 10 blocks. I get there "paradise", a comic shop of our own. Magic and other games got into my life and have stayed with me until now.
I learned the game properly when Ice Age game out. A friend of mine proposed a Sealed Deck tournament as part of a gaming week we'd organised. Only a couple of the players had really played before, so the level of play was pretty low. I opened a Stormbind. Although I didn't understand how good it was back then I liked it enough to build around it. That and my double Goblin Snowman, which seemed almost as good.
I came second in the tournament - thanks to a combination of my cardpool and actually playing all my matches. But I really had no chance against the best deck in the field which featured the profoundly broken Shield of the Ages. I mean seriously, what were R&D thinking? Goblin Snowman is good defence, but that thing's unbeatable!
(I then didn't play again until I started playing online with the MtGO release of Onslaught.)
(I'm on on this site much anymore. If you want to get in touch it's probably best to email me: dom@heffalumps.org)
Forum Awards: Best Writer 2005, Best Limited Strategist 2005-2012
5CB PotM - June 2005, November 2005, February 2006, April 2008, May 2008, Feb 2009
MTGSalvation Articles: 1-20, plus guest appearance on MTGCast #86!
<Limited Clan>
The Cardproffessor's History of Magic Part1:
It was 7 years ago, I was a vivacious 6 year old who was going to his aunt's house for Christmas Eve. My cousin, a magic player, pulled me aside when I got there and explained to me a game. My eyes glittered with wonder. But then he began to explain and I was confused. That game was magic.
1 year later I returned and he showed me this game again. It was, of course magic. Although I didn't recognize it as the old game he had showed me a year ago, so that day I was introduced to magic again for the first time. This time I hap a bit more understanding and could wrap my mind around it a bit more. Still, the mind of a 7 year old tends to forget things pretty quickly, and so I did.
A couple of weeks later I remember going to a Toy store. There I found a box that had cards inside that looked awfully familiar. I wasn't sure why, but I suppose I related the cards to my cousin, who was an idol, I guess, and so I bought the cards. That day I pulled out the cards. Wiffing the smell of new cardboard I hastily ripped through the wrapping and started to play. That day I was introduced magic for the first time...for the third time.
Then 3 years passed. I had played a bit of what I now knew as magic, but not all that much. One day I went into school, to find some new kids I had never seen before playing what I could vaguely recall being magic. So, the next day I brought in my cards, and we played. They, having a bit more experience than I, always won (also it might have been affected that their decks were all affinity, and mine had stupid morph stuff, and some Kamigawa.) But determined I was, soI kept at it, and I became increasingly better. And that day in 6th grade I was introduced to magic for the first time, for the fourth and final time.
Ever since then I've gotten better still, and my first tournament occured, and a whole bunch of other stuff in between. Other games like Yugioh, Pokemon, Duel Masters, Harry Potter, Mighty Beanz, Naruto, Yugioh GX, Digimon, Yu-yu Hakusho, Bleach, V.S., and about ten zillion others have risen up, yet still magic stands true.
-Youtube.com/proffessors
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