Thanks for the great primer prospero, definitely a lot of lessons learned from the nature of Shop decks.  Has Serum Powder still be good in testing?  The only problem I see is not really the topdecking situation which I fully agreed with your explanation, but rather the hands you decided to keep with Serum Powder being fundamentally a X minus 1 card hand (in this analysis I don't consider Serum Powder to be of much function in MUD since every other Moxen gives mana the way Serum Powder would).  Would that X minus 1 card hand kept with Serum Powder present a potential loss of power where you would have mulled a bad hand without playing Serum Powder and still end up with X minus 1 card hand?

Hi TMDers,

I'm Chris Zhou and I play at Asgard Games in Houston, TX.  ho_master and grahaminator who posted here recently are also people from Asgard Games.

Brief history of my MTG career:
I started playing MTG when my group of best friends in middle school were playing the game.  Since the intuition when you were in middle school was just to hang out and have similar interests as your friends, I bought my first magic pack after a friend gave me a bunch of commons (mostly from Mercadian Masque and Torment).  The first pack I opened was a Torment pack and when I saw the art of Sengir Vampire, I swore I was hopping in the store and telling my friends how awesome the card was.  And started my MTG deckbuilding: I built my first deck with my first rare Sengir Vampire.  It was a black/green deck that ran a bunch of Mercadian Masque mercs and green was played with whatever green creatures I was given to.

As a competitive individual at heart, I slowly got more engrossed in the format.  Playing with my group of friends in middle school taught me that white weenies was a powerful deck with White Knights, Disenchant and Cataclysm.  There was simply no way to beat it.  I thought about ways to beat it, and built a fast red deck that could sometimes win, but whenever he got Paladin-en Vec or Mother of Runes out, I lost all the time.  Reading more articles, browsing Scrye magazines and fishing for more decks and ideas, I eventually fell in love with Extended.  At that point I was fairly competitive, and would go to magic scenes to playtest my decks.  I borrowed ideas from Aluren but made personal changes to it.  I ran Intuition + Vampiric Tutor + Hickory Woodlut.  It was close to being unstoppable.  My good friend built monoblack reanimator with 4 Vamp Tutors, 4 Entombs when Akroma was spoiled.  It became one of the hardest decks to beat.  Finding the best decks 'cheesy', I refuse to play them, but would always be on the 'innovation' and 'design' side when playing MTG.  I built Red Sligh in Extended, and it was mostly homebrew.  I ran 4 Wastelands, 4 Ports which were not common in most sligh lists, but my philosophy was I needed the land-tax to beat Reanimator while putting a clock.  Running 4 Waste + 4 Ports allowed me to abuse Veteran Brawlers, which at that time was the only efficient 4/4 for 2cmc in the format.  People did not expect him, and he won games fast.  My deck was completely foiled out (wastelands, ports, lightning bolts, volcanic hammers) and it was my favorite deck because it could beat most of the powerhouse decks when it played right.

After middle school, I decided to take a break from MTG and start life fresh in high school focusing on sports and academics.  I sold my collection for $600 Singapore dollars ~$400 USD.  Looking back now, I regret the decision, but no one can change the past.  I did well in high school, was a competitive canoeist that won a number of medals, and scored 8/9 distinctions to be placed high in the ranks of my school.  I then left Singapore to study at Rice University, Houston TX. It was not until sophmore year where my group of friends were playing MTG and I got caught back in nostalgia.  I thought to myself "Let me just play casually".  Oh man, I was wrong.  I first purchased all the cards that I had for my old Aluren deck since it was my favorite deck of all time.  And since I played Extended 9 years back, I made the move into Extended, and sleeved up Tron.  However, I have been out of the game for 9 years that I never heard about Legacy.  After looking more into the format, I realized that this was the format for me.  It had all the cards that I loved (tempest, saga block) and I instantly became hooked.  The girl who was responsible for bringing me to MTG is now my girlfriend whom I enjoy her company and she trolls me for being lame with my MTG hobby lol.

And then my girlfriend and I heard news that a game store was opening 5min walk from my off-campus apartment.  We got very excited and headed there.  People at Asgard were cool.  At that time, I played mental MTG/Legacy i.e. I owned the cards and played on MWS and not having anyone to play Legacy with me.  In school I would play Dragonstompy/Stax against my casual friends' decks and they would always complain how unfair it was.  Two weeks into going to Asgard Games, I spotted two people playing decks in one corner.  When I creeped up, I saw a Dreadnought on the table and a Tarmogoyf.  Immediately I went ape-shit.  We introduced, and started meeting weekly to play some games, and over time, our group has grown from 2-5 people to over 12-20 people that attend Legacy weekly.

That is my story of MTG.  How has this any relationship to Vintage/TMD?  I do have goals in getting into Vintage.  Cost is an issue at the moment, but I am willing to fork out for the staples I need for Vintage.  I do enjoy the very essence to what I believe is MTG: Vintage.  Being able to play with the historical cards that spanned from its beginning to end will be the biggest motivation for myself to play Vintage.  Over my few years of playing Legacy, I have begun to love control decks, and I feel that nothing more can be fulfilled with playing a playset of Mana Drains.  I am a control player at heart.  I would sleeve up Survival decks or some aggro decks, but tapping non-lands sideways always felt wrong.  I enjoy the challenges of the control role, because even though being the underdog, I truly enjoy the interaction against decks that want to avoid interactions (combo/prison/fast aggro).  I want to be able to deny their denial of interactions, and turn their position around after I stabilize, and overwhelm them with cards and board position.  If I were to sleeve up a Vintage deck, it would be Drain Control decks, namely Landstill.  I have not actively played Vintage, but I read articles and do the 'mental magic' again, and I feel that Landstill would be my deck of choice.  Despite its unpopularity, I do feel that it is quite well-positioned in today's meta, but this comes from a Vintage novice, who is more than willing to learn.

So be easy with me and nice to meet you all!