Hi,

  I started buying cards in 1994 because they looked cool, like D&D stuff. I played D&D back then. Yep, I was a geek, still am. I've worn the same kinds of clothes for 20 years, I'm short, losing hair, tipping the scales on the oompah fat side. I've come to accept that girls either see me and shudder or don't even see me. Basically no life outside of role-playing, computer games and pizza. I live at my mom's house in the room over the garage. So basically I was a shorter carbon copy of Zvi circa 1997. Boy, he cleaned up good didn't he.

  So anyways, in early 1995 some of my D&D group started getting cards and in about two weeks everyone was playing. We played goofy random-swedish decks with not a bit of tech. So one day a poindexter walks into the comic shop, oh yeah, I collect comics too but I draw the line at collecting figurines, uh, unless they're Star Wars figurines, they're okay to collect, except Jar Jar Binks. Anyways this poindexter comes in and wants to play for ante. Well, I played him first because I was the best player of the group. I also had the best deck in the group, a kinda R/G deck but with about 120 cards and Craw Wurms and Giant Treefolk and the mandatory Shivan Dragon. Well I remember this game vividly. I played first and got what I thought was a good draw. I has some land and some creatures and I was going to pound him. I played a mountain and a Mon's Goblin Raiders. He plays Lotus, Jet, Sapphire, Swamp, Hippie Knight,  Sinkholes my Mountain, plays Ancestral, my turn. It was the fastest game I had ever played up until that point, about 8 turns. Boy, that sucked!

  So I went home and started to really learn how to play MTG. I learned how to play, kinda. I watched Brian Weissman playing Ole Rade at a PT and realized I sorta didn't know how to play. Anyways, I had a good DCI rating at one point when I was playing a tournament every week. I studied the stuff on the 'net a lot and even wrote an article that got posted on The Dojo! Of course, any scrub could get a crappy four sentence tourney report on the Dojo, but anyways, some people actually read it and it and liked it and I was pretty proud of that. That was back in 1997. I went to 5 or 6 PT's between 1995-98. It was like, get 3-4 people, one of them had to have a car, and drive to Dallas or Long Beach or Chicago. And then we all slept in the car because we were spending our money on cards and tourney fee's. But it wasn't that bad because at a PT you could play 24 hours around the clock and people were sleeping on the floors except at Rye where the hotel was run by the gestapo. They even called the police and we had to park the car about a half mile down the road.

  Going to those first PT's was really fun. All the guys that are gods now were pretty dorky then. Like, and this is totally true, I saw Finkel pick his nose and eat it. I watched Mark Justice (is he still alive?) playing some little kid in a side tourney and Mark was mana screwed, and then I saw him draw TWO cards on his draw phase. He was a cheater. The kid beat him anyway because Justice got mana screwed again in the second game. So this little kid who thinks it's great he's playing the famous Mark Justice put's his hand out to shake hands,... and Mark just looks at the kid's hand, turns around and walks away. Well, whatever.

  So like anyways, in the 90's I played mostly fast creature/burn decks or Necro. Man I was REALLY pissed off when they got rid of the Kird Ape. I mean, I almost quit playing, because now my deck sucked! I actually had a collection, if you can call it that, of almost 300 Kird Apes. That was PT Dallas I think, yeah, and I met George Baxter, he was like god then, and he told me just play a burn deck, he said "cook 'em". He had mad skilz for forecasting because just before I went to Dallas I read about this red deck down in Georgia, and then I found out some kid named Chapin had played the same one in Dallas and made top eight. Yeah, so I starting playing Sligh. I studied and studied. Once I even wrote David Price an email asking him about his deck and he sent me his deck list and explained why every card was in there. I bet he already had it typed up, you know, Ivy League, Cornell, but it was very nice of him.

  I played Magic all day and when I wasn't I thought about it or read about it. Like I read every single article on the Dojo, even the scrubby ones, even the humour ones which usually weren't funny. And I was still playing a lot but people were getting wise to my tricks so they would sideboard for Sligh. So I'd switch to Necro and then they would start sideboarding against that. I started playing permission for a while but jeez, I'd be sitting there until the end of almost every round just grinding it out and no time to relax before playing again. So like there was a PT in NYC and everyone was staying at the hotel Pennsylvania. That was the most screwed up situation ever. You could literally walk up to the top, 40 floors, and beat someone trying to get in an elevator and go to the top. You had to go to the top because that's where the side tourneys were for the night. Well, anyways, I'm so fat I couldn't walk up two floors without collapsing so I finally get in an elevator and huck if that elevator didn't stop on every frikking floor. But Chris Pikula was in the elevator and that guy is FUNNY! It almost made the trip bearable. He went on this rant about coin flipping cards and he just went on and on, ya know, I guess you had to be there.

  Now I just play casual stuff or with some T1 degenerate decks. It's still quite a game. My favorite decks are Sligh and Necro, and my favorite card is Ophidian.