post your magic history

I'm feeling reminiscient and wordy, so you folks are stuck with my magical autobiography. If this concept bores you, press back. Otherwise, feel free to add your own. Warning: I am... verbose, and my memory is often described as remarkable. Smmenen and I should have a windbag contest.

Perhaps because I've never really considered myself a serious member of the MTG community, it strikes me that I have carried on this hobby for a tremendously long time. I bought my first cards during Homelands, I believe. I was in grade school and had seen people playing before, it looked interesting and fun. I found out a friend of mine had cards so I took the plunge. My first purchase was the 4th edition starter set equivilent, with two piles of 60 random cards, a felt bag and some blue glass beads in a box printed to look like the back of an oversized card. I still have the box, bag, and beads.

My grade school friend played by some nonstandard rules, which myself and the couple other kids who also decided to start out did not know. The only major difference I remember, aside from a kids' oversimplification of the batch rules, was that you had infinite land drops per turn and could draw a card when you played a land. X spells dominated, and massive, 5c, 200+ card decks were standard. Nevertheless, it was the social experience I liked; we hardly thought it worth sitting down with less than 4 players. Sometimes we formed official teams, at other times the freeforalls divided by hastily drawn alliance and divided again at the first opportunity to backstab. All with a grin and a laugh, but you couldn't trust any of those fuckers once you shuffled up.

Sometime during Tempest I discovered the actual rules, convinced others to use them, and began trying to build a 40 card 2-colour deck in response to the brand new issue of manabase instability. I didn't have enough cards.

Things got more serious and our tiny playgroup joined a hobby shop's weekly night. By now I was playing a green fatty deck that used elvish piper and other cost cheating effects. I was starting to outperform most folks due to my superior understanding of deck design (lol!). I even built a sliver/burn deck from commons and uncommons that impressed others with such technology as focus and a mana curve enough that someone bought it from me. Eventually I traded my green rares to build new decks around new themes, with very limited access to the card pool this diversifying knocked my win percentage down a few pegs. Partly due to this and partly due to my blossoming exploration of the newfangled Internet, I discovered Beyond Dominaria sometime during early Masques, which I joined as Liam.

Looking back the online type 1 community was hilarious. Practically half the regulars used to playtest in person (well, maybe not quite), and many were very young... if you browse the TMD archives you can find JP reminiscing about getting permission from his mom to sleep over at Azhrei's house. Neutral Ground was the Type 1 mecca. The Canadian metagame consisted of suicide black. Developing Enchantress was serious business. Sylvan Library vs Soothesaying in Keeper was the hot topic of the day, with the green enchantment championed by the Librarian himself, Matt D'avanzo. Invincible Counter Troll was everyone's favorite thing to hate. Smmenen argued against Force in Keeper. Obviously, anything that could post a winning record against The Deck was auto-restrict. And I'm pretty sure most of us hadn't even heard of Europe, let alone the metagame there.

While I followed the boards for some time, I was playing less and not against anyone good, so I didn't really pick up much aside from a desire to play with blue cards from BD. I remember OSC being the innovation of the day, having a blast goldfishing TurboNevyn in apprentice, and the Doomsday prank, which confused me thoroughly (my gut told me the list made no sense, but I'd learned to believe those names...). I remember K-Run taking down the first T1ToC with Parfait (those things used to be played on apprentice!), catapulting his pet deck to the stone-age equivilent of teir 1. I mailed him a Pegasus Stampede for his birthday. Through all this, I focused most of my attention on trying to make a U/B budget deck and 3-colour zoo. I never once, and still have not, played a single game with a Keeper deck.

Then FoF was printed and the metagame was officially crapped on. BBS decimated Neutral Ground and the current ToC. Rumbles of discontent began to build, but they were quickly eclipsed by massive drama over net-decking. As I recall, Legend had assembled the obvious fof/b2b/4xMorphling/999counter deck to prey on Keeper and Suicide, dubbed it Legend Blue, and subsequently thrown a massive fit when someone ran his list card for card in the ToC. He also raised loud, incessant objections to use of the name BBS, insisting the deck was called Legend Blue and must go by no other monkier. To be honest, I don't remember Legend keeping it up for long, I think he left the site. His crony Negator, however, stuck around flaming and trolling untill everyone was thoroughly sick of him. Insults flew like monkey feces and the whole thing got very immature. Fun was had by all. I think eventually Negator, too, gave up... I'm not sure BD's archaic forum software was capable of bans.

Since it powered a deck that won against Keeper, FoF got the axe pretty quickly, an event which pretty much coincided with my fading interest in magic. The last thing I remember playing with was the brand new Standstill, trying to make it work in one of my endless and terrible Zoo permutations, before I said my goodbyes on BD and took up playing Descent 3 aggressively. I do remember that a new deck called Grow was just starting to get the first trickles of serious attention, I think because someone with a name played it at a tournament, but I didn't look into it myself.

It was a long while before I felt a strange but familiar urge. I'd totally forgotten about BD and my cards had been shoved somewhere out of the way long since. But for some reason, I had to find out what was up: discover the latest 60th card in Keeper (let me guess, Lobotomy again?), say hi to Rakso, that sort of thing. Instead, I found myself confronted with a 404.

The site used to go down once in a while so I didn't think much of it. I checked back a couple times a day for a few days... but no "site down" temporary page appeared, as was the custom, nor did any Apache-related page telling me to log in if I was the owner of the domain. So, I made one of my extremely uncommon forays into #bdchat to get the scoop. The room seemed mostly extinct, but I was informed that BD had died, that Zherbus had tried and failed to save it, and that he had migrated the community to a new home called themanadrain.com. I registered here as Liam and began the process of unfurling the new and foreign metagame.

Tog was king shit, and there were several kinds of Slaver deck all in very raw states. I experimented a bit with 'tog, but decided I didn't like it... intuition/ak was obviously a great effect, but it always seemed like more work to do than I could leverage it for in some unquantifiable way. Obviously, I was doing it wrong, but I know now this observation was the beginning of my understanding of a concept that would later be called tempo. Next I copied some shop slaver list that had mana drains. I raised an eyebrow for some time at Guilded Lotus... surely this is exactly the sort of card that used to catch derision on BD. The deck tested terribly and guilded lotus seemed like an inadequate and misguided attempt to mesh shops and drains. I looked around a bit, but when I saw Guilded Lotus was actually fairly standard I left the site in disgust.

It was another fair while before I appeared here again. I started reading about the decks on the front page again (I'd say the top decks, but I was too far removed from the meta to make the distinction, so I looked at everything) and it seemed like 4cc was popular. I think I remember a debate over the ratio of Exalted Angel to Decree Of Justice. Then, I saw a deck that captured my imagination, despite the fact I quickly gathered it was an underdog that was championed by a single, dedicated proponent. I had stumbled into a thread by JDizzle and a list for DeathLong.

DeathLong appealed to me and my asthetic of the game. Moreso than anything else I'd ever put my hands on, the list and playstyle were extremely removed from the metagame. Either a card enabled the nonsense better than the other options, or it was wrong. Either you blew your load in their face before they could do anything about it, or you lost. In my mind, this made the decklist objective and the strategy inherently strong. I tinkered with JD's list heavily and positively butchered it. However, I learned to play Storm, discovered the potential depth of the logic puzzle side of the game, and became interested in Vintage again. When Grim Tutor was legalized, I tested both lists and missed the toolbox sideboard and secretly disappointed the much-debated card didn't push my pet deck over the top. I switched away from Death Wish after most others.

The other deck I picked up, perhaps not coincidentally, was also a list that recieved chiefly disdain. Probably more coincidentally, it also contained the seeds to a metagame powerhouse. That deck was Meandeck Gifts. I learned the deck and posted about it for my Full Member exam, another very lengthy post that I probably should have spent a lot less words on. I think the only really relevant thing in there was some theorizing that gifts-oath was inferior to the main list... gifts-oath was a brand new toy at the time but I think my lack of excitement proved wise. With the aid and urging of Clown of Tresserhorn, I put a fair bit of effort into hybridizing Gifts and Slaver, winding up with a reasonably competative list that ran a lot of multiples of 3. In the end it proved to be the incorrect meta choice and the project was abandoned. I remember getting the find 2 robots, nothing else trick from Clown before it became common knowledge and thinking that was pretty slick. Somewhere in here I tested Uba Stax extensively and grew frustrated. I built a lot of weird shop variants that went nowhere to try to give it the punch I couldn't find.

Next Becker unveiled Pitch Long and my world was filled with glee. My pet deck was now AWESOME. Since I already knew the archetype inside out, I had a big head start on most of the people trying to get used to the thing... my test partner at the time was in love with Slaver and, due to playing people without a clue, didn't believe me that Becker's deck cut it to pieces. I proved him wrong, over and over and over.

Quickly, people figured out Pitch Long. It wasn't too long after that that people figured out Meandeck Gifts. I rarely championed scroll gifts on the boards, what with most people so convinced by SSB, but there was definitely a serious gap between Steve releasing the list and the metagame learning how to play it. I used to get irritated with people who still insisted on running Tendrils in the sideboard and relied heavily on tinx. The gifts/long meta pushed out Slaver and Stax, a void which was flooded with u/w fish. I found that matchup aggrevating and lost a lot of interest in the format.

The metabomb trifecta of ichorid cards, gush, and flash hit and distanced me further, after my initial attempts to make Gush Tendrils good failed. I messed around with GAT and learned the Gro concept, many years after the first time I saw the deck in its infant stages. Interest waxed and waned until I turned to my favorite way to make the game interesting: tendrils of agony. I returned to the Gush Tendrils idea, this time starting from scratch with the gro concept in mind. The result can still be found in the Open forum... unfortunately, I didn't have the courage to post my deck for critiscism until ICBM kicked up a stink with Empty Gush and proved the premise valid. I released my list with a detailed analysis, but the proven work of a proven team (fairly) got more attention. When TTS came out, it was almost card for card with my deck except with Ponder over Scroll... Becker considered this the key innovation but I argued my list was just as valid, and which you should play should depend on the meta. I was pleased to notice almost as many gush-storm lists with Scroll as without make top 8. Soon Tyrant Oath was on the rise and I was too busy to test.

Then, of course, the DCI uprooted us all again. I couldn't be bothered to learn the new meta and pretty much didn't surface again until Ad Nauseam was spoiled. Once again, the chance to work on an explosive Tendrils deck presented itself, and I've been active again for the past little while.

(phew. We're done. Go have a smoke.)