History of TheManaDrain

[CrazyCarl]

Hey guys, what's going on in this thread?

Srsly, I'll post some of my fonder memories of TMD tomorrow or something.  I'd go so far as to say that TMD was a big part of my formative years as a teenager, no jokes.

[Jacob Orlove]

Wow, it's weird to be back. It looks like people have covered the basics already, so I'll add a little. I can also answer questions.

I was promoted to moderator back in '03, I don't remember why. I joined Meandeck in '04, so that can't have been the reason. Probably I just posted a lot. I took over as the day to day admin when Zherbus didn't have enough time for it anymore, and Pete kept me on as lead admin when he bought the site. I stopped posting in '08.

I'm heading back to the east coast for law school this fall, however, so I might finally be close enough to some tournaments to play Type 1 again. I might as well check out TMD from time to time, too.

[Juggernaut GO]

I'd say while the format is not nearly as robust as it was 5 years ago, this forum certainly has become far better of a community then what it used to be.  It's no longer a place where elitists came to jerk each other off and there is also no longer a clique of arrogant douches running the site like Stalin.

I am curious what happened to that guy RVS, he used to play the tinker deck all the time, and it was the most fun ever.

[Demonic Attorney]

I don't think anyone has mentioned MolotDET as former staff, though he was here before my time.

I started reading TMD in 2004, made an account at the very end of that year, and I think I started posting in 2005 after I placed 17th at Waterbury because 2 Meandeckers sabotaged my tiebreaks after our early-round matches  

I was made moderator in 2007, I think (August 2006), and Admin in 2008.  

The best post I remember being made to TMD was Kowal's fake WotC page announcing the restriction of Night's Whisper because "Wizards hates Sui Black players and hopes you all get hit by a bus getting hit by a plane."  

[Godder]

Chain5 - no (although there was a time when all Vintage Adepts had some Mod powers)
Hyperion - yes
MolotDET - yes

Also, to get to the harder ones sooner rather than later, here are some obvious ones from this thread and current staff:

Jacob Orlove
Azhrei
Toad
Demonic Attorney
Godder
JP Meyer
Matt (formerly MattTheGreat)
Klep
The Atog Lord
Eastman
Marske
TheBrassMan
Clariax (Rules Forum)
Ephraim (Card Creation Forum)

I remember Jacob arriving on the scene - it was like he became a member one day and just started posting in everything, a lot. All of a sudden, he was a Moderator, probably because he did post a lot .

[Pyromaniac]

I am curious what happened to that guy RVS, he used to play the tinker deck all the time, and it was the most fun ever.

As to what happened with RVS: he's retired from Magic. I don't know if he still has his cards but he never plays anymore

As for me: I stopped played competitive decks a few years ago and can't be bothered to try and work my way back into competition, I just don't have the time or drive for it. I still attend tournaments every once in a while but mostly just to talk to people I know and play some EDH and casual magic.

The rest of ISP has also semi-retired from Vintage, mostly because we've become somewhat bored with Vintage the way it is at the moment. (And PLEASE don't tell us everything's fine etc...we like to make up our own opinions thank you...) The other issue is that all of us have busy jobs at the moment along with other hobbies which take up most of our time.

[nataz]

Hi-Val

[Mantis]

Wasn't BR4M moderator as well?

[Juggernaut GO]

Wasn't BR4M moderator as well?

pretty sure I told that guy to go fuck himself in a PM one time, haven't really heard from him since.

[Godder]

Hi Val - yes.
Bram (formerly Kaervek) - yes.
Also, Smennen.

[MishraTron]

Do Moderators of the defunct Article Submission Forum count?

[Godder]

No, because they were more editors than moderators.

[CrazyCarl]

Looks like the history I know of was mostly covered.  Beyond Dominia died, Zherbus decided to create a website that would foster intelligent discussion.  The problem with it being a website is anyone could join, so you'd have people with no grasp of grammar or Magic theory trying to be the next big thing (ARCANE DENIAL IZ GUD AMIRITE!?).  I'd also credit TMD with the revitalization of Vintage tournaments.  With the advent of proxy events, combined with Tournament Announcement forums, there were large Vintage events all over the Northeast and New England (can't speak much for the rest of the world because I had no reason to pay attention!)  Lots of decks were announced, tweaked, tuned, and made competitive through the Vintage Adept Forums/Advanced Vintage forums/whatever they were called at the time.  Naturally people got pissed, but you know what, there was a lot of good information and the forums weren't closed, so anyone could read and learn.

I used to write tournament reports once in a while before I won the 2003 Vintage Grand Prix at which point I started writing for StarCity instead.  Sometimes I have the desire to play a Vintage or Legacy event and then write a report, buuuuuuut that would involve playing Magic, which outside of Type 4 and Cube I, unfortunately, do not enjoy all that much anymore.

But yeah, lots of good times on TheManaDrain.  Late night IRC chats, making fun of various nations, and all around intelligent conversation made this a great place to foster the Type 1 community.

[Razvan]

Incidentally, since Carl decided he still can post here... him winning the 2003 champs is what brought a lot of people, including myself, to TMD. Good times.

And it wasn't just Arcane Denial, it was like 12 Show and Tell decks a day... and ironically enough, the card is playable now too

[Zherbus]

Oh boy....

Zherbus, who is around here somewhere, can give you the definitive history.

Here's what I remember.

Bdominia was THE site for Type 1 back around 2000.   Oscar Tan was the main mod, and Azhrei (Darren Di Battista) was the biggest voice in the crowd.   There were quite a few Europeans on the site, much like this one.

Then, one day, I think in late 2001, I tried to log onto Bdominia, but the site was down.  It turns out that the owner of the site didn't pay the upkeep, and the site just died.   No one paid the bill, and eventually the domain just disappeared.     I tried to archive as much of it as I could, using the Wayback machine.

BDominia's demise was known in advance, which is why I jumped on creating TMD. Feedback from BD'rs about what they liked and didn't like about BD served as the foundation of how I created the site.

At that point, various people started opening up Vintage forums.  I opened up a forum on Delphi Forums, and it attracted a little bit of traffic.    Zherbus opened up this website.   And I think there were a few others.   Over time, however, most of the players seemed to end up here.   The other sites, through natural competition, dried up and died down.

Zherbus has a pretty cool vision for the website.  Nearly immediately, although not at first, he began to separate the wheat from the chaff, and created the Extreme Vintage forum for high level discussion.   It was there that he unveiled Paragon Keeper.   That was quite a discussion back in 2002ish, as it was the first version of Keeper built with Fetchlands, an entirely new mana base to an archetype whose mana base had looked largely the same since 1995. 

Yeah... except BD and TMD did co-exist for a few weeks. I pulled in a lot of BD regulars, I heavily moderated useless conversation, and promoted in depth conversation. Those three factors made TMD take off.

And yep! We had primers posted and being developed. Nether Void, Suicide Black, Sligh, Goblins, TnT, etc. When I posted Paragon Keeper, not only did it include fetchlands, but an already (seemingly obvious now) next step of 2 basic Islands to fetch and a robust Cunning Wish package.

Oh, and motherfucking BRAINSTORM.

Another big change to the website was the short-lived attempt to create article content on the front page.   Legend wrote his great primers on Mono Blue and on Suicide Black.   Then, Team Meandeck wrote an article on mono-red Stacker.

Yep!

I was a moderator pretty early on (as were most Meandeckers), in the 'second' wave of moderatorship.   

The biggest change that I can remember is that Starcitygames bought the website, and the front page went away, and Zherbus dissappeared for a long while.

That's what I remember.

I disappeared first, then sold it. Then came back a few years later. Then went away again... then came back sort of. Ha.

I remember getting banned for calling out people on meandeck because they pretty much ran the site until scg bought it.

I'm not really sure what era was worse.

I also remember being turned down on multiple occasions when I offered the owner of SCG 10,000$ cash  to buy TMD  just so I could ban people.  One was a memorable exchange in a hotel elevator in Richmond during the winter storm at one of their p9 events.

Well since bygones and bygones, at the time I had no idea who you were. I just knew that if you had a vagina, there was a truckload of sand lodged within it. But like everyone in the Vintage community, we eventually get along.

Trivia:

Once upon a time a lot of people thought Suicide Black was good.  Threads about this deck would flood the forums, and those threads would be filled with all sorts of flood by posters going back and forth arguing that suicide black was good, no it's not good, etc.

Then Zherbus created the Suicide Black forum.

True story. 

Yep, and I believe the forum description was something like:

"Parents totally suck, dude."

I originally came across BDominia as place to discuss Extended(!) because that was my favorite format at the time (this was when Dual Lands were still specifically legal in 1.x), and there were no decent forums at all for Extended, so BD it was. I had been reading Oscar Tan (Rakso) on SCG, so was familiar with BD as a place for Type 1, but K-Run's primer on Parfait got me into Vintage because I liked mono-W decks (my avatar for years was Serra Angel) and here was a cheap Vintage White deck that wasn't terrible.

Nobody remembers Holy Tommy Gun, Devil's Bile, Butter Knives, D'AvanZoo, or Legion. Vintage (at least ME) was just as guilty of awful deck names as Legacy. We just grew out of it.

Back then, big names on BD included Matt D'Avanzo, Azhrei, Rakso, JP Meyer and some others. I also remember some noob getting into some serious arguments/flame wars over Prohibit... When BD died, and TMD was created, a lot of the names moved across, but not all of them. TMD itself started in June, 2002, and by the end of 2002 was using too much bandwidth, and was shut down. However, Zherbus retained FTP access, and he moved the site to a new host. At the end of 2003, the new hosting company shut down TMD because of high bandwidth. The site was deleted as well, and all with no prior warning. TMD was forced to restart from scratch, this time hosted by one of Leviat's friends, although Leviat was able to use the backups to create the archives. Later, TMD was hosted by Leviat himself until it was moved to its present location on the SCG server.

Prohibit was a little funny, but nothing beats Dromar's Charm.

And yeah, TMD DESTROYED my host providers bandwidth. They offered no better package, so I got essentially kicked off!

Looks like the history I know of was mostly covered.  Beyond Dominia died, Zherbus decided to create a website that would foster intelligent discussion.  The problem with it being a website is anyone could join, so you'd have people with no grasp of grammar or Magic theory trying to be the next big thing (ARCANE DENIAL IZ GUD AMIRITE!?).  I'd also credit TMD with the revitalization of Vintage tournaments.  With the advent of proxy events, combined with Tournament Announcement forums, there were large Vintage events all over the Northeast and New England (can't speak much for the rest of the world because I had no reason to pay attention!)  Lots of decks were announced, tweaked, tuned, and made competitive through the Vintage Adept Forums/Advanced Vintage forums/whatever they were called at the time.  Naturally people got pissed, but you know what, there was a lot of good information and the forums weren't closed, so anyone could read and learn.

First off - <3 C4rl.

Secondly, good summary. The proxy events were actually started with BD when I started them in New England, but took off on TMD where others started running them.

The problem with Vintage, back then (and one more arguement for Proxies) was that with people not being able to play powered decks, the format was like 80% mono-colored shit. Sligh, Parfait, White Weenie variants, Suicide variants, and Curiously Gay Fish. The powered decks were pretty much done at: Stacker, Keeper, Mono-U (BBS), and the occassional brave soul who played Academy/Dragon/Mask decks. Those without good Vintage card pools were talking a lot about stuff that was just worse than decks that were already tier 3... tier 2 at best. R/G Beats, Extended deck ports (Legacy was more Vintage deck ports at the time), and to be quite honest, blatantly HORRID decks like A Beautiful Mind (UGH), Invincible Counter Troll (come the fuck on), and Lich. The latter set of decks just being people WITH power playing something worse than what they could have and trying to convince the planet that it was correct.

Blah.

TMD's first few months saw:

• Tools N Tubbies (TnT), the Workshop aggro deck with a Survival of the Fittest engine. Yay for Anger, Welders, and Squee!
• Proxy Events trickle out in New England, then blow up everywhere except for Europe and the Mid-West. I used to get SOOOO much hatemail from the Mid-west because I'd lock Grim Lavamancer.dec threads, my how things have changed.
• Paragon Keeper, which introduced a lot of stuff we all take for granted today. Fetchland set ups using basics, Brainstorm, Wish SB's, and functioning without 4 Fact of Fictions.
• TMD growing by dozens of members to a few days of hundreds per day.
• TMD Members graduating from posting here to writing for SCG.
• Tog! Intuition-Ak, Gush, Go crazy, Wish for Berserk, go get lunch.
• Gro Variants, from PChapins first run at it at Origins (Smmenen, confirm?), to Grand Inquisitor pioneering experiments (and some tournament successes) with the Gro shell in Vintage, to Gro-a-Tog - The unholy marriage of Gro and Tog decks.
• Long.dec... Tendril's was printed and Smmenen did this:

It was quite a snowballing start.

[CrazyCarl]

Ahhh, Dromar's Charm and Prohibit.  I actually had a signed playset of Prohibits for a while.  Pretty sweet.  Remember when Gush got restricted and it was OK to play something other than GAT?

[Zherbus]

Carl, this thread needs more Carl on Zherbus Keeper mirror, circa 2002.

[Godder]

Oh boy, ICT and ABM... For all the hate ABM generated for Psyduck, he was also playing Stax decks long before anyone else thought they were any good, but his "reputation" killed any chance Stax had of getting anywhere on TMD until someone else picked it up and did well with it. I actually remember Holy Tommy Gun (WW/r if anyone is wondering) and D'Avanzoo as well, but they never quite got there.

[TracerBullet]

Oh boy, ICT and ABM... For all the hate ABM generated for Psyduck, he was also playing Stax decks long before anyone else thought they were any good, but his "reputation" killed any chance Stax had of getting anywhere on TMD until someone else picked it up and did well with it. I actually remember Holy Tommy Gun (WW/r if anyone is wondering) and D'Avanzoo as well, but they never quite got there.

I'll give my vote to Butterknives (Pikula? played it at an invitational one year, and I actually had it built at one point, including all 4 Juzams), D'VanZoo (What ever happened to Matt?), ICT (anyone who ever played whatever his name was would remember his facial ticks), and the early arguments on Gaea's Blessing vs YawgWill (Azhrei eventually beat D'Avanzo).

I don't think TMD can take credit for TnT, I remember that one being on BD (Along with Stacker2, the Ultimate Fat Burner and the original TnT, Mexican Christmas ((cause it was R/G for the Mexican flag, and it had the little worker dudes [welders])).  I do remember DuckTape.  And good times were had by all.

To my credit, I made fun of Semenman at the time of the original Brown Paper Bag list (BBS/Mono-U with Prohibit), and to my detriment, I made fun of JP for suggesting that Gush + Berserk + Psychatog would ever be playable. 

I don't think MiracleGro started was T1 invention - I'm pretty sure Alan Comer had that one in 1.x before we ever got to it.  That being said, adding Tog + unrestriction of Brainstorm was a stroke of genius.



Anyone who can remember my epitaph/post comma name on BD earns all kinds of bonus points.  I was TracerBullet, the _____ __ ______.

[Zherbus]

TracerBullet, TMD isn't taking credit for any of that stuff I listed. That's all just to illustrate the era that boomed.

TMD certainly didn't design Paragon Keeper. Carl Winter and myself did quite a bit of that, along with other Paragon input.
The Germans did the TnT thing. We had no idea what happened, but that present showed up on TMDs doorstep.

Gro was Alan Comer, but Chapin was the first person to make Gush NOT a joke in Vintage.

[vassago]

I heard from a bum on the street corner that TMD was forged from pure manliness and absolute power milked from the testicles of the gods themselves....Even though there seems to be much stronger evidence to the contrary in this thread, I am inclined to believe him. 

[Godder]

And Long.dec was named after Mike Long, who showed that LED, Burning Wish, Yawgmoth's Will and Tendrils made a pretty potent combo deck.

[TracerBullet]

And Long.dec was named after Mike Long, who showed that LED, Burning Wish, Yawgmoth's Will and Tendrils made a pretty potent combo deck.

Anybody remember the name behind The Funker that Shane Stoots loved so much (Covetous Dragon + Urza's Block artifact mana + Welders + Blue Draw 7s)?

[Zherbus]

Shane made that. It was just a funky, but explosive deck.

[Duncan]

"We don't call it "Holland", we call it "Meandeck Europe".  It's like regular Europe, except by making a few minor changes, we've improved it immeasurably."

-Saucemaster

http://www.themanadrain.com/index.php?topic=21381.0

Love this quote! Absolutely awesome Too bad the link does not work I'd love to see the original topic and the replies.

One of the best threads I've ever read here was Feinsteins tournament report. I can't recall a link immediately, but it's the one where he visits the Dark Lord and Brassman for advice. That was an epic story.

[Toad]

I was promoted to moderator back in '03, I don't remember why. I joined Meandeck in '04, so that can't have been the reason. Probably I just posted a lot.

You joined Meandeck in 2004 and then stepped back to 2003 and got promoted to moderator because of this.

This thread brings me tons of awesome memories back. Maybe I should play some T1 again at some point ...
PennyLane and Fever have not been mentionned in this thread yet !

[jpmeyer]

To my credit, I made fun of Semenman at the time of the original Brown Paper Bag list (BBS/Mono-U with Prohibit), and to my detriment, I made fun of JP for suggesting that Gush + Berserk + Psychatog would ever be playable. 

I don't think MiracleGro started was T1 invention - I'm pretty sure Alan Comer had that one in 1.x before we ever got to it.  That being said, adding Tog + unrestriction of Brainstorm was a stroke of genius.

Which is pretty understandable seeing how the entire deck came about as kind of a joke.  At GP Cleveland we wanted to have a Vintage side event, but couldn't find enough people so we just played amongst ourselves.  The only deck I had on me (other than my U/G Madness deck that I had brought for the tourney proper) was my Standard Psychatog deck, where I swapped out 4 Counterspell and 4 Circular Logic for 4 Mana Drain and 4 Force of Will and after blowing out a few of the decks that Smmenen had on him (I think Mask and mono-blue?) I got the crazy idea that ZOMG this could be a real deck!  I then tried playing it in what would be the last BD online tournament (which I think only lasted like 2 rounds before BD went down) and was just completely blowing out those "mono-colored shit" decks as Zherbus put it of the time.  My favorite was letting Parfait (or maybe Enchantress?) do whatever they wanted for a few turns against me before casting Upheaval/Tog on turn 5, which made them discard like 15 cards or something.

[Godder]

I was promoted to moderator back in '03, I don't remember why. I joined Meandeck in '04, so that can't have been the reason. Probably I just posted a lot.

You joined Meandeck in 2004 and then stepped back to 2003 and got promoted to moderator because of this.

This thread brings me tons of awesome memories back. Maybe I should play some T1 again at some point ...
PennyLane and Fever have not been mentionned in this thread yet !

I haven't forgotten either of them (they were cousins) - Fever was a Moderator way back when (another one for the list) and Penny (not her real name, obv) was a favorite of #TMD.

[Toad]

Jup, they were cousins. Penny's real name is Julie, and she was indeed #TMD's favourite. Fever, originally FeverDog, was a pro for getting into fights with everyone around. Flames FTW.

There was also another girl who used to post a lot at that time, It is a shame I cannot remember her nickname, she was playing on budget and always designing pretty nice unpowered decks.

I'm surprised no one mentionned the German crew from CAB already, they were a huge part of the Vintage scene some years ago. Kim Kluck (Shades) invented Slaver, and Carsten Kotter (Mons) was the first player to win a tournament with a Gifts Ungiven package featuring Tinker Colossus as win condition. They were also involved in the design of GermBus, which dominated the Vintage scene for a long while (Exalted Angel Skeletal Scrying Decree of Justice Keeper). Stefan Iwasienko helped a lot too, and was another #TMD favourite back then (Womprax/Wompatog).

K-Run was a well known player back then, mostly for the design of Parfait. He is a great guy.

I'd also name Koen Van der Hulst and Arthur Tindemans for creating MUD circa 2003, from Netherlands.

Everyone from Duelmen too !!! The first huge Vintage scene in the World

Nobody remembers Holy Tommy Gun, Devil's Bile, Butter Knives, D'AvanZoo, or Legion.

I do!
/old

[Matt]

While the supreme overlords have been named already, other admins we've had over the years are Azhrei, Toad, Leviat, Ferrett and me.

I was an admin briefly! For, like, a weekend. The only thing I did though was manually change my postcount and then forget what it originally was so now no one knows.