My MTG Origin Story

 

Lilliana, a planeswalker from the upcoming Origins set

The next Magic, the Gathering set, to be released July 17^th , is called Magic Origins.  From what I understand, the overarching theme of this set is to explore the origin stories of several planeswalkers (very power cards) in the magic universe.  As part of a promotion for the set, Wizards has been asking fans to tell their own origin stories.  To that end, I’d like to talk about my own discovery of Magic, The Gathering (MTG). 

Using modern technology, I can determine that I started playing sometime around 1994, when the Revised edition was released.  I must admit, reviewing the list of release dates for sets really throws me off, as my perception of this timeline is far different from the actual timeline.  Before consulting this list, I would have presumed six months to a year between set releases. 

I remember that I was of Jr. High School age. I had my friend Cortez over on some random weekend,  when we would typically play video games.  Instead, he had brought these cards he called ‘Magic Cards’ and offered to show me how to play.   I was game, and we sat on the carpet in my bedroom and laid the cards out.  I remember showing him cards from my hand to ask him what they did or how I played them, and slowly but surely, through that first game, I learned how to play cards out of my hand.  

After a very slow progression through the game, we came to a point that I now know as parity.  This is when a game is just a line of creatures on one side and a line of creatures on the other side, staring at one another.  This happened a lot in my early days of magic, but this first time was different because I didn’t have the first clue what I was doing.  I remember that Cortez had a Cockatrice out, a creature with an early form of what is now known as deathtouch.  I would just sort of pick a creature to attack out of my lineup, shrug and see what Cortez would do.  ‘I block with Cockatrice.  It dies.”  … “oh, yeah.”  And then I would do the exact same thing as I furrowed my brow trying to figure out what to do.  “Umm, this creature attacks.” … “I block it.”  … “oh, yeah…”  

  

it's that second line I didn't quite grasp

Back in those days, you could buy a starter deck, which was 60 random cards in some set amount of rarity.  These decks were supposedly playable, but they didn’t necessarily have the mana you needed to even cast your cards.  You just pulled the card off the top of the deck and hoped you could do something with it.  I recall that in that first game, we didn’t play with a  hand size, so I was holding an absurd number of cards, staring, reading, furrowing my brow (lots of brow furrowing in this story).  Cortez was kind enough to let the game carry on this way, so that I could familiarize myself with the cards.

Thinking back on it, that doesn't sound fun at all.  And I recall being frustrated that I couldn’t accomplish anything.  But, on the other hand, I was enthralled by the whole of it.  A card game with cool fantasy themes and tons of different art and creature designs.  It was very stimulating just to read the cards and look at the art.  The only artist I can remember is Poole, he did really nice watercolors of islands.  Technically, the art is higher quality now, but it will never give me the same feeling as the Revised edition art.  There were also miscellaneous pieces of flavor text, often about mysterious characters named 'Urza' and 'Mishra.'  

I don’t know when I decided I wanted to collect and play my own cards, but I think it may have been when I saw some games start to pop up at school.  “Hey, I know those!” And then it turned out that I could buy cards at the comic shop I was already frequenting for Spiderman and X-men comics.  Booster packs were $2 and starter decks were $8.  Later we learned that Starter decks weren’t as good a deal, because they didn’t include as many rare cards, but they got the job done early on.  (it’s worth noting that I’ve bought more cards in the last 6 months than I did the entire time I was collecting then).  

It’s also worth noting that Magic Cards are the only thing that I collected during that time that has maintained and accrued value through the years.  All my comic books, baseball cards and star trek cards are worth about what I paid for them.  A harsh lesson about marketing to children.  

-D