My Story with Magic the Gathering

Eye Candies

1994-1998, My Timmy Years

Like many others, Magic the Gathering has come and gone in my life through stages, but has provided me so many vivid memories with friends that have come and gone.

I actually can't remember the first time I picked up a Magic card, but it must have been sometime back in 1994-1995 at age 11, when Revised Edition was in full swing in Illinois. For a brief moment in time the 3rd Edition of MtG (Revised) was ubiquitously played and traded across public school lunch tables, sidewalks and school buses. The cards could be purchased from your local Jewel/Osco grocery store to the now defunct Borders Bookstore and even the big department store Marshall Fields during the holidays.

I loved opening these gift boxes at Marshall Fields.

My favorite thing to do was to look for packs and starter decks of the cards whenever I had the opportunity, and often coerced my Uncle Johnny to drive me and my friends in his beat up Toyota Corolla to the grocery store to purchase revised booster packs behind the locked glass case in the wee hours of the night.

Back then, there was a simplicity to the game. Although by then there were already hundreds of cards, it wasn't intimidating to learn the rules the different cards and effects. We'd spend Saturday afternoons trading and building decks around the sweet Royal Assassin or Shivan Dragon that some of us were lucky enough to pull out of packs. Deck-tech at the time basically consisted of cramming as many of your favorite cards into a deck and then filling the land slots with as many dual lands as necessary to color fix.

Occasionally we'd hit up the local tournament scene, chock full of neck beards and sweaties to test our mettle against the local champs. Back then, I'd rarely make it past the first round with my decks but never could figure out why I was getting crushed. I recall scraping up $5 to enter the tournament, only to have my dreams crushed by older men who had a better mastery of the game. Then I'd walk next door to buy a small sized Caesar's Pizza to ease the sting and hang around the comic store looking at cards I couldn't afford behind glass cases. I really cherished the cards back then, and had real dreams about silly things like uncovering a hidden treasure of Underground Seas.

Trading was much more prevalent back in that time as well. It was common to ask a random stranger at a card store if they wanted to trade for any cards, and this is eventually how I fumbled my way into small amounts of Alpha Beta and Unlimited cards. Even back then, they were special and immediately recognizable based on their deeper color saturation. Unlimited was much more common than Alpha and Beta which were incredibly sought after even in the early months of the game.

When the weaker sets of Homelands and Fallen Empires came out, my friends' interest in the game naturally started to chasing girls around in high school. Thinking that I'd never return to the game, I sold the majority of my cards on eBay netting me a whopping ~$1700 and was the beginning of a decade long hiatus from the game. eBay is how I parted ways with my Beta Shivan Dragon and my first piece of power that I had traded for at the store, an Unlimited Mox Pearl.

2009-2010

Shortly after entering the workforce in 2006 and finding out my good friend and colleague JohnM also used to play the game, we started to have game nights where we drafted booster boxes of M10, Worldwake and Zendikar. Of course my lucky friend John pulled Jace the Mind Sculptor in our first draft of Zendikar. He always had a way with these kind of things.

These were truly care free years of young adulthood where we had a little bit of money to spend on cardboard, but didn't yet have life's burdens weighing us down yet. We would go to a local card store CardZilla together and pay for booster boxes in cash before bringing it back to draft. I remember driving in my worse for wear 1993 Honda Prelude with JohnM down Pacific Coast Highway as we discussed how crazy it was that people would spend upwards of $10,000 on a Black Lotus. Who in their right mind would spend that much on cardboard, we quipped. Hindsight is 20/20.

John grinned mischievously when he opened this chase card

Slinging cardboard and drinking glasses of Maker's Mark whiskey with good friends on top of my wobbly wooden IKEA table made up some of my favorite memories of my 20's. Some people spend their 20's traveling the world (or so I'm told). I was happy enough to crack packs of a collectible trading card game with friends.

Rest in peace John, I'll always cherish the good times we had together.

2013-2016

After the US economy crashed in 2009, I started to contemplate a career change from automotive engineering to aerospace. I left my company shortly thereafter, and took a leap of faith at a budding startup company. At the time, I had no idea about the risks involved, but it was one of the best decisions I had made. After failing to get my friends to join to company as well, I naturally started to have less time to spend with my old colleagues who all happened to be getting married and moving on with their lives.

This is when I took a break from the game to focus on being an adult and take my career more seriously. I got married in 2013 and bought my first condo in 2013, and as expected there was simply too little time leftover to coordinate game nights with friends even though this was the source of many of my happiest moments. There were the occasional times when I felt the pull to play MTG, so I would meet a friend up at a local LGS to play a draft when new sets were released but playing the game was becoming less frequent.

Wanting to change that, I started coordinating with another great colleague and friend (MChan2) to get drafts going again. Even though with a new group, we still had great memories playing in my condo over sets like Kaladesh and Magic Origins while ordering takeout Thai food and boba teas. Sadly, this was also short lived as I changed roles at my company, leaving little time and energy for in person gaming. I satiated by urges by playing limited draft formats on the very competitive Magic the Gathering Online (mtgo), but the janky interface was a constant turn off. Around this time is when I started to become a much strong player, as I started to grasp the fundamentals around building balanced decks, using card synergies and picking up on draft cues.

2019-Present

By the time COVID hit in 2019, playing paper magic was lifetimes ago and was replaced by the more modern MtG Arena. It was enjoyable, but lacked the joy of "Gathering" behind slick interfaces and a lower barrier to entry. Locked away in quarantine, I found my way into the high end and graded MTG groups on facebook after hearing about it on a reddit post.

It didn't take me long to relive my childhood by rekindling my desire for what was now considered Vintage Cards. By this time it was clear that Magic was a game that would continue to mean a lot to me. And finally having a bit of disposable income, I started to amass the cards that were coveted and rare even 30 years ago. Admittedly it took some logic bending to wrap my head around spending big money on collectible cardboard pieces printed 30 years ago, but it wasn't at all about the investment potential of the cards. It was simply the cost of entry to own something that I love and enjoy.

I started this blog shortly a couple of years later to share these cards with others that might appreciate these museum pieces. After all, much too often collectors acquire these cards and lock them away in vaults where they can no longer be enjoyed by others.

Set of Power 9 + Underground Sea

Those with a discerning eye might recognize that the Power 9 set is in Alpha sans the Beta edition Black Lotus. This is because the Alpha Black Lotus in Gem Mint condition had become prohibitively expensive. For example in 2021, a PSA10 case signed Black Lotus was sold on eBay by David Edwards for a sum of $511,100. Even a few years before then, a private sale recorded $900,000 for a PSA10 Black Lotus. So for now I'm forced to be satisfied with my lowly Beta edition of the card and take daily antidepressants to suppress my urge to remortgage the house to acquire an Alpha copy.

In early 2022, I also started to think about getting into the Old School format by reconstructing childhood decks like Mastro's Land Destruction TM deck below with higher end cards, and other Tier 1 Old School staples like infamous control deck "The Deck" and various renditions of Robot artifact decks. I also decided to purchase a set of International Collector's Edition as a "cheaper" alternative for playable copies of power 9 and dual lands. My intention was to meet new friends on Discord or at local game stores to play with but life with 2 young kids had continually gotten in the way of this stretch goal. I hope to get some action with these cards soon and will be sure to report back.