Editor’s Note: Welcome to Tricks of the Trade, Tom Dawson’s new column on all things good about Magic: The Gathering! To kick things off, Tom proposed one of our world-famous round-ups to lead into the unfathomably deep subject that is M:tG, and you can consider this a sort of backdoor pilot for Tom’s column. The questions posed were as follows:
Who got you into the game, and how?
What is it about the game that originally caught your interest?
Do you still play? If so, what sort of decks do you run?
Share a favourite story, anecdote, or even a random piece of trivia you enjoy
Well, the results are in, and hopefully our thoughts on the matter will spark some discussion, as well as whet your appetite for what’s to come with this exciting new feature on the Geek!
Tom Dawson:
Who got you into the game, and how?
For me this was my buddy Steve, who picked it up from a mutual friend. It began with what I now recognise as a typical cycle of events; one person discovers the game, and is roundly mocked by his or her friends, because we may be nerds but Magic is geeky even by our standards. After a while, this adopter persuades their friends to try the game. Those friends reluctantly agree, usually out of boredom, and that’s all it takes for the virus to pass onto a new host. At this point, the cycle begins again, with the cardboard crack laying claim to another disciple. In my case, it only took two games before Magic had its hooks directly into my heart.
What is it about the game that originally caught your interest?
I distinctly remember the moment that Magic took hold of me. My first game was a floundering affair, frequently punctuated by my “what happens if” or “how do I” queries and the resultant explanation. Suffice to say I lost, and lost hard. By the time we moved on to a second match I felt confident I had the basics down, and it was a slightly more even duel, albeit weighted by the decks in play. While Steve was playing his at-the-time prized (in hindsight of course, we are both in agreement that it was a fairly useless deck) mono-black deck, into which he had put both time and thought as well as the money he spent buying individual – and awesome – cards, I was using his spare deck, an Izzet red/blue number fresh from the Duel Deck and then bulked out with whatever extra cards he had lying around. The match itself had devolved into a slugfest, both of us scrambling for some way to batter past the other’s defences for a final strike. Steve found it first, dropping the terrifying looking Reaper from the Abyss onto a battlefield populated only by my comparably pathetic Goblin Electromancer, and suddenly all I could hear was the faint sound of a fat lady singing.
Despondently reviewing the cards in my hand, I had a lightbulb moment. What if instead of playing as I had been, trading blows and damage and creatures, I tried something new? It was the first time I looked at my cards and considered their potential beyond simplistic face-beating strategies, and at that moment the entire potential of Magic opened up for me. I could lay down another creature and swing for damage, but in two turns I’d be dead at the feet of the Reaper.
Or…
Hesitantly I tapped for mana, and dropped Tricks of the Trade onto Steve’s Reaper. He patiently explained that while I had the right idea about enchantments and auras, this particular card was not one that should be aimed at my opponent’s creatures unless I wanted to die a very quick death. “OK”, I responded, “but what if I also do…this?” and dropped Switcheroo to swap my little Electromancer for his newly buffed and completely unblockable Reaper.
A moment of silent tension. He looked from the me to the board, back to me again. The pause stretched. One again he returns to staring at the board. Finally, Steve cleared his throat, looked back to me, and with a terrible gravitas he spoke: “….shit”
And that was how Magic spoke to me. The realisation that what I’d been thinking of a simplistic back-and-forth of attack and defence was something more akin to a madman’s game of chess, where the pieces on the board were only half of the game and crazy stunts were not only allowed but implicitly encouraged. Once my brain wrapped itself around the concept, I was itching to explore further; if I could win a game by stealing an opponent’s best weapon, what else was I able to do? By the time I left Steve’s house that night, I’d bought that red/blue deck from him and was eagerly studying my new cards and their abilities, searching for cool tricks to pull off. That excitement still impacts the way I look at cards today. I won’t simply look at a creature to see the cost, the strength – I’m also scanning the abilities or effects for ways to pair them with the abilities of other cards and make sparks fly in wholly unexpected directions.
Do you still play? If so, what sort of decks do you run?
At time of writing, I only run three decks, but they’re real doozies. I have a blue/black/white deck based around artifacts and the relentless exploitation thereof, a blue/green deck which focuses on taking ordinary creatures and buffing them to ridiculous levels to create an army of monsters, and a mono-red deck built almost exclusively around Goblins. They’re all wildly different to play with, but a common theme runs through them all – I like to combo cards off one another, assembling an engine that can be greater than the sum of its parts. In later columns, should anyone care to read them, I’ll likely dissect all three decks and discuss why they work and the various sneaky tricks each one has for winning games.
Who got you into the game, and how?
My friend and colleague Aaron Gotzon. He had a few of those mini-decks from a promotion wherein you signed up for a free deck (apparently he did it a few times). It was there that I first realized that Blue is the true way.
What is it about the game that originally caught your interest?
I’ve always loved CCGs and the idea of deckbuilding. Magic, as it has one of the largest libraries of cards from which to draw, affords a lot of variety and options for doing so.
Do you still play? If so, what sort of decks do you run?
I rarely get any game (although I’ve taken to teaching the game to a friend to fix that), but when I do I run a Blue/Red Control Burn deck. It draws from many blocks (most of my cards are very old), but is legal for Modern Construction play. The design philosophy is simple: Be a bastard.
Share a favourite story, anecdote, or even a random piece of trivia you enjoy:
Previous builds of my deck (back before it was tournament legal) focused on Blue, and featured mainly flying creatures and control. My proudest victory with the old deck involved a combo of Rainbow Crow (which was dubbed “Pride Bird” among my playing group) and Jaded Response. That was a fun combo, and I would love to see it brought back.
Who got you into the game, and how?
A classmate of mine when I was ten years old. His elder brother was into fantasy games at the time, and it spread from there. Six months later I played my first game of AD&D with them and a few other kids. He just brought it to class one day and figured I might be interested, as he was probably looking for more kids to play with. There was no Dutch translation of the game at the time, so the pool of kids who had both a potential interest in a nerdy game *and* enough English skills to read the rulebook was probably pretty small.
What is it about the game that originally caught your interest?
I think the imaginative power of representation the cards had. Every card depicted and expressed in game terms a creature, event, a power, with its own lore and atmosphere. A new world opened up through those cards, and it was the first piece of fantasy fiction that I voraciously consumed.
Do you still play? If so, what sort of decks do you run?
No, I haven’t played a game in years and am considering selling or even giving away my collection. Not that I think many people would be interested in a vintage pile of (mostly) useless cards.
Share a favourite story, anecdote, or even a random piece of trivia you enjoy:
There isn’t one specific event that stands out. When I started playing, it wasn’t very easy to acquire cards in my small town in the Netherlands, as the game was far from well-known. I got my first packs (Fourth Edition and Ice Age) from a cigar shop, who might have had their own kid who played the game. The always gave you extra cards for free, which was very cool.
I played most heavily between 1995 and 2000, and had my own little circle of nerd friends who were into stuff like that. It was the kind of friend group that’s often passive-aggressive and hostile to each other, but you were sort of stuck with each other anyway. We did have a lot of fun though.
Eventually, as we all went to different high schools, ties loosened, and the cost of keeping up with the game began to weigh heavier than the fun I got out of it, especially since I was getting more and more into AD&D and its various expansions. But that’s a whole nother story.
Looking back, I treasure most the first year or so, immersing myself into the new cards—particularly Ice Age captured my imagination—and finding out what had come before. Of course, I was bummed that the really good stuff (the original set, Arabian Night, Legends, etc.) was practically impossible to get for a kid like me, but that didn’t lessen the appeal of the history of the game.
Who got you into the game and how?
I’d heard of the game and played the occasional round before, but it wasn’t until high school that I really dug into Magic. I had been homeschooled for the last two years of middle school, such that hopping back into the public school system at Northglenn High, student population 2500, was a little bit jarring. I didn’t know very many of the people there, and, weird kid that I was (heh, was), making friends was difficult.
An acquaintance-of-an-acquaintance ran massive, clumsy, many-player (five to twelve people) games of Magic at lunch in the enormous cafeteria, and I managed to wrangle myself an invite. The table was a motley assortment of enthusiastic teenage atheists, enthusiastic teenage Evangelicals, rebels, stoners, Juggalos, goths, skaters, and all-around weirdos. I won’t say they “welcomed me with open arms” so much as “allowed me to hang around and be weird,” but that was enough! I didn’t have any money, so I subsisted primarily on people giving away cards they didn’t want and the occasional booster pack, but I had a great time, and learned a ton about deck design from the guys who won every single game with ridiculous unwieldy combos that yielded things like infinite slivers (Sliver Queen, Heartstone, Ashnod’s Altar).
What is it about the game that originally caught your interest?
I wanted to be able to talk shop with the older kids (kids in Dimmu Borgir shirts with bright-red or jet-black hair, who called themselves things like “Dante”), and since I didn’t have any money for new cards or to go to tournaments, I started reading the Magic: The Gathering website like it was required. In a lot of ways it was the design of Magic and the ideas behind it that interested me more than playing the game itself. Mark Rosewater’s columns in particular appealed to me, and I learned a ton about game design from reading them. I began to understand rudimentary concepts like “balance” and “brokenness,” and how to appeal to different types of players (Timmy, Johnny and Spike). When I finally did get enough disposable income to start buying some cards online and assembling decks that were built rather than just sort of thrown together with whatever I had lying around, I did better than many of the other kids simply because I had read the design documents.
Do you still play?
No. I played in high school and then again off-and-on through college, but I gave away all my cards at the end of college because I realized I was going to have to either stop or take it up semi-professionally, and I didn’t really have the money or the time for the latter option. As an adult, I frequently find Magic frustrating whenever I do play a one-off with a friend’s deck or the Duels of the Planeswalkers games. Magic is an elegantly designed game, but with a lot of people it turns into a game of one-upsmanship and dirty tricks, and I don’t enjoy the table dynamics. I don’t mind aggressive one-on-one games, but Magic’s emphasis on control mechanics and denial make it intensely frustrating. I’m glad I played it as a kid, but as an adult I find that it does most of the things I don’t like in tabletop game design.
When I did play, I had four decks I was proud of.
1. A Red/Green (but mostly artifact) Megatog deck designed around staying alive for seven turns and then feeding an entire armory to the Megatog, who would then trample your foe to the ground.
2. A Black (well, technically everything) reanimator deck based around Entomb, which threw expensive creatures into my graveyard and let me reanimate them for pennies to crush my enemies. I never quite had enough money to make this work (Entomb was like $20 a copy at the time), but it was probably my best technical deck.
3. A pure Red goblin deck which either had five goblins by turn three or had a really terrible hand.
4. A Grip of Chaos deck, which I’ll talk more about below.
Share a favourite story, anecdote, or even a random piece of trivia you enjoy:
It’s more a collection of stories. My favorite deck was based around Grip of Chaos, a ridiculous enchantment from Scourge which took all targeted spells or abilities and retargeted them at random from all available targets. As you might imagine, this rendered the game entirely unplayable.
The rest of the deck was full of goofy stuff which interacted well with Grip of Chaos, like Confusion in the Ranks, which trades permanents with other permanents, now at random thanks to the Grip, or just plain-old Fireball, for tons of random damage to… something. There is nothing quite like charging up a 25-point Fireball and just throwing it in the air, with no idea where it will land.
The deck was most fun in the aforementioned massive games, and I only ever played it if everyone else was cool with it. It never won a game, of course, but that wasn’t the point — it turned the game from a hyper-serious competition, full of bruised egos and hypermasculine posturing into a farcical comedy of errors, where even the simplest actions became entirely unpredictable.