An Indepth Look Into A Geek's Soul

There are many things in my past that make me wonder what I would have been like if I had never been involved in it.  The biggest thing right now would be Magic.  It's a simple card game at the core of it, yet at the same time it's wonderfully complex and I don't think that anyone could really ever be considered an expert at it, no matter how good of a deck they manage to build.  A game like this really only comes around once in a long while and I am glad that I was able to jump onto this bandwagon at the age that I did.

I think that I first started the game in fifth grade.  If I remember correctly, it was right before I got into the whole Pokemon card thing as well.  I could be wrong, but oh well.  I remember opening my first pack, Stronghold, and being sucked in by the one card in specific:  Flame Wave.  It was flashy, it was big, and it had a guy riding a surfboard on a wave of flames.  Tell me how that is not cool?  Plus, I think people just like red spells to start off with, and boy was Flame Wave red.

My first deck was a green one.  It was fueled by Llanowar Elves and was pretty much  just built around getting out the biggest creature possible and hoping for the best.  Back then, it really was the best too, as far as my group of friends was concerned.  The backbone of the deck came in the form of a 7/7 brute by the name of Thorn Elemental.  To this day, it is still a card that I look foundly upon, even if it's not the best card out there on the market.  It led me to such amazing victories that I could really care less if it wasn't the greatest out there and people would rather play Rhox instead.

It would take me until high school to get my friends addicted to the game however.  Joel was the first one to fall, becoming completely addicted to Magic during the time that Mirrodin came out.  I don't think I've ever collected so much of any one set before.  Between the two of us, I'm fairly certain we had the majority of that one set, if not the entire block.  It wasn't long before he became a better player than me either.  The kid has some insane skills when it comes to the game, skills I will never really have.  His Angel deck was something to be admired, while his Slivers completely dominated me.  The only way I ever stood a chance against those decks was when I played my Zombie deck.  Being pure black and already dead does have it's advantages.  I think it is still my best deck to this date.

I remember playing some crazy multiplayer games during free period in my senior year at high school.  There was a group of about five of us who would go to our physics room and just play at the table for a solid fifty five minutes.  We even kept a tally of who was the worse player there (turns out it was Ankit) and overall it was a lot of fun.  I was sad when I left, because my pool of players decreased by a good 80%.

However, it decreased to zero when I first moved up to Michigan.  No one up here wanted to play and the guys at the card shop all were those jerky, elitest kind of players that I rather dislike, so I wouldn't play with them either.  In fact, I hardly touched my cards for over a year.  It wasn't until I started working at the Writing Center that I really started playing again.  I had to teach the whole crew all the rules from scratch, and we don't play the current edition.  I figure that is just far too much work, especially because I don't know the new rules too terribly well.

I guess the real point of this story is just to see how my life has kind of changed around Magic, and how Magic has changed around my life.  I think no matter what happens, I will always been into Magic, even if there are a few sets I'm not terribly huge on.  While most of the other guys that I know of stopped playing Magic when they were in eigth grade, I don't plan on stopping until my grandkips are in their eigth grade.

Peace Out.