I should probably start off with an introduction, since most of you don't know me. My name is Tom, I'm 42 years old, a professional software engineer, and I'm coming back to Magic after having been away for about 16 years. I have a bunch of hobbies, gaming being one of them, and I consider Magic a subset of gaming, albeit a pretty big one.
I first started playing in late 1994 when Revised was the core set and Fallen Empires was the new hotness. It had these bizarre token generators that divided us over whether they sucked or rocked. Token decks weren't even a thing in my local community, and most of my friends disregarded the token cards in Fallen Empires as worthless -- except the one guy who liked keeping token generators for feeding his Lord of the Pit.
Alpha, Beta, and Unlimited cards were vanishingly rare in my part of the country (Bowling Green, Ohio) at the time, and prices were ungodly for single cards. Twiddle -- I kid you not -- was an $8 card. The internet wasn't happening yet, and since we couldn't easily order up an envelope full of cards from across the country, we were slaves to the local card economy.
At the time, I didn't really have my career off the ground yet, and spending $3 for a booster pack on a wage of $5/hour, when weighed against my other obligations (rent, utilities, gas, car insurance, and oh yeah -- food), just didn't seem like a good idea. I still did it, and earned a lot of evil looks from my wife, but I never really got into the "buy a box of boosters" thing because that was something rich people did. I wasn't sure, but I could imagine Vince Neil sitting in his Beverly Hills uberpad surrounded by boosters, opening them willy-nilly and wallpapering his den with Fallen Angels. (Kids, Vince Neil is/was the frontman for Motley Crue, one of the hardest-partying hair-metal bands of the 1980's. Go download "Kickstart My Heart" from iTunes and try not to pull a muscle while rockin' out.)
Sometime later I moved to Detroit and no longer knew any local gamers, so I found a kid (a coworker's son) who had a massive Magic addiction and gave him my entire collection.
Fast forward to August, 2012. I've moved to Oklahoma, changed jobs a number of times, and wasted 7 years on World of WarCraft before my guild dried up and blew away (I was a tankadin before it was ezmode, punk!).
Unable to wrangle the schedules of my friends sufficiently to keep our Pathfinder game running, having no hope of getting enough futurist geeks together to launch a respectable Eclipse Phase game, and still feeling the desperate burn of my inner gaming Jones, I knew I had to do something. The parameters for that something were: It had to not matter if any or even all of my local group could show up for our Friday night game. It had to be something I could do on my own if necessary. It had to be something that would tickle the obsessive-compulsive gamer geek within in such a way that he would stop wailing away in the middle of the night, dragging his chains across the attic floor.
I came to the inevitable conclusion that it had to be Magic, because there was no way in hell I was going to be caught dead at 42 playing Yu-Gi-Oh or Pokemon. I could just see the cops rolling up on me, a childless middle-aged man standing outside Norman HS, scoping for 15-year-olds who wanted to "play a game" with me. That's an article I didn't want my church friends to read in the police blotter the next day.
Anyway, I ran out and grabbed a couple of the new deck-builder kits and proceeded to whip up a few decks for the purpose of introducing my friends to Magic. In the process, I discovered that somebody went and ruined changed the game so radically that it turns out I only knew the very basics of how to play any more. From my perspective, Blue is the new Black, Black is the new Red, and Red wants to be Black and Green at the same time. What happened to interrupts, mana burn, and banding? What is this "Standard" thing everyone's talking about? And WTF is a Phyrexian mana symbol?
The one thing that has dramatically improved at first glance is the graphic layout of the cards, and the art is crazy good compared to what it used to be. I totally want a poster-sized print of Defy Death for my office wall.
In the future, I'll be discussing my reactions to the new state of the game, my memories of the way it used to be, and talk about decks I'm building or have built. Given that I am effectively a noob now that y'all have gone and changed everything, these are not going to be fantastic tournament decks. Rather, I'll be talking about cards and deck ideas that interest me, and since I can't seem to organize my cards without building a deck thanks to a tendency toward OCD-like behavior, what you'll probably find is casual and (hopefully) fun to play theme deck ideas that I started screwing with because the cards caught my fancy.
I'm attracted to the Pauper/Peasant formats as a result of my first go-round when I had no money, I'm more or less morally opposed to paying real (read: folding) money for a single card, and thus will rarely post a deck that would cost you more than $20 to buy outright. Tournaments are cool and all, but first and foremost a game should be be fun to play. Maybe I'll even learn something -- it can happen, I've seen me do it.
