Back Matter: Kool Runnings (Part One)

With Urza’s Saga (and all of the shenanigans that its block entails) on the horizon, I have been feeling nostalgic. During Urza’s Block, I first got into the tournament scene. I learned how to play Combo with Yawgmoth’s Will, Yawgmoth’s Bargain, and Replenish. I learned how to play Control with Powder Keg, Masticore, Treachery, and Morphling. Everywhere I looked, one-drop creatures were wrecking havoc- Goblin Welder, Wild Dogs, Goblin Lackey, Mother of Runes, and Phyrexian Negator (which felt like a 1cc with Dark Ritual plopping it down). Those were the days…

Well, it’s not just Saga’s clockwork gems and dazzling baubles that has me visiting times long passed; it’s the feeling that I am getting when I play now. I am once again excited about Magic! Drafting, Sealed, Singleton… even Standard- excited about anything related to playing the game. This feeling has permeated me being in (now) four distinct eras of my life, each corresponding with the highpoint of a Magic-based experience. The best part about these euphoric Magical times is that I am usually enjoying life well beyond the game too!

So, where am I even going with these ghosts of Blocks past stories? Well, Travis has been talking about doing origin stories for a while, and Urza’s Saga has finally gotten me in the mood to talk about myself for… thousands of words! But Saga wasn’t the first era (of the four mentioned earlier); it was actually the second age of ChrisKool’s Magical escapades.

It all started in 1993…

The Dark Era (Literally)

It all started in 1993, when a friend of mine came over with a “cool, new card game.” I don’t remember what rules he taught me, but we had a BLAST playing from the same Revised Starter Deck. Sure, it was land light (and didn’t have enough Green sources to cast Force of Nature), but the combination of cool fantasy creatures and pummeling my opponent to death was appealing. I was instantly hooked.

So I did what any 3^rd grade student would do (yes, I’ve been playing since age 9… you’d think I would be better!), I begged my parents to drive me to a card shop where I could spend all of the money I’d accrued… on 3 Booster Packs of Revised (because they were out of Starters). I couldn’t tell you what my Rares were (but for some reason, I think I opened a Jandors Saddlebags); however, I can tell you that I opened at least one Craw Wurm. (And no, I wouldn’t trade it for your Wheel of Fortune.) Oh yeah, I also only had 4 Basic Lands. Awkward.

When the local store got them back in stock, I snagged a Starter Deck. The Revised Rulebook quickly became my favorite novel during the 4^th grade. I would read the examples over and over and over. The Shivan Dragon on the cover was a coveted creature, although no one I knew had one. (And because of Shivan Dragon, I decided that Melissa Benson was my favorite artist.)

Now luckily I hail from a middle class family in suburbia, so I did what any allowance earning kid would do in my shoes- splurge. I started buying packs as fast as possible. One time I passed up 6 dollar Legends Boosters for some 3 dollar The Dark Boosters. I hit a Season of the Witch (which InQuest magazine assured me was a solid, 6 dollar rare). I really wanted a Barls Cage. (I also never bought The Dark again- it only had 8 cards per pack and quickly rose beyond the 3 dollar price tag.) Of course, when 8 card packs of Fallen Empires arrived, I opened up my rawhide wallet once again. In retrospect, I wasted my money.

Even though I loved ‘playing’ Magic, I wasn’t really playing real games. Since I didn’t really understand the game, I would just play with all of my cards. We usually played starting with 10 Lands in play. This stopped once collections got over 2,000 cards (and we learned about the Duelist magazine with its associated deck building tips- special thanks to Zak Dolan and Mr. Suitcase).

A friend convinced me that we should both choose one color and focus our decks on that color- for some reason, he was the White deck, and I was the Black deck. We quickly swapped color for color and were soon battling White Knights versus Black Knights day in and day out. I decided that Drain Life and Dark Ritual were definitely unfair (and was glad to be the Black deck), but I soon learned what real inequality was- Karma and CoP: Black (yay for preboarding to beat your friends). I had to add Gloom to my deck just to represent my feelings.

By the time Alliances was on the horizon, I had added cards to my Black deck so it was a toppling 85 cards or so. (It was tuned to perfection, of course!) My little play group finally got over the color hate cards (beyond Protection creatures), but I was ready to dip my adolescent feet into bigger waters. The local card shop had taken quite a liking to Magic (which was weird, since it was a sports card shop and not a gaming store) and advertised weekly Wednesday tournaments. I convinced my parents to drop me off to play in one, but none of my friends joined me (which might have been due to the fact that I was a slightly spoiled child). I won a few rounds but lost to a Combo deck featuring Candelabra of Tawnos, Urzatron lands, and Fireballs. Damn.

My best Magic friend moved away shortly after, but not before we went to a PTQ to play in side events. We tuned two decks to play in what everyone today would call a Vintage event (but will forever be Type 1 in my heart). I believe the PTQ was Mirage Sealed or Type 2, aka Standard, or some lame format where you couldn’t play all of your cards. Friend and I had switched colors by now- he was enjoying Nevinyrrals Disks, Hypnotic Specters and Dark Rituals (but no Necropotence since it deprived you of drawing cards and cost life… why would anyone play such a bad card?!), while I had taken a liking to White Weenie creatures backed by Counterspells and Wrath of Gods. But being young and tethered to car rides of others, we couldn’t stick around until the event started. Such is the life of a 11 to 12 year old.

After my friend left, I lost the urge to obsess, but I still would buy packs and tweak my Blue-White deck. I am pretty sure it got worse every time I bought a pack and struggled to cut cards to fit in a few of the newest treasures. But at least I had learned that I should try to stay near 60 cards (but probably closer to 63 cards…) if I ever wanted to see one of my prized possessions during a game!

Coming Out of the Casual Cocoon

In 1998 or 1999, I rediscovered CCGs through Pokemon! Mostly, I got caught up in the PokeFever like hundreds of thousands of other little kids. Maybe I was 13 or 14 and Pokemon wasn’t really cool (kool… Kuehl!), but the game was really fun. Ancestral Recall AND Wheel of Fortune cost nothing to play! As a matter of fact, you only had to pay costs for combat (and sometimes had to discard cards to play other cards, like the Demonic Tutor variant- Computer Search)!

Yeah, yeah- I know everyone cares about Pokemon: TCG, but I learned so much about CCGs through Pikachu and pals. (One such valuable lesson was to look to Japan for all things awesome- I can’t wait to see another deck like the Japanese CHK Block Gifts deck!)

Primarily, Pokemon taught me how to be a power gamer. The internet was permeating through homes by this point, so I would look up net decks and tweak them for competition. I made sure to get all of the hot decks’ cards so that I could play whichever strategy I wanted. I also learned how to metagame for the most powerful deck by including narrow cards that were obscenely powerful against the best deck(s). All of these tools would be easily translated to Magic when I made the switch.

From countless hours of browsing PKMN strategies on the net, I also learned about a Pokemon: TCG ICQ league using the Apprentice software. This quickly turned into downloading IRC and playing in weekly tournaments. Many of the older players also played in #e-league, a MTG Apprentice league and tournament organization on the same IRC server (I think it was #EFNet). The Apprentice software would be where I got acclimated to the world of deck building and high-level metagaming, but not until I had fully switched into playing Magic again.

Pokemon also was my first foray into the secondary market of CCGs. Anyone that played PKMN: TCG or had a child that was into Pokemon knows how insane the game became for a short while. I had purchased some theme decks and some booster packs before the craze took hold, but Christmas in 1998 strained the supply of Pokemon cards nationwide and WotC didn’t have enough printing to meet demand. After the holiday, kids everywhere wanted… needed(!) Pokemon cards, but they were nowhere to be found. Prices quickly started to rise (at what seemed like an exponential rate). A 15 dollar Charizard became a 40 dollar Charizard became a 100 dollar Charizard became a 250 dollar Charizard! In a suburban environment like Northeastern Indianapolis, every child wanted their parents to pay enough to “catch ‘em all.”

When I saw the price of booster packs rising, I knew that I didn’t want to get left in the dark (like with Legends and… The Dark), so I begged and pleaded for a loan from my mom for 150 dollars when I saw two sealed theme deck boxes in a video game store. The local card shop was selling Pokemon theme decks for 30 dollars apiece, so I knew that a box of eight decks for 75 dollars was a steal. Sure enough, the card shop paid 160 dollars for just one sealed box, I repaid my mother and stashed the last box to eBay after the prices crept up a bit more. When it sold for almost $300, I sold my entire Magic collection except for my UW deck to gain more capital and scoured the local video game and toy stores for more PKMN boxes to rinse and repeat. Eventually, when supply had dried up of English product, I imported Japanese boxes and sold the singles on eBay. The whole experience gave me good insight to what cards are actually worth (as opposed to what Scrye and InQuest magazines had told me).

While I was selling, I was also playing the Pokemon Trading Card game. On a family vacation (heh, there really only are family vacations at the age of 14, I suppose) in Florida, I played in a Pokemon tournament where my only loss was to another kid that also played Magic. He was playing the other Tier 1 PKMN deck (I think I was Haymaker and he was Raindance…), so I knew he was serious about Card Games when he showed me his TE/UZ/5E Type 2 deck. The kid had nothing but praise for Magic and suggested that I look into the competitive scene if I enjoyed the competitive Pokemon decks. I took his advice to heart and started playing on #e-league with semi-competitive decks like Mono Brown (with Green for fatties and with Snake Baskets… I was still bad, but I was at least playing the Tinker mana engine).

Quickly, I got away from playing Pokemon and entered Magic full force. Mercadian Masques was soon to arrive, so I bought a ton of Classic Sixth Edition (which had just released) and Urza Block goodies in preparation to play paper Magic again. While I waited to accrue a paper collection, I played in #e-league tournaments weekly. I eventually started playing competitive homebrews and joined a top-ranked French Canadian team (Croisade- I wish I had kept in touch with those guys… my moniker back then was giovanni/gio/oig_oig after the Pokemon nemesis). I was an avid #e-leaguer for a few years but stopped before Invasion Block (I think) when I started playing a ton of paper.

As I got into paper and Urza’s Block rotated into Invasion Block, I met many of the Indy players that brought me up to the average PTQ play level. (This series of name dropping is not in order by any means).

I might as well start with some stories related to Travis (so many trolls). Honestly, I can’t remember when I met him. It may have been at the comic shop that he worked at when he wasn’t busy wearing women’s underwear and touring as a drummer for what was referred to a Screamo band at the time (although I would consider it NoiseGrind now-a-days, BRUTAL). It may have been at a tournament at the Goal Line (the local card shop that I purchased packs at as a kid) or the Game Preserve (a game shop located in a ritzy mall). Travis has always been a charming… something (I would normally use an endearing obscenity here- the woes of keeping things respectable), so I am sure that when I met him there was an immediate impression made.

Somewhere along the path of group idea inbreeding and nonstop drafting, Travis and I discovered we liked to play dumb, rogue decks that were tuned beyond any conceivably sane amount of effort. One such deck was a GW Threshold/Geddon deck for Extended. This deck sticks out among all of the others for two main reasons: 1) Travis convinced me that Mox Diamond belonged in the deck for various synergy reasons. We cut three lands to fit in the moxen. The deck only had 14 lands after the cuts. *sadface* 2) I lost round 1 or 2 to a local that went predominantly by “Boy.” He was younger than me, but a better player and a protégé of Gabe Walls. I blame the low land count (and I miss Boy, ahem, Rob- move back to Indy!).

I convinced Travis to lend me 16 or so dual lands among other things so a mutual friend (“Seagal”) could play this horrific Kool 4c Control deck with Deeds, StPs and Force of Wills. Travis hates lending cards, but he couldn’t resist my sweet, adolescent smile (I also probably collateralized the loan). I went 3-0, 3-4 with no byes in the GP; the guy with Travis’s cards lost in round 7 playing for Day 2 against PT: Junk. He fetched 2 Scrublands instead of a Savannah and a Scrubland with Tithe. Wasteland took away his only Green source and that was that. See Travis, it was worth it to lend those cards!

My last main Travis memory (of the ones that have a chance of passing the editorial censors) from this time era involved a 12 year old who we will simply call “Patch” (from Cabbage Patch Kid). As the gaming community on the North side of Indy consolidated, everyone quickly tried to lay claim on the best players for team limited season. Patch was a smart kid- he had grown to play at a fairly high level and talked trash like someone twice his age (and probably three times his petite size). Naturally, our three minds together were unstoppable, until we opened a pool that literally had 14 playable creatures over 5 colors. 0-2 drop, flee the scene, cry.

I met Nate Price through a guy named Graham that we were mutually friends with (and who I believe I knew through playing Pokemon); I know Nate once lent me an Accelerated Blue Type 2 deck for a tournament at the Game Preserve. I won that tournament- thanks bro! I also played Team Limited with Nate and mutual friend Steve-o during Odyssey Block. I had a sick White-Red Aggro deck, but I punted a pivotal match and cost us a Top 4 berth (or chance at a Top 4 berth)… I’m pretty good at Magic. Luckily Nate still lives in the Indy area, but Steve-O ran away to become a movie star or something on the Western coast.

I first saw 5 Color stalwart Nick Little playing said format at the Goal Line. It looked super fun, so I built a deck and went back to play him. I am pretty sure I beat him more than I lost to him. Erhnam/Combo/Necro/Geddon (or whatever it was called) for the lose. Little did I know I know at the time, this meet and greet introduced me to essentially the Northside Indy gaming foundation- the 5 Color format. Within a year, everyone played 5 Color (in between drafting) for fun, ego, and sometimes fast food.

I don’t remember where I first met Gabe Walls, but I do have two predominant memories related to him during this era. The first one was at my grandma’s home town, the city of sensual scents, Terre Haute, IN. I was at their Magic shop, Raven’s Crest, to just kill some time and look at pricing. Little did I know, the Junior Super Series Qualifiers were out in full force! And Gabe and two young padiwan (although neither were Boy, I think) were in attendance. Gabe used to bus around the Kokomo kids to all the JSSQs- how paternal! The second memory involved Gabe’s transportation- I think it was a white Jeep Wrangler. The little things, oh, the little things. (I am pretty sure the only reason I remember this is because Seagal’s car was totaled while they went to Chicago for a PTQ, and the Wrangler sat in a parking lot by the Goal Line for a few days one weekend. Awkward.)

There were a ton of other guys from this period, mostly from the 5 Color circuit. It was also where I met good pals AJ, Chris (byertron on MTGO) and James (deathcloud9 on MTGO). Both lived close to me and went to the same high school. At the time, I mostly played with them for fun (the majority of testing was with my friend John or at a card shop with whomever). I actually met James AND AJ on the school bus, only during different years. My first time playing Magic with James, I played a 5c Necro deck and a Mono Blue feature Masticore, Disk, Powder Keg, Mana Drain, FoW, and Library of Alexandria. I’m surprised that he ever wanted to play again, but he did beat the Necro deck once by resolving a Turn 2 Dwarven Miner (and I assume that the experience led to his love of nonbasic hate today).

Beyond all of the good times with friends, I had only minor success playing Magic. I convinced my parents to take a vacation to Vegas so I could play in a Grand Prix (the one above where I went 3-4). I also tagged along to Denver with my father on business to play in a Grand Prix and went a sad 1-2 drop. I did manage to make some cash buying cheap cards and reselling them. My main claim to fame was 11^th in a Masques Block Sealed PTQ (where I beat Alex Borteh before his Nationals success) and Top 8 at Indiana States. (Yeah, Top 8 at States… woooooo!)

As Onslaught came out, I found myself not caring as much about cardboard or digital cardboard (for which I blame evil, vile females). I sold down my collection (mostly to friends… I hope you enjoyed shuffling those 40 NM-EX duals into poor condition Byer!) and gave away most of my lower value cards as I stepped away from the game for a second time… It was a short respite, though, as I’d be back in Kamigawa (thanks to James getting me to deck build to beat the Artifact menace that was Affinity).

But as I came back to play Magic again, I will come back to finish this epic ramble. I love Magic: The Gathering. There, I said it. Not that I am ashamed- the game is great! I get to be competitive, exercise my mind and be creative all through one pastime! And I love sharing my journey with anyone that cares to read. So join me in the near future as I share the joy of my first and only PTQ win, ANOTHER break, and then the series of fortunate events that bring us to today!

Cheers,

ChrisKool/Kuehl