I’m writing this from memory so some details are likely a bit off.
I was very vaguely aware of Magic: the Gathering when I was in grad school (my undergrad days ended a bit before Magic had made it’s appearance). Very vaguely aware. It’s just as well because, while I’m sure I would have taken to it, my wife at the time would have frowned on such a “frivolous” waste of time and money. Note that she’s now my ex-wife.
So, fast forward 10 years and 3 relationships. I was seeing a truly geeky woman whose son kept spending his money of random grab bags of some sort of cards for a game. “What the **** are those?” I asked. “Magic cards!” he answered. Then his mother gets that faraway look in her eyes and tells me about her undergrad days when she “played Magic” (ya, I prefer them young) and how it started getting too expensive to keep up with the good cards, so she stopped playing. Then she disappeared into the basement and came back with a shoebox full of cards. Mostly Revised, 4th Ed and the like. She looked through them in a state that I can only describe as nostalgic bliss.
After a while she looked up and said something like “I should start playing again.” and “You should try it, I think you’d like it.” and finally “Let’s get some cards!” I said something like “Isn’t that kind of dorky?” Pot, meet kettle.
This was just before the Planar Chaos launch weekend. On launch day we dropped her son off to play in the tournament. We talked to the shop owner and looked at some cards. We looked at some of the recent precon decks. We settled on a couple of Ravnica block decks. I chose Simic (UG graft). I can’t remember for sure what she went with, but I believe it was Orzov (BW). And so we played. A lot. Her son taught us how to play. We played. We consulted the comprehensive rules. We read articles on the mothership. We taught her son how to play correctly (he learned from friends around the lunch table at school).
Our early days were very much like the stories you hear of the game’s early days. We visited local shops, and flipped through their binders. We bought cards that would work with our decks (mainly green in my case). Our decks grew into a massive collection of fairly random 1-ofs. Mine reached around 125 cards before we stumbled on the rational for sticking to the 60 card minimum. Thinking about it, my early deck resembled an unfocused EDH deck.
It’s intersting to think back to when our combined card collection fit into an 800-count storage box with dividers for each color (plus artifact & land). Then we moved to an 800-count for each color. That was a big step. As we got more serious, so did our storage. We switched to binders: One per set, a playset of 2 cards of each page face. I saw that one of the kids at the Gametronics (the local shop where we learned so much about the game … a bit thanks to Matt, Jerry, and the rest of the regulars for spending so much time talking to us and answering all our questions) was putting cards in the corners and edges. That left the center empty. I wrote a program to generate a PDF of inserts (below). As soon as each new set was available on gatherer, I’d load it into my program and print inserts. Then cut them out and put together the binder.
In time (probably about when Shards of Alara came out) I got interested in EDH (now Commander) and began acquiring 1x older sets. When I sold my collection (out of necessity, not desire) I had a nice collection going back to Arabian Knights (with a handfull of missing sets). which occupied a moderate sized bookcase.
But I digress: back to the history. Soon we were going to FNM. We drove 4 hours and spent a couple nights in a hotel for the Futuresight prerelease (we later did the same for Lorwyn). We were hooked. When it went on sale two weeks later we bought two cases and assembled a play set each (and remember, this was 3 months after we bought our first precon and started learning how to play). We did the same with 10th Ed. and Lorwyn, and even backfilled with Coldsnap and the rest of Timespiral block.
We were a magic playing family. One Christmas I got her sets of Alpha Serra Angels and Hypnotic Spectors.
We’ve since split up and so I don’t know whether she’s still playing or not. I’m pretty sure her son is as I see pics of him on the local shop’s FaceBook page, and (after a short hiatus) so am I.
We may not be together anymore, but I owe her a great deal for introducing me to the game.
