How it was....
I played my first game of Magic during 1994. I didn't know what I was doing and neither did most of the other people that I played with. There was no DCI sanctioned tournaments anywhere near to where I was and don't think there were any anywhere. Magic was still a fun game but it was no where near as popular as it is today. Their playability and how good they were in trade value valued cards. It was not uncommon for a person to trade an Uncommon for Rares or in some cases Commons for Rare cards. If you needed a Sinkhole and someone had one and they didn't play Black in their deck then you might have to give up a Rare for it. If you didn't use the Rare it was no big loss. Arabians and Legends were out and Unlimited had almost reached the end of its life. Everyone pretty much had the cards they needed because believe it or not, there were under 800 cards total. Even when Revised came out, the number of cards totally available stayed around 800. We were having fun playing this game and well, none of us ever thought that Magic would go as far as it did.
My friends and I played every single deck we could think of. We had the Stasis, the Burn, the Counterspell, White Weenie, Black Weenie, the Hypno deck; all of the combinations you could think of we tried. It was a fun time in Magic and we always had a good time. Dark soon followed and we had another 100 cards added to the mix and all of us changed our decks and added new cards and everything started over. Fallen Empires followed and even though a lot of people hated the set, there is nothing like getting out four little 1/1 creatures out and killing a Serra Angel or a Vampire. Fallen Empires made White and Black Weenie decks extremely popular and fun to play. For all the complaints that Fallen Empires got, I loved the set. Ice Ages followed and all of the people that had been selling their old Icy's for a lot of money got a shock. It was in the Ice Age set. Ice Ages was the first stand alone set for Magic and my friends and I had many nights of sealed deck tourneys with Ice Ages alone. We played for all the cards and it was usually light hearted until someone pulled out Jesters Cap or any of the other power cards from the set. Then it got serious. I lost many Caps, Masks and other cards during this time, but it was one of the most fun of my life. I also added a bunch of cards to my collection.
Chronicles was supposed to be the end of Magic. WOTC had reprinted all of the big cards from the game and devalued the cards of everyone that owned the old ones. What these people didn't realize that people want black boardered cards. What Chronicles did was put power cards in the hands of players that didn't have them and put them on the playing field of people that had been playing forever. I didn't care that some of my cards were now worth 1/10th of what they had been. I liked the fact that we had a bunch of new people in the game.
After Ice Ages the new expansions came rather quickly. Mirage, Alliances, Tempest, Portal, Homelands, Stronghold, Weatherlight, and a few others I'm sure I missed came and were put in type II so fast most of us lost track of what was what and began just playing for fun. Type I, II, 1.5, and all the other types of playing went out the window. When WOTC brought back Ice Ages for type II for a while we even became more confused. After all the dust settled there were a lot of new different types of gaming and to this day it still confuses me. I sometimes look back to that winter of 1994 and wonder if I had known then what I know now what I would have done. Probably bought all the Moxes, A Recalls, Timewalks, Lotus' and whatever other power card I could have found.
When it is all said and done I must say I do like the game of Magic. I play many other CCGs but I always fall back to Magic when I get bored and want to play a game. I play on the computer now and it is a lot of fun being able to play all the old cards against other people. The setting is somewhat like it was back in that winter when no one knew what he or she was doing and everyone was having fun. And you know what, this time, no of the older cards were devalued. A Lotus is still worth a lot of money.
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Email: wizrdlord@aol.com
