I have been lucky to have played Magic for nineteen of the twenty years it has been in operation. Now that I am thirty-six, I have officially been playing Magic for a majority of my life. During that time, I have encountered Magic in many amazing ways. Today, I want to walk down memory lane and share with you some of my favorite Magic experiences in hopes that you will share some of yours as well. These are the best of the best. Some of them are moments, some are decks, and some are connections of events. Let’s look at these experiences!
Like all of my lists, this one should have several honorable mentions built around it. So, here we go!
Honorable Mention #1 – Summer 2012 – While drafting M13 for Friday Night Magic shortly after it came out, I opened a foil Thundermaw Hellkite. Win! Then in pack three, I opened an Ajani, Caller of the Pride. These were the two most valuable mythics from the set at the time, and the total value of the cards I drafted that day was around $90. I have never opened such a bounty before or since.
Honorable Mention #2 – August 1994 – After being introduced to Magic and buying a starter pack of Revised Edition Magic, I built a quick deck and played a multiplayer game against two other people. I would put two months’ money into many more cards in the next week and adopt a huge love for the game. Playing multiplayer in Steve’s basement against a lot of friends was incredible. I still remember the first black-bordered Magic card I saw (because everybody had white-bordered cards during Revised). It was Scarwood Goblins. It looked so powerful—it was my first gold card as well. Wow, look what expansion sets do!
Honorable Mention #3 – Spring 1995 – It took a while, but eventually, I built what I consider to be my first good deck. After months of fooling around with Craw Wurms, The Hives, Clockwork Beasts, and more, I finally committed to having one deck with a good powerful selection of cards. My deck was R/G, and it contained Kird Apes, Scryb Sprites, Giant Growths, Lightning Bolts, two Taigas, Goblin Balloon Brigades, and more.
Honorable Mention #4 – Spring 1995 – I don’t even remember how, but I won my first tournament. I had a red deck for fun; it had Goblin Balloon Brigades, Bolts, X spells, two each of Granite Gargoyle and Roc of Kher Ridges, and more. Well, I entered the tournament for a Limited Edition Alpha Gauntlet of Might, and I won. I sold it for $120 immediately to a guy in the area and pocketed the money of love. What I learned most from this tournament was my adoration for Goblin Balloon Brigade and small fast creatures. I had a GBB out first turn in almost every single game, and they would often hit for a lot of damage early on. I learned then that these little guys packed a real wallop.
Honorable Mention #5 – August 2, 2002 – The Ferrett, then editor of StarCityGames.com, offered to make me a featured writer after I sent him several articles for free. That really began a long career as a Magic writer, and if you are reading this, it means it must have continued at least through this day!
Okay, let’s look at my official Top 10 list now
#10 – Spring 1999 – Pro Tour Qualifier Top 8 – I am not exactly known for playing in a lot of tournaments in real life. Other than FNMs, I haven’t played in one for probably more than five years. I draft online sometimes, and I play in FNM sometimes, and that’s the extent of my tournament Magic. But there was a time from about 1996 until 2003 when I played in them a ton. I would play in Legacy (1.5), Extended, Vintage, Standard, and Limited all over the place. I played at about five or six PTQs in my life. Well, once, I managed to Top 8 one in my hometown of Charleston, WV. We had around eighty to a hundred players, so it’s no super-big deal. It was sealed Urza’s block Limited, and I had a decent enough deck. My B/G deck included a Pestilence, which was the power common of its day, and I had good cards that filled the theme from Phyrexian Monitor to Marker Beetles. I had a Western or Eastern Paladin as one of my rares. I always look back on that and smile.
#9 - Winter 1998 – Arena League – Precon Season – When the preconstructed decks were originally released, they were used as tools for tournaments. In Arena League, you bought a precon and played it naturally for the first week. Then in the second week, you could add a fifteen-card sideboard to the deck. You could pull any card from the deck and place it in the sideboard and add cards to the deck. With that restriction, which decks are the best, and what replacements will play the best in the league next week? The replacements had to be in the format, and so people naturally gravitated toward one of the Stronghold precons, especially Sparkler and Migraine. It was a blast to play Arena League in this way, but this was not the best Arena League experience I ever had! Check out #7 below!
#8 – Winter–Summer, 2001 – AbeDraft Auction Style – For about six months in grad school, I came back to the capital city of Charleston, WV to do some work as an intern for the State Senate. While I was there, I renewed some old Magic acquaintances and became deeply entrenched in the local Magic scene again. This time was the beginning of the modern Abe, and so many things happened then. I created Equinaut as a tournament deck then, I encountered my #3 experience and my #6 experience, and I grabbed this new game called Mage Knight—which led to HeroClix—and I still play in a HeroClix tournament every week. But one thing that began to really establish my love for Magic was a large box of cards from all over the sets. I would bring it to Magic at the store, and then people would auction cards off it and create Limited decks from the cards they won in auction. I loved the auction format, and I adored the games we played and the fun we had. I was truly a powerful experience.
#6 – Winter 2001 – MagicShop – I played a ton of E-League way back when. It was a group of online folks who played either in tournaments or casually via a program called Magic Apprentice. I was even an E-League judge. It was fun because they had a lot of crazy formats for tournaments like BUGWR and Goblin Wars. (Many of their formats I later wrote about in articles.) One spin-off was called MagicShop. It was an online website that allowed you to start the game with a certain number of points, spend those on cards, build a deck, and then play other Shoppers via Apprentice for ante. As you won or lost games, you would naturally lose cards from your sealed collection due to ante, and then you purchased packs with the winnings you received from playing others. It was a breathtaking experience, and I remember it to this day. It impacted my writing and casual play in a variety of ways too long to list here. Here’s to MagicShop!
We have arrived at the Top 5!
#5 – May 1997 – Shandalar – My favorite computer game company was always MicroProse because of games like Civilization, Pirates, and X-Com. The great Sid Meier, before he left the company, worked on a game that brought MTG to your PC. With an amazingly limited card pool (just Fourth Edition and a handful of power cards, plus the twelve-card Astral Set made just for the game), they created a universe and campaign in which you had to build your deck, play for ante, buy and sell things, and explore dungeons—all in the pursuit of cards, Magic, and winning the game by thwarting the evils of these five ubermages and then fending off a nasty planeswalker. To this day, it is one of my Top 10 favorite computer games and one of my Top 5 favorite Magic experiences. I have replayed the campaign and its two expansion sets more than ten or twelve times over the years, roughly once a year. I once introduced it to a friend who had just started playing and loving Oblivion. After trying Shandalar for fifteen minutes, he set aside Oblivion to play this game for days on end. It’s that good.
#4 – September, 2009 - MTG Forge Quest – MTG Forge was always fun, but when it added Quest mode, it injected massive doses of awesome. Every update it makes to Quest mode amps the fun level of this game even more. It is now better than Magic Shop and Shandalar. It wasn’t for a while, but now it has officially eclipsed it on Abe’s Level of Fun. Plus, this game is free. I’m not kidding—now, because it is free, it has the occasional bug, and those are always fixed a bit here and there, but new ones pop up, and that is to be expected. Would you like to know what’s awesomely fun? Taking a sealed card pool against increasingly difficult foes with decks you recognize. How can your evolved deck handle TurboLand or Caw-Blade? Quest is just that good.
Now it’s Top 3 time!
#3 – Spring 2001 – Five Color – While experimenting with various formats, I decided to commit to building a Five Color deck. It seemed like a fun format. I wound up with cards like Reckless Embermage and Nettletooth Djinn in my first deck. I loved the format, and this was the early days of many fun cards being restricted, such as Restock and Corpse Dance. It was casual only, and everyone was having a blast playing with it and trying it out. I built my deck at the card store and played with a few others who had done the same. It was the beginning of a new age that continued with many Five Color articles on SCG, being on the Five Color Ruling Council for years and years, and embracing 5C as one of my favorite formats of all time.
#2 – Circa 2005 to Circa 2007 – Regular Magic Night – For years, I hosted a regular Magic night at my apartment at Eastern Michigan University in Ypsilanti. Every Friday night, we had roughly twelve to twenty people swinging by. Anyone was welcome! We had a great group of people who came and played, including some neophytes and some vets and some younger and some older folks. It was very egalitarian. This massively awesome playgroup of people who were massively awesome themselves was one of the single best times I had as a Magic player. I yearn for those days when I had so many people playing multiplayer Magic at my place. We had so many people that most nights, we divided into two rooms. It was truly epic. People who played in that group still have fond memories of that time. It was something special. And thus only something truly magnificently special could beat it out for the top spot. What is it?
#1 – December 1998 to Present – Abe’s Deck of Happiness and Joy – Shortly after Urza’s Saga was released, I wanted to do something clever with Sneak Attack. I adored it, and I had three copies. So, I came up with the idea of a Standard deck that was built around Sneak Attack and Living Death. I included power cards Lifeline and Portcullis. The idea was to Sneak out some creatures, build up the graveyard, and then play Living Death to bring back all of the dead critters. The deck included cards in Standard such as Birds of Paradise, Child of Gaea, Spike Feeder, Spike Weaver, Spike Soldier, Verdant Force, Stronghold Assassin, and more. Urza’s Legacy was released, and the deck added Avalanche Riders, Ghitu Slinger, Bone Shredder, and such. Out came Portcullis. The deck shored up some weaknesses. It won tournaments. I added Oath of Ghouls. Urza’s Destiny came out, and everyone was playing with Masticore (and I mean everyone), which Living Death would kill. Out came Sneak Attacks, and the deck became more Living Death-ish. Say “hello” to Hunting Moa. Then, Rath cycle rotated as Mercadian Masques came out. What could I do with the deck? This was my favorite deck of all time. Abe’s Deck of Happiness and Joy! I tried a primitive version with cards such as Saber Ants and some others, but it was yucky. So, I decided to retire it and add non-Standard cards. As a casual deck, it swelled with fun cards such as Adun Oakenshield and eventually Captain Sisay and Twilight's Call. It came closer and closer to a hundred cards, and at this time, I had already built and played with a Five Color deck. The deck was a hundred cards big and full of awesome. Then, I made it a hundred-card Highlander deck, as per the rules of the format. Sometime in 2002, I eventually pushed this to a Five Color deck, and since it was Highlander before I moved it to Five Color, I kept it as such. It became my banner deck. I traded for more and more foils to make it pretty, and I added more and more cards to it over time. Over the years, the deck became the central deck of my collection and the major piece of art I have contributed to Magic’s deck-dom. I’ve played the deck against many Constructed decks and often walked away with a win, which left me no small amount of happiness. Today, it is over twenty-six hundred cards and growing. I added more than fifty cards from Gatecrash alone.
What cards have been continuously in Abe’s Deck of Happiness and Joy since the beginning?
No matter how long, all of our Magic lives have been full of amazing events that we carry with us everywhere we go. What are your defining Magic moments? Your top experiences? What does your list look like? Let us know! It’s good to think about these things as we move forward into the next twenty years of Magic!
See you next week,
Abe Sargent
Locations
