Introduction

Greetings and/or salutations! I am Professor Shine, and I play Magic: the Gathering. This blog is a place for me to collect my thoughts about my experiences with the game, and to braindump for the whole world to see.

So, a little history about who I am, and what my experiences with the game have been. I started playing in 1994, when my friend called me up over Christmas break and said that our acquaintance wanted to show us this new game. It's called Magic, and it's played with cards. Cards? Hmmm, okay, whatever. So we played a few games, and I almost immediately fell in love. I had always enjoyed games in the fantasy genre, including Dungeons & Dragons, board games, and role-playing video games. And this was the same thing, but with cards .. and modular and customizable! Two of my favorite things in the whole world.

Unfortunately, most stores in the area were sold out of the core set (at the time, the perhaps inappropriately named "Unlimited"). I think some stores still had whatever expansion was out at the time (Arabian Nights and/or Antiquities), but our friend recommended starting with the core set. In retrospect, I kinda wish I had immediately cashed in my life savings and scoured the region for every single thing I could find. That stuff is worth so much money now.

Anyway, it wasn't until Revised Edition came out that spring that we could start getting into the game. And that we did. That spring and summer, every time we'd go to Madison, we'd come back with a few more packs of cards. We'd build decks, play them against each, and generally have lots of fun in the process. At Gen Con that year, we did lots of trading and playing with the swarms of other Magic players were infiltrating the hobby gaming scene in droves. I got introduced to all kinds crazy cards and archetypes that I didn't even know existed, like Urzatron (back when the best thing you could do with that was Colossus of Sardia!).

A year later, though, none of my friends were that into it anymore. I tried playing casually with a group I learned about from another guy on campus, but I never felt like I really "fit in." Around the same time, Wizards were greatly lowering the power level of the game, and nothing in the new sets (Ice Age, Homelands, Alliances) was exciting me at the time. So I packed up my cards and filed them away.

Flash forward about 8-10 years. I was in a heavy born-again-Christian phase, and I was taught that "Satanic footholds" might be causing me spiritual problems that might be exacerbating personal problems I was struggling with at the time. So I went through this process of purging things from my life that were deemed unholy. Magic had a lot of influence and symbolism of the occult, so ... I chucked my cards. (Yes, I had several dual lands, but no Power Nine or anything like that.)

Flash forward to 2008-9. I was separated from my [now ex-]wife, and forced to live with my parents. I was digging through my old stuff in the basement and .. I came across some Magic cards that hadn't been filed away with the other boxes I'd had. So I looked through them. Yeah, this was fun. And hey, I never got to play this Elves deck I put together (it ramped into Force of Will and Craw Wurm!). So I got bored one day and looked it up on the Internet. Huh, they're still making this game! I looked at some of the newer cards. Wow, that looks like fun!

So I visited Pegasus Games here in Madison and awkwardly asked the clerk about it. He sold me a couple of janky intro deck type things, which I excitedly opened up and started taking in. I found out about Friday Night Magic, and tried my hand. Unfortunately, at Pegasus, the format was draft with the new Conflux set, and I didn't really know what I was doing. I knew good bomby cards when I saw them, but I didn't really know how to draft or construct a deck. I did manage to get my Ethersworn Adjudicator out one game, but it died immediately. Aw. :( I went 0-2, got a bye in the 3rd round, and wasn't terribly excited about drafting after that.

Instead, I started attending their Thursday "casual play and trade" thingy, and I had a lot of fun with that. Lots of random players just hanging around, mostly much younger than myself, but still fun to play with. I started buying more cards, and attended the Alara Reborn sealed events. I started getting a little better at the game, and tried drafting a couple more times, this time at Misty Mountain Games on the other side of town. I still didn't really know how to prioritize my picks, and never put together a deck that won a match.

I enjoyed playing, but I wanted to get better. So I started reading articles on Channel Fireball about drafting. In particular, David Ochoa's "good vs. evil" articles were incredibly helpful in illustrating what kinds of cards to look for: bomb creatures/spells, removal, evasion, card advantage. The M10 Core Set came out, and I won my first Draft match with a blue/black control deck. Wow! I think I was hooked for good.

Then I met a nice fellow at (I think) M10 Game Day who invited me to do some casual playing at his place. I'm pretty socially awkward, so actually giving him a call was one of the more difficult things I've done, but he was really friendly about it. He invited me to play in their casual Monday night group, and I started doing that every other week (they usually stay up playing pretty late, so it was hard for me to justify doing that every week and being tired at work every Tuesday).

In the meantime, I was drafting more, playing more Standard, and winning on a pretty regular basis. Tournaments where I'd finish 0-X were getting pretty rare. I bought singles online to complete a crazy Landfall deck that was capable of flooding the board with Beast and/or Bird tokens by turn four. (Then I'd lose to Day of Judgment, but hey! It was fun when it worked.)

I continued growing as a player, learning more nuances about drafting, deckbuilding, and playing. I started trying to build and play Good Decks, instead of just Fun Decks (though if a deck is both Good and Fun, bonus!). I think at this point, 4 years after I started playing again, I've become Good. I can win very consistently against newer players, and I can hold my own against the better ones. I can go to a competitive tournament and finish with a .500 or better record most of the time (except for maybe Sealed... I haven't had much luck with that yet).

At some point, I started posting a lot online about my experiences in various Magic events, on internet forums I frequent such as The Shizz and MTG Salvation, and in my personal blog. I started playing in other formats (Legacy, Modern, and Online). I've become pretty good with the rules of the game, and I have Judge aspirations. My level of activity (in both breadth and depth) with the game is at an all-time high. So, I figured it was about time to document everything in one place. Both to streamline what I write about online, as well as for my own self-reflection.

I have no idea if anybody will actually read this or care about it. I think if I can get a few of my online friends to read and get some value out of it, and possibly get some dialogue going about various things, then that'll be great. If nothing else, it'll be like a journal, good for introspection if for nothing else.

So, Reader, whoever/wherever you are, thanks for reading, and I hope you enjoy. :)