Geek Origin Stories: Magic the Gathering

My Magic origin story.

My obsession with trading card games started with a different more impossible to play game. I was always a huge fan of Star Wars growing up, I can’t even remember the first time I watched Star Wars, just that when Star Wars came out on VHS I had to have it. When I was in 5ish grade I went to a card show with my father (A Baseball card collector)at the local rec center. When we were there I noticed something I had never seen before, a deck of Star Wars CCG Premiere. The idea of cards with Star Wars characters on them was amazing to me and I had to have one. My brother got one as well, and we were hooked as soon as we learned that you could buy more cards. My mother at the time was working as the children’s activities director at a church so we had some extra money and we would go out and buy packs once or twice a week. We did this for 4 or 5 years and eventually amassed a huge collection of Star Wars cards. So what does this have to do with magic? Well my interest in Star Wars got me into the local card shop frequently, and I saw quite a few boxes of magic cards… as well as on rare occasion a tournament going on. I bought a deck of magic cards (the 60 card set things they used to make whatever they were called) of Tempest. To this day I have no idea were those cards are… but didn’t really get into Magic till High school. Around the time of 7th edition. I found some friends that enjoyed magic and joined them and started playing competitively. I wasn’t really good, but I was good at opening good cards. Bloodstained Mire was my first rare land… and I thought it was crap at the time, my first pack of Odyssey was Entomb. Then my friends decided that alchol and porn was more fun… and Magic kind of died for me… at least till college when I met Lauren and she resparked my interest. After graduation, the summer before I got a job, I started playing magic a lot more. Got into playing FNM at the local card shop, and after moving to DC got involved in a local Meet up group. Which is sadly too far out of my way for me to play at all the meet ups.

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