A (Time) Walk Down Memory Lane...

(Editor's Note: Today's column is a little light on actual EDH content, but you might recognize yourself in here somewhere if you've been MTGing around Ottawa a while.)

1994 – The Discovery of Magic.

The awkward (some would say he’s still awkward) young man arrives at the “Downtown Gamer’s Club”, hosted at the Dalhousie Community Centre on Somerset St. W. He’s there on a Sunday, nominally to play some RPGs of which GURPS holds the baseline approach. Featured is Ian Holmes’ IC&O (Ian’s Cities and Orcs), a weird amalgam of house rules, wargaming and role-playing that would enthrall and frustrate us for years on end. During one of the many breaks in play we’d disperse to So Good restaurant (People, if you like Chinese food and haven’t been here, correct this lacunae immediately!) or Golden River to get some high starch, high meat, high spice content, except for our lovely arrival from New Zealand, Babs, who as a vegetarian had a priority on tofu dishes and would help your scribe grow enormously as a person.

So...during one of the above breaks, our other gamemaster Mike Mullen pulls out a bunch of cards. They have the name “Magic the Gathering” on the back of them. These would be Unlimited starter decks, mixed in with some Arabian Nights stuff. The Arabian Nights boosters were selling at the club for $4.50 or so, which seemed way too expensive at the time...so I declined. We never thought this card game would amount to much so we all got a starter (I got a Veteran Bodyguard and Braingeyser in mine, I traded both for a Serra Angel and Shivan Dragon, cos those were BIG AND FLEW!) and sat down for some games. Even then, the decks took on some semblance of personality from their owners. “Dan” (who may be called Dan in real life...) had his patented “Boeing 747” deck, that basically put Mahamoti Djinns and Sibilant Spirits into play, dropped Unstable Mutations on them and followed with Giant Growths and Berserk to finish you off, lots of fun. Mike had his Walls of Life...and Death (Note the ellipsis there, the Walls gave you life...and Death was procured otherwise) which revolved around a bunch of Walls, Pestilence and Diamond Valleys. Yeah...that wasn’t annoying at all, All the small critters would die a hideous death to Pestilence and those that survived would run into walls. If the game got too dicey he’d “sac” the walls to Diamond Valley and bring them back with Resurrection or other shenanigans. No, I’m not bitter at all, but who the hell decided that a 4/4 Serra Angel couldn’t cut through a 3/5 Wall of Swords? I mean come on guys...give that a second pass through playtesting.

Anyway, I finally got around to throwing enough cards together to build a pretty cool White/Red deck with a splash of blue for Spell Blast and Power Sink. It did okay but the card I really, really liked was Nevinyrral’s Disk. I didn’t just like it in a “Cool card, let’s play it” kinda way, it was more of an obsession. I had to get Disk out and I had to blow it up. No matter the boardstate. I could have more guys than my opponent, there could be nothing else on the board, Mike and Aidan Fisher (who had a deck with a bunch of Banana Lions...err Savannah Lions) and Dan could beg me to hold back for a turn but we all knew the end of the world was coming and that was that. Eventually they had a long talk with me and I learned not to blow up the world quite so quickly, and then came the new deck construction rules which frustrated us but we adapted...

1997- First Forays Into Organized Play.

At this point Magic was basically a small hobby. I’d spend some money on it but I wasn’t “serious” about it at all. There was a chain of stores at St-Laurent and Rideau Centre called Comics Xctera (or something, it’s been a while :p ) that sold comics and cards.

Kevin Preece, who may well still be the coolest person in Ottawa, if not the planet, was a sales associate there and he’d sell these “pre-cons” that had a chase rare and a bunch of other random stuff. The decks would invariably have some theme that annoyed people to no end. For example, one deck would have Psychic Venom, Twiddle, Recall, PowerSink and basically every annoying enchant land and....you’d somehow bring your opponent to 0 life from 20 because they HAD to tap their lands. Anyway, some of these pre-cons sold for $20 to $40. I bought a blue/red one that had BIG SPELLS and a card called Mana Drain. The idea was your opponent cast their BIG SPELL and then you’d “Mana Drain” it and cast a Fireball to their face, or a Braingeyser (there’s that card again...) to draw a bunch of cards. I slowly tweaked this into some weird white/red/blue Mana Flare deck with Rock Hydra, Guardian Angel, Alabaster Potion, burn spells...and that was a load of fun.

Interesting side story about Kevin. He had a band called The Haunting at the time that performed a Hallowe’en gig at Barrymore’s. I remember this vividly because they would play a killer cover of Tainted Love where I’d rush to the front and mosh furiously. When Kevin would throw his guitar picks in the front row I “accidentally” bodyslammed a few other smaller people to get them. Hope you guys recovered and no hard feelings!

Around this time tournaments started being held at Carleton University. Andrew Todd told me about them, told me they were super casual and to just bring anything and have fun. I remember bringing in some contraption with bats and rats, which was Dan’s brainchild. Basically it had four Vampire Bats, four Plague Rats, four SengirBats, four Pestilence Rats, some Crypt Rats and a bunch of “Terror” effects. Oh, and two Nev’s Disks because you needed a reset button. So off I go to Carleton and my first match is against...some guy, we’ll call him Doug. Doug’s deck completely annihilated me. He had Serra Angel, Icy Manipulator, Royal Assassin and a bunch of other un-fun junk like Winter Orb and Demonic Hordes. Whatever, I played in round two and nearly beat a green/red deck with Ehrnam Djinn, lots of Lightning Bolts and random other stuff like LeyDruid that untapped his Karplusan Forests (We argued for 15 minutes that Ernie’s forestwalk worked on these, until a judge told us it only worked on basic forests, what hax...) and I think I won a game or two.

This was pretty frustrating but I knew I wanted to build something competitive. Andrew had traded me four Chains of Mephistopheles so that would be my starting point but the deck never really coalesced until...

1998-2000 - Prereleases and Tolarian Blue

...I met Ken Gallagher at Kool Kards Heaven (more on them later) or maybe it was Pagan Playground. All I know is that Ken had a cool hat and a lot of cards I’d never seen before. We decided to go to the Stronghold prerelease in Montreal and lo and behold the card I needed to make my deck amazing. Megrim. Combined with Anvil of Bogardan and Chains, the player would be discarding two cards a turn and taking four damage, every single turn. Oh, there was this card called Mox Diamond that I think I traded to Ken for a bunch of random junk for my Chains deck. So the deck started picking up speed but it was totally creatureless. I added Ensnaring Bridge to keep critters at bay but there was ONE card I hadn’t planned on. Helm of Obedience had been out for a while but no one had really played it much. When someone played that against me, I nearly baseballed their deck across the room. So unfair. Oh, they had printed Gaea’s Blessing too, which stopped milling completely. It’s like R&D had known I loved mill decks and said: “You know what Pierre? Screw you. We’re going to keep playing mill hosers until you build something different.” SCREW YOU R&D! I’ll build a mill deck again I swear!

Anyway, I think I might have traded for a Jester’s Cap or something but at that point the Chains deck was basically a shell of itself and I’d bought my friend Dave’s collection so we gathered at Kool Kards...

Right, Kool Kards Heaven.

Kool Kards was insane. It was basically a massive warehouse that would be re-furbed into a gaming area. The owner, Darcy Green and his kids Tatiana and Jayden, would basically have everything Magic-related, ever. You wanted Moxen? They had them. You wanted foils? They had them. You wanted tournaments? They ran them. Not that I’m bitter or anything, but some of the drafts were pretty ridiculous. Not that I’d accuse Ken of being a massive lucksack but pulling two Cursed Scrolls and a Tradewind Rider in his draft was pretty annoying actually, to be perfectly honest. But hey, I’d never hold a grudge after close to twenty years. Jeffrey Szelzki (AKA Cartman), amomg others, also began a long run of near-dominance at KKH that would direct him into organizing tournaments later on.

So anyways, KKH became a hub for everyone to meet. We had a giant “box draft” out of the stuff that my friend Dave had sold me, and we drafted the rares afterward. There was a ton of crazy stuff in there, a Moat or two, some Hellfires, maybe a Workshop. I probably traded enough stuff or sold enough stuff to pay for University, but I kept buying them back, a habit I’m glad to say has since left me.

Nowhere was this so evident than when they printed Tolarian Academy and KKH supplied me with the entire list, no mean feat since it needed four Stroke of Genius, four Tolarian Academy, four Mox Diamond and the rest of the stuff. At the time, I was in this newsgroup with some friends from Carnegie-Mellon University in the States. They’d come with a deck called “Tolarian Blue” and they made me promise to my grave that I’d never share the list and I never did. The deck caught on quickly enough (and got banned in a hurry) that it’s really no secret that adding a bunch of 0 to 1 mana mana-producing artifacts to fuel a land that tapped for blue, to cast spells that drew a lot of cards, which could be discarded through Mind Over Matter to untap the Academy might be a wee bit unbalanced. The deck regularly won on turn two or three and hilariously the standard version held its own against Ken’s Type 1 version.  We played about a dozen matches at a coffee shop and split them 50/50. That’s how dumb the deck was. Oh, I remember beating a Dark Ritual, Carnophage, Carnophage, Sarcomancy draw from Andrew Todd. He couldn’t believe it so we re-did the match and I still won on turn three.

The story of Tolarian Blue would not be complete without an aside about Joseph.

So around this time a bunch of game stores started popping up to support Magic.
Dave Tellier opened the first Wizard’s Tower at the University of Ottawa, Master Yang’s opened up on Bank Street, Silver Snail had some tournaments and Pagan Playground opened as well.

 But anyways, Joseph.

Joseph was an absolutely fantastic guy and a casual Magic player. Dave would hold tournaments and I’d show up with Academy, Adam Saint would show with White Weenie (I call Adam the Father of White Weenie because it’s all he’d ever play. Ever.) and Adam’s brother Jeremy would have some obnoxious Blue deck that abused Capsize. We hated Capsize so much that it became our barometer for obnoxiousness. Armageddon was a four-Capsize card for example. I’m pretty sure Nick Sirman bumped into us at the Tower too, it was pretty crazy the amount of Magic players that grew up there. Anyway, back to Joseph. As I said, Joseph was casual. He’d bring an 80-card deck filled with goblins and such and just have a good time, but Joseph hated artifacts and Tolarian Blue above all else. After one game where he got Stroked out for 90+ cards he kinda looked at me behind those beady brown eyes and said: “Next week Pierre, I’ll kill that stupid deck of yours.” He came back with every single Shatter variant known to man. Shatter, Primitive Justice, Gorilla Shaman, Verdigris, EVERYTHING. That’s all his deck did.

So we sit down and I play Academy, Mox Diamond, Lotus Petal and he blows them up.

At this point I get all -_- but I recover, dropping Mana Vault and Windfall into more Artifacts and I Stroke him for 100+ instead of just 80. The next time he added four Shockers to his deck to make sure I’d never have consistent draws. It didn’t help since Time Spiral gave us all a new hand. Good times.

 Yeah, Tolarian Academy? Maybe better than the review it had in Scrye Magazine that said “Very narrow land, only usable if you focus on mana artifacts. $5 at most.”

 Heh.

1999-2004 - Extended Play and Magic Outlets

So at this point I’d decided to focus more on Extended and Type 1. Extended was awesome at the time because you could use all the dual-lands AND you had access to a pretty big card pool. Around this time we all started gravitating around the Pagan Playground which was on a second-floor office above McDonald’s on Rideau Street.
To say the Playground was eclectic would be.well, an understatement. Picture a wide store that sold Goth clothing, Magic cards and had a gaming area that was shared with Vampire LARPers. The funny thing was that some of the LARPers played Magic too and we had a fairly peaceful co-existence. On Fridays the Playground would host the Vampire: The Masquerade sessions which would eventually end up outside at Oh So Good dessert shop for some sweets. The Playground held a fair amount of tournaments, the most memorable was an Extended one where Alex Anderson on Counter-Phoenix violated me on Secret Force. It turns out Hibernation and Forbid Buyback, discarding two Squees along with Shard Phoenix blowing up all the Elves is bad news. Who knew? Alex is an absolutely fantastic guy to this day and was a great playtester too. He may even have got his box of Urza’s Legacy for all the Memory Jars he sent in – at the time you could mail in a banned card for a booster from the equivalent set; that ended in a hurry.

It was around this time that I developed an everlasting hatred for the card Carrier Pigeons. Ken Gallagher and I had been doing a series of mini-masters, which involved taking a pack of cards and adding two of each basic land. You generally played “blind”, not looking at the pack contents for maximum surprise effect, and the winner picked the rare they wanted first. So in this particular instance, my best friend Eugene dropped by to meet us and he had a pack of Alliances and I had an Ice Age pack. Now, far be it from me to exaggerate any gaming (or real life...) event, but this is easily the most lopsided game of Magic I have ever participated in, ever. Eugene went all the way on the back of a Carrier Pigeon. Yes, a 1/1 flier for four mana that draws a card on the next player’s upkeep. Now you would think I’d have say...a Dark Banishing, Swords to Plowshares or even a flying creature to deal with this thing. But no, the Pigeon slowly and inexorably made its way through my life total. Oh, Gene also had Misfortune to pump up the Pigeon. I could not choose the four damage to myself at the time because of my life total so the Pigeon became a 2/2 and that was that. I don’t even remember what my Ice Age rare was and refuse to remember.

To this day I still rip up any Carrier Pigeon I come across. Stupid card.

Any story about the Playground would be incomplete without a short tale about proprietors Pete and Sara, who put up with way, way, way too many shenanigans on our part for their own good. Both of them let us get away with far, far too much for any store’s own good. Pete had the grace and intelligence to entertain everyone in the place while magically selling them all sorts of stuff they'd probably never use. I probably still have a bar of hemp soap in a crate somewhere around here. Sara was the voice of reason that generally chillaxed by the cash register when she wasn't maintaining some semblance of order in the place. I’m pretty sure some of us actually slept there overnight at times after events. Seriously, the Playground basically became a second home for us and continued to be so when it moved down Dalhousie Street before both of them moved on to bigger and better things. Good luck both of you, wherever you are.

Around this time Dave’s business had blossomed and he opened a few other Wizard’s Tower branches in Barrhaven (where we play EDH to this day) and Kanata. Tower has since become a massive tournament hub, but more on that in a future column focusing on the store chain.

2005 to Present - From 5-Color to Commander.

At this point I had gotten pretty disenchanted with constructed Magic. Shawn Davies held a bunch of Vintage tournaments, sponsored by the New Technology Store at Algonquin College and those held my attention for a bit but I really wanted to focus more on casual play. So Nick, Jon Barrett, Johnny 2000 (No one knew his last name but picture a really tall Lebanese guy in a leather and sheep wool trim jacket and add a tad of braggadocio, that would be him) and I think Ken Gallagher and I started playing 5-Color. 5-Color (Or “Five” as it became colloquially known) was a fairly fun format. You needed at least 18-20 cards of each colour and could use four of any card, the format had its own banned list, and it was an ante format, which became both a strength and its undoing. Cards like Contract from Below became insanely good. House rules made us wager “fake ante”, in other words the top card of our deck would be exiled for ante purposes, but players used decks full of commons or uncommons or simply traded the ante cards back to each other, since no one really wanted to lose duals or a Moat or anything valuable to a Jeweled Bird. Jeweled Birds started getting altered and signed since they were so prevalent in the format. I remember some pretty epic games between Nick Sirman and myself, which mostly involved me complaining a lot about Nick’s cards and strategies. Come to think of it, I still do that to this day, though I’d like to believe I’ve moderated my whining somewhat.

After a while Five died out and we started playing highlander games. I’m not sure what the genesis of this decision was but we likely just turned our 5-Color decks into highlander and went to town. Much complaining on my part when Nick would cast Myojin of Seeing Winds and draw 25+ cards or sift through his deck through Mindmoil, but it was still super fun. Eventually we got pointed to Elder Dragon Highlander (now known as Commander) and after a bit of fumbling with the ruleset, decks started being made. Only needing one of any single card was a huge draw since I believed (erroneously, as we’ll soon find out) that I wouldn’t need duplicate copies of cards to play. Sadly, I soon realized that I’d need X Sol Ring, Y Sensei’s Divining Top, an arbitrarily large number of Cultivate and Wrath effects and so on. Still, most of the cards outside Fetchlands, various planeswalkers and high-end mana enablers/tutors are fairly easy to get and Commander, due to its multiplayer nature, doesn’t quite punish you for a non-standard list as would a regular tournament deck.

I had absolutely no freaking idea what was going on so my strategy of chucking a Serra Avatar through Brion Stoutarm for Commander damage met with a quick review of the rules and that was scrapped. Then came the natural pull and push of trying to keep the game balanced for my group, nominally the Wizard’s Tower gang of Robert, Jia, Tainen, Shane, Chris, Vince, Ken and many, many others. Eventually I came up with a Horobi, Death’s Wail mix that used Masticore, PhyrexianSplicer, Shizo, Death’s Storehouse and Cuombajj Witches to clear the board before swinging in for Commander damage.

Commander also let me indulge in my obsession with foil and black-bordered cards (sometimes obsessively so, as a “regular” Armageddon might have sufficed but a Portal one had to be included, thanks again Ken...) and creativity, mixing in that griefing capacity that goes through all my deck iterations.

Wizards has been on the ball as well, creating Commander specific products (Guys, please reprint Sol Ring, Chaos Warp, Sensei’s Divining Top at the very least in this year’s release) and Theros block looks like has quite a few Legendary permanents that will find their way in the Command Zone or just in the 99. Here’s hoping Theros’ enchantment sub-theme sees a reprint of Sterling Grove, Aura Shards, an Oblivion Ring variant and maybe, just maybe, Academy Rector or Replenish? Not holding my breath on the last two though.

Next week we'll start looking at some of the Theros previews and we'll have a return of the Overrated vs. Underrated section.

Until then, may your Enchanted Evening not be exposed by a Primeval Light.