I'm not sure anyone forgets their first Magic deck. Usually because that first deck gets modified and tweaked and reverted back to its original state over such a long period of time that it leaves a lasting impression. And Magic itself has had such an impression in my life that it always stuns me how close I came to simply not buying my first deck back in the summer of 2001. I had finished up my first year of high school and was bored ever since the local Pokémon scene had dried up. Most of the money I had from delivering papers was invested in that game, but I had little reason to continue since I had no reliable way out of the city to any of the larger tournaments. My parents refusal to support my hobby by taking me to Buffalo or Erie for tournaments was a point of adolescent consternation.
There was a sports card store called Two Guys that opened the previous year on Water Street in Fredonia. Western New York winters made getting to Fredonia was impossible for me, but when the weather was warmer it was only a thirty minute bike ride from my home in the neighboring city of Dunkirk. That summer I started putting up flyers asking people if they were interested in starting a league, and every week I would come back and check the blank sign up sheet and ask the store owners asking if there was any interest, to no avail. This usually happened on the weekend where some of the college kids were playing Magic, and they'd often prod me to pick up a deck and play in a tournament.
I was skeptical about picking up Magic though. I didn't really have enough money to support two games, and I was still hopeful that the Pokémon scene in the area would be revived, or I could magically coerce my mom or dad to take me to a large tournament in Columbus or Pittsburgh and prove I was good enough to make a habit out of competition. I was also aware of how long it would take to get competitively good at Magic, which would be my goal if I started the game up. Starting from scratch and wrangling the cards for a respectable Pokémon collection had taken a while and Magic, which started five years earlier in 1993, had about ten times as many cards to collect.
But it also seemed Magic could actually congregate a crowd to play it, and there were some familiar faces among them. Two people I recognized from the Pokémon League during its heyday, Eric and Justin, both picked up Magic that summer and had suggested I play. There was also Josh Raynor, who I met from the High School Envirothon Club (2nd place champs in 2003, suck it Falconer). That August, with both the summer and my hopes of a revitalized local Pokémon scene waning, I reluctantly bought an Apocalypse Theme Deck named Swoop and signed up for FNM.
Some of the people that showed up early for the tournament ran me through the basics of how to play my deck, which was a Blue-Green Fliers deck with lots of bounce spells. Coming from Pokémon it was easy to transition to Magic, though the ability to play spells and activate abilities during your opponent's turn was slightly vexing to me as Pokémon had nothing similar to this. Though I was confident I had at least grasped the basics, I didn't have any illusions about winning with my store-bought precon. The terms archetype and metagame were already in my dictionary from Pokémon, and I knew how poor preconstructed decks were in comparison. I figured at least some of the people at the tournament would have a competitive deck, particularly the people that had their name written in thick black marker on the white wall near the counter conspicuously labeled FNM WINNERS. Only three names appeared there: Rick Near, Doug Wilson, and Mike Innace. There were near thirty people in the pungent, humid room filled with card tables and lawn chairs, and I had the misfortune of drawing Doug Wilson as my first round opponent.
Doug was playing a Domain deck (five-color deck) which was popular in the metagame at the time. Standard consisted of Masques Block, Invasion Block, and 7th Edition, which had just recently come out. Invasion Block was a multicolor themed block with a cycle of tri-colored dragons, whose names I slowly came to know and fear through their Charms and Lairs before ever knowing what the Legendary Creatures attached to them actually did, a feature of discovery that was sadly only present that summer where I was completely ignorant to the lore of the game. Domain decks used cards that were stronger the more colors and basic land types you had access to, and the headliner of the Doug's deck was Draco, a massive 9/9 flying Artifact Dragon that he could squeak out for a paltry six mana. I was utterly smashed by it in the overall match, though in one of the games (matches were best-of-three) I was able to cast Aether Mutation on Draco and put sixteen 1/1 Saprolings onto the field, a play which a kid piloting that theme deck for a first time can only dream of. I cannot say for sure if I managed to steal that game off of him or if he calmly played a Teferi's Moat the following turn. In either case, I had managed to turn a few heads with that play, and against Doug Wilson, one of the greats according to the Wall of Fame. I had resolved that next week I would be slightly better, and would improve every week until my name was on that wall.
The Swoop deck itself wasn't overly hard to modify. From games I played against people the following weeks I realized that I could scrape a few wins by simply applying pressure and trying to win quickly before my opponent could play a creature that outclassed mine. If they spent a large amount of mana I could just Repulse it back to their hand and repeat my attack. Getting a turn two Gaea's Skyfolk always gave me hope in the game, and I tried to search for other creatures that were cheap and efficient in lieu of the giant dragons, which were expensive both in terms of mana and money. This was essentially what I had done in Pokémon and Haymaker decks over the previous three years. I knew I couldn't ever afford a playset of Charizard or Blastoise so I focused instead on Electabuzz and Hitmonchan.
Entering FNM was $5 and you got your choice of Booster Pack when you entered, so I would often trade any of the rares I had for cards I needed for my deck. One card I wanted to scoop up four copies of the second I knew it existed was Questing Phelddagrif, because in addition to being a 4/4 for four mana with an array of abilities, he was a goddamn winged hippopotamus. This required me to add white mana to my deck, which was easy thanks to the multiple mana fixing options in Invasion Block. It also allowed me to run my one Meddling Mage, which I figured was a good card (and therefore, untradable) because it had a nickname. Questing Phelddagrif also has one of the most beneficial secret abilities a card can have against the wave of newer players that started Magic that summer: a giant wall of text. Inexperienced players can read power and toughness, and occasionally keywords like Flying and Trample, but when their opponent plays a card like Phelddagrif that has three different abilities that don't do a whole lot on their own, it's simply too taxing to try to understand it. "Yeah, okay, it can get flying and does some bullshit where I gain life. Is it my turn yet?"
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| The bane of my existence for two months. |
The deck also gave me a couple copies of Kavu Chameleon, which was actually a decent card against some legitimate decks. Masques Block was still in Standard for a couple months until Odyssey came out. This meant that for two months I played Magic while Brainstorm and Dark Ritual were legal in Standard. With this sort of degeneracy, its surprising that a mill deck was the most played deck at the store. This is essentially the nightmare deck for newer and casual players, Blue-White Control filled with Counterspells, massive creature removal with Mageta the Lion, and Story Circle, which just stopped your attacks in its tracks. It was the infuriating embodiment of control: it would sit back, counter or kill everything you tried to do, and Millstone you to death. Kavu Chameleon was surprisingly effective against it though, since he couldn't be countered and could change his color for a single green mana to get around Story Circle. Plus he was a 4/4 for five, which in dirty peasant terms is a pretty good deal. It was never enough to actually beat the Story Circle-Millstone Deck, but it had the same effect my Aether Mutation did against Draco that first week. It made the experienced players concentrate on the game, and treat a kid with a dozen packs and a precon like a dark horse that might actually take the game if they let their guard down.
TCGs don't favor the peasant, and I knew from Pokémon that I didn't just need a plan for a deck, but an overall strategy to acquire cards and keep this hobby going. The Standard Format in Magic rotated every year, which meant that when Odyssey became legal that autumn, Mercadian Masques, Nemesis, and Prophecy would all rotate out. In another year the entirety of Invasion Block would rotate out, my Pheldagriffs and Skyfolk with it. Odyssey would then be the oldest set in Standard. I decided to focus on the rotation for that following year, getting a respectable collection of cards from drafting Odyssey Block. It might take a while, but eventually I would be the one playing the Story Circle-Millstone Deck since I would have access to those rares. In the meantime I would play the best and cheapest deck I could scrape together using whatever commons and uncommons I managed to draft as a base. As it turns out, Odyssey was an extremely complimentary block for this strategy, and a cheap deck soon emerged that would carry me through the following year of my Magic career.
