Playing the Game, from beginner to competer.

So I've gone through a few drafts of this. Not sure what exactly I wanted to write. At first it was about deckbuilding. Now I've chosen to write about how I repicked up the game, and actually got better.

To tell you about picking the game back up, it stands to reason I should talk about dropping the game. As a young teenager I was easily persuaded. A friend of mine, one that had a big impact on my life was a Magic player. Not anything like I am now, but a casual one. He had a mean Sliver deck back in Type 1, but as far as I know he wasn't into the whole FNM scene. From there I slowly got into it. This was back during when...well I guess Mirridon was in standard, and Kamigawa was just being released. Now I was just a punk 14 year old so I didn't know what Standard was, the real nuances of deck building, or anything about magic other than basic rules.

So, I got by on prebuilt decks, playing my friends here and there. I loved the flavor, the worlds were great, the ideas fantastic. Eventually though, I kind of just lost interest. So, it all got packed away in this big ass backpack, oh wait. You know what? I think I got a girlfriend. Around that age...it was my first so I dropped Magic and picked up her. Well...that was awhile ago. Now though. Let's see, it was around winter break of my first year of college. My friend was over, one you might come to know as The Man in Black if anyone will read these damn things, and we were drinking. Underage! Yes I know! Omg!

Anyway, drinking, Magic right. On a whim we wanted to play Magic and I thought, hey, I have those old cards in storage. So we scoped it out and no dice. Nothing but no reception and a wooden sword. So we did the next best thing. Went to the closest place that sold them we could find, grabbed a couple of these new fangled Shards of Alara Intro Packs, but together some nice little decks. And duked it out. For future reference, it sucked. Some intro packs, even if you add a few cards just end up losing. Hardcore. They aren't meant for any real play. Needless to say Intro Bant beat Intro Jund 2 out of 3 times. Then again, we were both just getting back into it, hadn't really had a feel for it yet. And we were boozing.

From there, Black went back to WV and got Garrett and another friend to play some. Garrett picked up some new cards, broke out his others, and mostly kicked their asses. Eventually we all reconvined back at Shepherd and started playing. We got more cards, learned the rules and figured each other out. Rather quickly our group of players expanded. Our friends picked it up, and we had a right old circle of players. We never tried anything competitive, just playing each other, getting pissed and moving on.

Our first experience, well, at least I know mine, in tourney play was at the Sealed Constructed Conflux Prerelease. And I did rather well. my two partners in crime, Garrett and Ben, not so much.

After that there wasn't a whole lot of play outside of our circle. Near the end of the year though we branched out again. This time, Black, Chris and I made our way over to FNM. I brought my rather fun Esper deck and did halfway bad. I won agaisnt other....thrown together decks, but lost to the real players. The ones that actually went there with good decks to win.

So I revised my strategy. Garrett had started doing it and it was time for the rest of us. With cards in hand I built decks around strategies. Not just cards I liked, but cards that actually worked together. The second deck that I brought, Devour, did horrible. Compeletely horrible. And from there I just stopped. It made me sad. u_u

Except Alara Reborn, went to that Prerelease, and again, did rather well with the Sealed Constructed.

As we went home I stopped playing, kinda had to. No one was here to play with. But then Black pointed out a deck online. One that had made Top 8. And it is was Esper. I have a thing for Esper. >> She's like my jelly on the side. Anyway, I made the deck, and brought it to FNM. It was an odd experience, playing with a deck that was meant to win. And win it did. I only had trouble with a few decks. And it made me rather happy.

So then I realized that for competitive play, one must follow certain rules in deckbuilding. And now I have a few decks in the works. One of which you've seen.

Well, this was my first blog with ECM that wasn't a decklist. It was sloppy, it was...not...neat. But it tells my history of how I got to this point in playing. I still intend to right that piece on effective deck building but right now fuck off.