STUFF & THINGS 4

By Richard Early

QUOTE OF THE WEEK:

“Rules question: Progenitus. How do I kill it?”

MAGIC TOURNAMENTS

Man, I’ve been running Magic tourneys since before there were Magic tourneys. I’ve been thinking about that this week with the Minneapolis 5K weekend on the horizon. I’m an old man who turns 40 later this year and, honestly, Magic isn’t a young game anymore either. It’s weird.

I remember the first time I ever played a game of Magic. An old customer of ours, Sam Wendt, was trying to get me to play for weeks. We’d been carrying the game for a while – since we got a box of Unlimited in. We had some Arabians, some Antiquities, and lots of the Dark (oh, boy). I had quite role playing maybe five years earlier and had no interest in a fantasy game. You gotta remember, too, that card games were a brand new concept, at least in the fantasy role playing world. Well, I broke down and Sam gave me a deck. I remember the game like it was yesterday. We played at our old front counter and Sam crushed me. I mean crushed me. You know how sometimes you let a noob hang around in a game either to be nice or because you’re an egomaniac? That’s what this game was. Sam cast like 3 Shivan Dragons and a Rock Hydra but wouldn’t attack even though my life total was under 10 and I had nothing in play but land. I finally got mad and threw in my cards. But here’s the thing, I was immediately hooked. I mean, we’re talking crackhead hooked. I wanted to beat him so bad and I couldn’t believe how awesome the cards were.

Within days, I started inviting people to the store on Saturday nights to play cards. We had this old chrome kitchen table donated by a player who lived in the building. You could seat about 4 people around it. I saw my first Serra Angel on that table. My first Mahamoti Djinn. It was awesome. Remember when those cards were relevant? I sure do. There were so few cards in the game at that point that it made creatures like that scary and powerful where as today they are nearly if not completely useless. Most of you who haven’t played long probably don’t think about this, but you’ve got to realize that tat that point there weren’t even 1000 cards in print. Heck, the time I’m thinking about there were probably about 500. I know that in Standard you have a limited number of cards, but after 16 years, players can remember the cards from previous formats and know that there are 40,000+ MTG cards in print. This was a new game and these were the only cards.

Our first major event at Paradox was called “Mox Madness”. We gave away a complete set of Moxes, valued at the time around $500. That’s right, a whole set of 5 for about $100 each. I would buy at that price today, by the way. Anyway, we ran the event over 2 days. Saturday we took the top 8 players and Sunday we took the top 8 players, smashed them together for top 16 Sunday night. If you lost on Saturday, you could buy back in the next day. (At least, this is how I remember it now. I’m old.). We had a total of about 95 players and while I can’t remember the name of the winner, I know who took second and I remember the match-up. It was Tyler Nelson playing suicide black (who had to buy in again on day 2 to make it) vs. the other guy playing red board control. I think Tyler won game one with some really fast Erg Raider, Thrull Retainer action that his opponent couldn’t match, but then the red removal stuff took over the match. It was the typical agro problem. Tyler expended his hand early and if the opponent could deal with it, he wins. I know that guy who won was the older brother of a couple of guys from Minnesota and I swear his name started with a K, but that’s all I got. Tyler, though, and his older brother Blair, have been friends of the store for nearly 16 years.

The other thing I was thinking about was the period in like 1996 and ’97 when I had nearly lost the business to a partnership break up and massive debt. At one point, I had one employee, the aforementioned in blog 1 Jamie “Woody” Woodward. Well, Woody was an avid player. He traveled to events al over the place. At the time, he had a buddy named Craig something-or-other who he often traveled with. Craig was a Grand Forks player who played both here and in GF at events run by Dave Denarsky and Collin Cominghay (those guys are a whole story in and of themselves, by the way). What I was thinking about was how angry I used to get at Craig over PTQ trips that he and Woody would take. I was so stressed out about the store and so broke that it was hard for me to tolerate much at that point. So when Craig confronted me about not letting Woody go on some trip, I really got upset with him. I don’t know that I ever actually stopped Woody from going to anything. I’m pretty giving as a boss. But there must have been some trip that I was holding up and Craig let me have it. He told me I was a terrible boss and had no business stopping things. To be honest, he was probably right, at least to some degree. After all, we had no vacation time, crappy pay, and crappy hours. So when your one guy wants to do something, you should probably let him. But what Craig didn’t seem to sympathize with was the consequences for me. Which were, simply, I would have to work the store by myself all weekend - which I did a lot in those days - Saturday 10 to 10, back again on Sunday. There was no FNM yet, which is weird to think about, so Friday nights weren’t like they are now. Saturday was your chance to play. Funny, though, most Saturday we had about seven or eight players and I frequently had to throw some deck together to get 8 guys. It was a crazy time in Magic and Paradox. On the one hand, the game was taking its first faltering steps onto the national scene. Pro Tour New York was the first PT and was in 1996, I think. Don’t quote me. States was on the horizon and sanctioning was just happening. There was no DCI Reporter and you ran events by hand and submitted them as such. Judge certification was beginning. I was kind of out in the cold on most of this at the time.

I didn’t have the resources to travel or network. I didn’t know anyone. Dave and Collin were actually the first certified coordinators and judges in ND and ran the states first Champs and PTQ up in Grand Forks, which at the time had a pretty impressive Magic crowd. Eventually, our great friend Kevin Johnson grabbed the reigns and got himself certified at a GenCon. Thank goodness. I’ll tell you all about the adventures of Dave and Colin some day, I promise. But I couldn’t, or didn’t, get to these big events. And that’s where the WotC network was forming, of course. With no internet to speak of, at least no organized web site like in modern times, it was face to face. It probably still is. It took me years to build a relationship with anyone at WotC. Now I have great contacts there and have even become a Premier Tournament Organizer. A long ways from where we started.

Really, it’s funny how things happen and how things change. Dave and Collin, had they not screwed things up, would probably have been the areas main guys. Being young college students, not tied to a broke game and comic shop, they went out and hit events and got in. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t blame anyone but myself for not getting involved. If this tuff was going on now, I’d never sit around and cry about it. I’d jump in. Back then, though, I was much younger and a whole lot poorer and desperate. Good times.

Plus, I used to hate PTQs. They took my players away for the weekend. That meant no money. Boy, my eyesight is bad, but that was about as shortsighted as you could be. Odds, are, there would be no MTG today if it wasn’t for the move to Pro Tours and Worlds and so on. It would just be another game on your shelf next to your Monopoly, Life, AD&D, Scrabble, and so on. You’d look at it every now and then and say to yourself, “Boy, that game is fun. We should really play some time.” But then you’d plunk down at you Xbox 360 instead. Maybe once a year when your old high school friend you bought your first pack with showed up, you’d bust out some crappy deck you made once when you owned about 200 cards and most of those were Forests. Yep, I was a dope. I didn’t even realize how PTQs made people buy singles, buy sleeves, play test, and just generally learn to love the game. I didn’t think about the inspiration it gave players, the hope that there was more to playing than just drinking beer and buying commons.

COMING ATTRACTIONS

We’re done, I swear. I had fun with this one so I hope you do. When you read this, if you enjoy, do me two favors Point the blog out to someone else and feel free to comment so I know I’m not posting this for my own health.

What’s next? Are you kidding? I came up with this one this afternoon….