I was in my first quarter of college in fall of 1993. Of course, I was a gamer then just as I am now so when I heard someone in my English Literature class talking about what sounded like a game I took notice. He was explaining to a classmate this new game he had been playing and was showing off a deck of cards that was used to play it. He explained how each player has a deck of these cards representing various spells, creatures, and artifacts that they buy in randomly assorted packs- “like baseball cards”, he said. The players represented dueling wizards channeling the power of the land to wage magical war on each other. The classmate didn’t seem too interested beyond the novelty of the artwork, but it really caught my attention. It sounded a little like WIZ-WAR, a game I really liked at the time. I asked the guy what the game was called, surprised that I hadn’t seen in it during one of my frequent visits to the game shop, and he replied “MAGIC: THE GATHERING”.

It was just after my birthday, funny enough. I remember it because I excitedly told my girlfriend about seeing the game in class and she said “Yeah, I saw that at the comic shop…I was going to get you a pack for your birthday but I didn’t really know what they were.” Instead, she got me a pile of SANDMAN comics. Not a bad alternative by any means, but those decks of MAGIC she passed up would have been from the “Alpha” set—one of the few releases that had the coveted “Power Nine”- powerful and extremely rare cards like the fabled Black Lotus and Mox stones that would go on to be worth hundreds and hundreds of dollars apiece.

So for the next couple of weeks, the hunt was on as my friends and I went to every hobby and game shop in town to try to find even just a single starter deck of cards so we could try the game. Word was definitely getting around about it more through word of mouth in gamer circles than by internet since this was fifteen years ago and most of my friends and the bulk of suburban America hadn’t embraced chat rooms, blogs, and internet forums as a frontline source of consumer information yet. Everywhere we went the game was sold out and there wasn’t so much as an empty display box left as evidence that the damned game even existed. We even got laughed at by a few store owners- you’d think we were asking for a cup of gelato in hell.

Eventually, at an out-of-the-way comic shop some miles south of Atlanta we found a place that had cards. Walking in the store and seeing- against all hope- a display box of MAGIC starter decks sitting on the counter was like finding the Holy Grail. Apparently they had just set it out because it was full, so between two friends and I we bought the whole thing. They didn’t have any booster packs, but we probably would have bought them all too. I can honestly say that I have never in my life been so excited about buying a game, and I never have been since.

That night, we opened our starter decks and rifled through the cards, wondering how it all these numbers, colors, and texts worked. It looked awesome, a little arcane, and there was this feeling of being on the edge of an undiscovered wilderness. This was before the infinite possibilities of deck building and card combinations had even become apparent to us so we really had no idea what was in store for us. We worked out how to play the game with the tiny rulebook supplied in each deck and we each just picked a starter deck at random to play with. We didn’t know any better at the time and we were still kind of wary about mixing the cards out of their starter deck assortments. Big creatures seemed better than subtle spell effects. We played the way kids tend to play the game when they first get into it.

The game was like nothing else I had ever played, although I could definitely see that it was kind of like WIZ WAR and the variety of interactions between cards was obviously reminiscent of COSMIC ENCOUNTER. There was a little feeling of TITAN too- marshalling creatures from the land to do your bidding while protecting an avatar-like figure is a common theme between the games. The rules were deceptively simple- play a land card each turn, which generates mana, which you then in turn use to cast spells out of your hand. Players get twenty life points, make that number zero for another player and you win. Each game, we started to see how cards would combine to produce greater effect and each new combination discovered was another “holy shit” moment as things clicked together in just the right ways. It was something of a huge breakthrough, the discovery of a new world, when I decided that all my starter decks sucked and I took all 100 or so black, white, and blue cards I had, declared the reds and greens useless and tossed them into a pile, and made my first deck. Suddenly, the frontiers of the game opened up to reveal a game of virtually limitless possibilities and practically infinite depth. My friends followed suit, and between each game we were taking cards out and putting new ones in to try different strategies. I never really played with red or green from that point forward.

I don’t know how many games we played that afternoon and on through the night, shuffling cards between various clumsy deck configurations but still too skittish to trade or play by the ante rules that required each player to wager a random card toward victory. I remember taking my friends home sometime around 6am and getting pulled over by some thuggish cops looking a little too hard for troublemakers. They asked what we were doing and all I could say was “Playing a card game”. I wouldn’t have dared try to explain it any further.

So then, from 1993 to 1995, I was a MAGIC: THE GATHERING addict. When new expansions would come out, we’d call around again, driving from store to store to try to collect as many boosters as possible in the face of three pack limits, tiny print runs, and retailers already getting hip to the demand and charging as much as three times the retail price for a single pack of cards. My friends and I played it almost exclusively, every Sunday night at my parents’ house and every Friday night at a Denny’s where this guy from a local hobby store would come and sell booster packs that he somehow magically knew what the rare would be. This was back before foil packaging so all he was doing was carefully shifting the cards around in the pack so he could barely see the title of the rare card- or at least make the best guess.

We still did a little board gaming here and there but even those were almost always a diversion from MAGIC, and strangely the real casualty was roleplaying games- MAGIC effectively ended all of our ongoing campaigns in at least three different games. Our collections exploded and with them the potential for exploration and deck building increased exponentially over and over again. The singles market started to develop so we could pinpoint the cards we needed to complete finely tuned decks, and we were all into this silly card game hook, line, and sinker up through the HOMELANDS expansion.

At that point- after the relatively lackluster and redundant FALLEN EMPIRES and ICE AGE sets before it- we felt that the game had become repetitious, that we had somehow exhausted all of that limitless potential. Opening packs to get the same rare you already had four of was getting to be a drag, and the financial toll of spending hundreds of dollars on paper products was starting to wear on us. We wound up playing bizarre variants just to bring some spark into the game- the best was one where destroyed cards were actually, literally destroyed and another fun one was a multiplayer game played with a 500-card random deck shared by all players. Despite our homegrown mutations, the magic (so to speak) was waning even as new players were coming into it all the time and the organized play system developed by Wizards of the Coast was taking off. Pro-level tournaments, expansion after expansion, and the constant grind of having to keep up with the game burned us out, and we retreated into SETTLERS OF CATAN. I sold my valuable cards on eBay and gave the remainder to the son of a family friend who went on to play for many, many years.