I don't remember exactly when it was that I discovered Magic: The Gathering (MtG). It was sometime circa '93 or '94 , and I would have been in the 4th or 5th grade. Back in the day, cards like Sengir Vampire here were what it was all about. Big nasty creatures that took over the game when they hit the table. You maybe had 1 or 2 copies of them in your whole collection, and they were in some terrible junk deck next to a craw wurm. I played the game pretty heavily in grade school all the way up through highschool before I decided that it was too much trouble to keep up with all the new cards that were coming out, and all the crazy tech that was overtaking the after school meta-game. I played a few other CCGs over the years, especially after my return to tabletop gaming in my late teens and early twenties, but aside from the excellent Call of Cthulhu CCG that was supported briefly and then axed and then resurrected by Fantasy Flight Games, none of them left such a lasting impression as MtG.
Turn the clock forwards some 15 years to Summer 2009. In a stroke of genius, looking to revitalize the MtG franchise which had been stagnating for a number of years, Wizards of the Coast brought us Duels of the Planeswalkers for the Xbox Live Arcade. Here was an opportunity for tons of dudes like me who grew up and later abandoned MtG to come back to the game with a reasonably low barrier to entry (I think it was like $10 for the game)in the context of a videogame, which was a medium that we had already fully embraced. Shortly thereafter, WotC hit us with M10, a new iteration of their core set for MtG which contained many of the classic cards that we had loved so much in the early days of the game, along with some new ones that were pretty awesome as well (Baneslayer Angel, Anyone?). Between jobs, I managed to make time to make it down to the local store in Rochester for some release events for m10 to get my first taste of limited magic (sealed format, in this case).
It was like reuniting with an old friend, but there were a few growing pains. For starters, I was not a big fan of having to go to a store or later the Cornell Games Club in order to play MtG. In general, you've gotta play MtG in some cramped dump with a bunch of awkward jerkwads who don't know what manners or hygiene are. I myself may be an awkward jerkwad, but at least I shower daily and wear clean clothes. Anyway, the burden of spending 4-6 hours in some stinking pit every week to play MtG was a bit much for me, which is just the opportunity that MtG:Online needed to work it's way into my heart and wallet. Now I could have all the fun playing MtG without any of the hassle. If I wanted to drink a few beers and play in a draft tournament when I got home from work, taking the occasional smoke break between matches on the patio, I could totally do that, even on a Wednesday night at 11pm. It was totally liberating.
Which brings us back to Sengir Vampire. Recently, MtG:Online saw the release of Masters Edition IV, a cobbling together of old cards from sets that weren't meant to played in limited formats (meaning they wouldn't sell so well online), designed in an effort to slowly inject the online card pool with all of the cards that are available in paper formats. I played my first ME4 draft (you can see the picks by following this link ), and it was like this wonderful time warp back to a time when vampires weren't moody pretty boys and wizards didn't go to prep schools. It's nice to know that no matter how much the mainstream tries to ruin everything we've always held dear in an attempt to make it more palatable for the Dancing With the Stars set, theres still a giant corporate entity out there that knows they don't have to reinvent the wheel.
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