Responding to Rosewater Making Magic #2

Well this week Maro took a turn down memory lane and told some stories about how he met his wife as well as mixing in some stories about magic design from all the sets he worked on. I will spare you stories about my personal life except to say that I also met my wife at a Halloween party. Looking back at the article I now realize that it may not have been a party but that the whole company dresses up for the day like elementary school. Anyways: onto the magic. My playing time in magic has basically been divided into two periods. The first was about one year when I was in elementary school.

yes, "visit the shores of imagination", tell me more!

Yeah! That's the stuff. Kiddos, that's what a magic booster looked like back when I started. But guess what! The first magic thing I bought wasn't a booster. Nope! I bought a starter deck.

 

Just awesome. The cards came in their own box. And I thought I wouldn't have to buy another box. For a month I was just trading cards from this box for cards from my friends. It was the best. If you look closely you can even see that they designed the packaging to look like a book. To this day I still remember the smell of freshly opened magic cards. It makes a direct connection back to my childhood. Every time I crack a pack I sneak a whiff, and it still brings me back, every time.

And then everything came tumbling down. In the fall of 1994 Fallen Empires came out.

I tried to love it so hard it's not even funny. I saved up my Christmas money and purchased a booster box, that's how determined I was to love these cards. As it turned out they printed about 350 million FE cards which flooded the market and you could pick them up super cheap. And they all sucked. Sooooooooo hard. I tried to make some truly awful cards work, I won't force more than one on you, but check this guy out:

Yeah! That's what I call a magic card. "But Brian, I can counter as many black spells as I want assuming he doesn't have up B. And it's an interrupt!". The set wasn't all bad though. I still have my playset of Hymn to Tourach

That's right. They used to confuse the players as much as possible. Why not put four different pieces of art on the same card? Does the art even have a unifying theme? I'll go with no. God Fallen Empires was the best!

Well that began my 11 year hiatus from magic cards. I picked up the cards once in a while at a sleep over and had my deck laying around for the occasional match when we couldn't think of something to do. But that was about it.

Join us next time to find out just how I got back into the game and why I'm now hooked for ever.