Responding to Rosewater Making Magic #3

Time for part 2 of Nostalgia series time (a little belated due to my travel schedule). Mark is talking about kissing his wife -- gross. I'm going to talk about how limited got me re-hooked on magic and how I'm going to be playing for life.

At the start of grad school one guy, let's call him Jonathan, brought out some decks of magic cards. We battled, I lost. Every single game. He had some niche combo decks and I had no idea what I was doing. Then he said, "we could go to a local store and draft". I was curious and said let's do it.

welcome to the end!

This is the store where it all began again. They offered drafts every Friday night as part of some weird thing called Friday Night Magic. A program Wizards has set up for nerds who didn't have anything better to do on a Friday Night. Perfect for me! At the store they draft in 8 man pods and then at the end of the night everyone puts their rares back on the table and you draft the rares for keeps with draft order coming from the tournament results. It felt weird but kinda made sense so I didn't think twice about it.

I cam in second in my first ever draft. I went 2-0-1 with the draw coming against a child in the second round. I didn't know about calling a judge for slow play, but even if I did I probably wouldn't' have done so against a 10 year old. I was totally gonna win the match btw. Anyways I had drafted a sweet BG deck with the highlight being a Putrefy:

yes Jed, the one with the good art!

At the end (he he) of the night there were two cards I really had my eye on in the rare draft. My choice was between

 and 

I think we know which one I picked ... I slammed that Hex as hard as I could. I knew dual lands were always valuable and such but c'mon. Hex is a kill spell, which I love. Plus the card is all focused on the theme of the number 6, even the flavor text (which is awesome) is six words long.

Anyways we were attending the place pretty regularly and got to know all of the local characters. The were essentially interchangeable with and of the local characters at all of the stores like this one. I will spare you the details but suffice it to say every store has is Jeremy Crowley and he was the player we enjoyed beating more than anyone else.

The owner was a character who even had enough pro points to appear on the early Hall of Fame ballots. However since I moved away from there the store has come under new ownership and apparently changed for the better. There was also an old story of how Mike Long stole the entire stores inventory one night. I never really did get the full report on that one.