Every few days in the summer me, Frank, andJohn would meet at Max’s house to play Dungeons and Dragons and at the time that we discovered MtG I was starting a new campaign. Before one of our sessions Max dug out the haul that his father brought home and we proceeded to open the entire lot. I didn’t know anything about the game at the time, but I was immediately drawn to the artwork. Indeed, I can vividly remember using the Lich card as a visual aid during the gaming session that we proceeded to play into the night.

Love at first sight.

Our start with MtG was slow to develop, but Max and John took time to learn the game one day and later taught me and Frank.

We hated the game at first.

Of course, we first played with the starter decks and because they contained a hodge-podge of miscellaneous cards we found that it was hard to cast the cards that we wanted and wound up discarding all the time. We even tried mixing in the contents of the booster packs, but I suspect now that our deck-building skills were not up to the task. Eventually, we decided on what now seemed like an obvious decision — each one of us would get all of the cards of a single color and play only with those. The color distribution fit nicely with the personalities and characters of our D&D group, specifically:

I was the GM, running a world held hostage by the living dead — BLACK

Max was the wizard of the group — BLUE

John was the Ranger — GREEN

Frank was the Barbarian — RED

We didn’t have a Cleric in our group so no one used white, but because we were short a few lands we used left-over Plains to fill in the gaps as proxies for the lands running our deck. I was the only player to use Plains for white cards, as I’ll show later.

After building our mono-colored decks we found the game to be so much better. Indeed, in addition to allowing us to avoid the problem of randomized decks, the cards in our colors seemed to allow us to play out the stories of our existing world and the characters populating it. Interestingly, the components of the decks also fed back into the D&D campaign itself, motivating story arcs and campaign denizens. However, over time we found that some house rules played to the personalities of our group and provided constraints for play and deck construction:

No color-hate cards (e.g. Gloom, Flashfires, Lifeforce, Tsunami)

No “evil” cards (e.g. Mana Short, Mind Twist, Smoke)

“Soft-ante”

No Tsu for you!

No “evil”

The notion of what made for an “evil” card was highly subjective, but we were often democratic about voting for the exclusion of any given card. There must’ve been more, but a few that I remember explicitly were:

Mana Short — cutting down the ability to cast anything was evil

Mind Twist — cutting a hand down to nothing was evil

Smoke — preventing maximum attack carnage was evil

Black Vise — hurting people for playing all of their cards was evil

Soft-ante

Before I move on I want to take a moment to describe what we called “soft-ante.” In old timey MtG the rules were such that before the game started each player would turn over the top card of their deck and put them aside — this was called the ante. The player who won the game would win and keep both cards forever. Obviously this wouldn’t work for us because the decks belonged to Max and even if they weren’t our mono-color decks couldn’t benefit from won cards anyway.

Therefore, rather than lose the cards from the deck forever, they were lost for the rest of the gaming session. Because we played MtG during the down time in our D&D sessions, we would each get into a half-dozens games a night. Over the course of the night you’d often start to feel the pain of losing ante cards by your last couple of games (except for Frank, as you’ll see later).

Now that I’ve talked about some of the circumstances around coming to MtG and the circumstances and house rules under which we played, let me talk about the decks that we played back then.

Blue — Max

Max’s deck was a frustrating deck to play against. While I don’t remember everything that he played a few things stuck out.

Time Walk — to this day this is the only piece of the Power 9 that I’ve ever touched. Max loved this card not only because of the amazing artwork but also because he LOVED to take extra turns. He was very sad when we banned his Mana Short for this reason (which effectively allowed another turn). One was tolerable, but two was evil.

“Oh go twiddle yourself!”

Twiddle — I just as you were about to attack in with that big creature, Max would tap it down before combat. This card is single-handedly the reason that I removed Lord of the Pit from my deck.

Mr. Spock as we called him.

Merfolk of the Pearl Trident — Max had a few of these and we all loved the artwork. Years later I would build my first blue deck using the Revised version of this same card (a post for another day perhaps).

Water Elemental + Flight — Max’s Water Elemental was one of the biggest creatures that any of us had, but it wasn’t the biggest. However, it became nearly unstoppable if he was able to put a Flight onto it which he tried to do every single match.

Red — Frank

Frank’s “Barbarian deck” was the only other deck besides mine that played more than 40 cards. Frank was the kind of guy who was really drawn to Barbarian characters so it should come as no surprise that his deck consisted of every red card that Max received in his small pile of Alpha cards (minus Smoke). Frank’s deck was a total mess, but there were a few things that he loved to do:

“Bondage: The Gathering”

Earthbind — Frank was the only one of us who could really handle Max’s flying elemental as he had a few of these in his deck.

Fireball — Frank loved this card and would Fireball as many things as he could at once.

Keldon Warlord — This became the image of Frank’s in-campaign D&D character. He always had this card out when we were role playing and he would summon it in MtG the first chance he got every time no matter what the circumstance.

Green — John

John’s deck was also in line with his Ranger character but I can only recall a few cards that he played, mostly because they’re cards that I also liked later on.

Craw Wurm + Giant Growth — This was also one of the biggest creatures in our games and John loved to use it to end the game with a boost from Giant Growth.

Grizzly Bear — I remember that John’s Ranger in our campaign had a bear for a familiar, but I really remember this fluffy dude because another friend later on had a deck with something like 30 of these (Revised versions I think).

Fungusaur — I don’t think we realized at the time how awesome this creature was. Later on I discovered that this could be pumped up using Pestilence and built a deck around that interaction. That was probably my first truly effective combo.

The Lich Deck, v 1.0

I already mentioned that Lich was among the first cards that we opened and I immediately fell in love with its artwork. It wasn’t until learning the game and putting it into a deck that I fell in love with it all over again. At the heart of my D&D campaign (spoiler alert:) was a Lich that was pulling the strings controlling the campaign world. As a result, I built the deck around similar themes as in my campaign. Aside from Frank’s deck, mine was the only other deck that played more than 40 cards, of which I played 42. A few key cards were as follows.

Lich — I loved the flavor of this card. I loved the artwork of course, but what I loved most was that it was one of the few cards in MtG that was purely thematic. That is, this is not a creature card. Instead, this is a card that turns you, the player, into a Lich and allows you to break the rules so to speak and play a different game than others. This was my first exposure to “rule breaking” cards and I would forever have a love affair with other cards of its ilk.

Black Knight — The Lich in my story was a fallen knight of yore, so this card added that back story to my MtG games as well.

Drudge Skeletons — The Lich in my campaign controlled an army of the undead and so skeletons seemed a natural fit. Game play wise, these were really hard to kill because of their ability to generate and I would chump-block all day with them.

Scathe Zombies — These were strictly worse than John’s Grizzly Bears but I loved the artwork and they fit thematically. I would eventually trade for more of these as I mention later.

Lord of the Pit + Simulacrum — This was the biggest baddest creature in any of our decks, but I lost more games trying to keep up with its upkeep cost than I won with it. I tried to use the Simulacrum to divert the damage to a Skeleton instead, but I only had one of those and the combo was too fraught to work consistently. Thematically the Lord fit perfectly as my Lich gained its arcane powers through deals with various demons. Game play wise I would have been better off with a Demonic Tutor, but I didn’t have one of those until Revised.

Pesitlence — This card bailed me out of more problems than any other card in the deck. The damage to me was usually worth destroying most of the other player’s creatures and allowing me to keep my skeletons to swing in freely.

Frozen Shade — The artwork reminded me of Tolkien’s Nazgul which was reason enough for inclusion. Practically speaking this bad boy was often a better option than Lord of the Pit because it could be pumped up at will.

While my deck was quite thematic, it turned out to not be a very good deck for wining games. But at the time I didn’t care — I had a blast playing it and telling my campaign story along the way.

The Lich Deck, v2.0

After some time playing with our Alpha decks we finally started to see new sets become available in our area. Sadly, as teens we didn’t have a lot of access to rides to the only place that we knew sold cards in our area. Therefore, we were always late getting to the store when new sets came out and so completely missed the boat on Beta, Unlimited, and Arabian Nights. We didn’t care too much however, because we loved our janky decks.

However, just after graduating high school Max learned that his parents had decided to split up. The plan was that he would move with his mother closer to where he was planning to go to college and his father would stay behind. Just before our last D&D session together before life changed everything, Max gifted us our decks! As a result I was determined to continue playing my deck against other players who I knew from high school. However, I quickly learned that the deck just couldn’t hold up against decks comprised of cards from a pool of hundreds of cards rather than one built from a few dozen, so I set about trying to make it better.

Those corners!

The problem was that all that I had were Alpha cards, but the world of MtG had moved quickly past the original card aesthetic. Many months after we had opened the original packs numerous expansions and reprints had hit the scene and by the time I was ready to upgrade the only readily available set was Revised. Now don’t get me wrong, I LOVED Revised and I bought a ton of cards, but using them in my Lich deck was a non-starter because of the corners:

The only card that I have (right to left) Alpha, Beta, and Revised versions of.

While I really wanted to use the new Revised cards in my deck, at the time I didn’t sleeve my decks and the disparity in the card shapes was too blatant. Therefore, I set about trying to trade for Alpha cards to fill in my deck but as it turned out, finding Alpha cards was REALLY hard.

BBS to the rescue

Finding Alpha cards today couldn’t be easier. With a ubiquitous Internet available at our finger tips the only limitation to finding Alpha cards is your wallet. However, back in 1994 there was no widely available Internet so even if you had limitless funds you were still limited by your local trade possibilities. Thankfully for me I was a technologically wired (so to speak) and had access to a modem and a rolodex (those were a thing back then) filled with local BBSes. In a nutshell, a BBS (Bulletin Board System) was a computer in someone’s home (usually) attached to a phone line that would allow another computer to connect to it via the phone lines. You’d call a number and BEEP BOOP BEEEEEEP you’d connect to a message board, download, games system. Using the power of my local BBSes I was able to find other players with Alpha cards for trade. Since my D&D group was defunct by then I was less drawn to the idea of maintaining thematic connections between the cards in the deck. Instead, for once I tried to get cards that simply made the deck better.

So what did I get?

Nightmare

The new big-bad in the deck

Because I got slammed so much by Lord of the Pit’s upkeep cost I decided that a new game ending creature was in order. I don’t recall what I traded for it at the time, but in all likelihood it was a Revised dual land. Back in 1994 there were a few Revised cards that was easy to trade, prime among them were the dual lands, Force of Nature, Shivan Dragons, and maybe Royal Assassin. If you could pull these from Revised packs then you were highly sought after as a trade partner. Even today I have a ton of Revised cards (nearly 4x of each card) but only a couple remaining dual lands (Scrublands). In hindsight I should’ve been less cavalier about trading those duals away.

That said, Nightmare is an amazing card. It’s power and toughness are equal to the number of Swamps in play and in a (nearly) mono-colored deck this was a big deal. In a game that ran long my Nightmare routinely came into play as a 10/10+ powerhouse. I never went back to the Lord of the Pit again.

Healing Salve

A poor Lich’s Ancestral!

Since my deck already had couple of Plains acting as proxies for Swamps I decided to take advantage of that fact and add a Healing Salve. In a Lich deck, a Healing Salve is (basically) equivalent to:

Who knows what I traded for this — probably an Alpha Fear, of which I had a half dozen at one time.

Island Sanctuary

A poor Lich’s Moat

Again building on the existing Plains in the deck, I decided to put in a card that was similar in effect (in a Lich deck anyway) to:

Arabian Nights sold out in a hot second in my area, so I’ve never encountered this in the wild.

One disadvantage to the Lich enchantment is that whenever I took damage I was forced to exile as many permanents that I had in play as the amount of damage that I took. However, if I could avoid taking damage at all then I could avoid that problem all together. Using a combination of Healing Salve, Drain Life, and Throne of Bone I had many ways to draw cards, so skipping the card on my draw phase to shut down ground creatures was a no-brainer.

Glasses of Urza

My pet card.

As a younger kid my grandparents and I played thousands and thousands of hands of Gin and regular Rummy, so a lot of my perspective on playing card games came from lessons learned in Rummy games. Framing MtG strategy in lessons of Gin, my philosophy of deck building was (and still is I suppose) built around some basic ideas.

More cards == good — In Gin you’re required to discard one card and draw one card every turn, so there’s no way to get a hand of more cards. However, when drawing and discarding you always want to keep cards that provide the most flexibility in forming runs and sets. By drawing and keeping wisely you can build an effective form of card advantage. In MtG card advantage and hand flexibility is built through extra draws, hand filtering, and draw smoothing. Using life-gain in a Lich deck is the way to draw extra cards.

More information == good — Gin players are always trying to count cards so they can both know what might be coming and also reason about out what’s in your hand. Gin players are notorious for trying to sneak a peak at the bottom card of the deck because even knowing that one card provides an important piece of information. Therefore, in Gin if you could just look at your opponent’s hand then you’d probably win 95–100% of the time. Allowing me to see my opponent’s hand in MtG was simply too tempting to pass up for me.

Top-decking is bad — In Gin, it’s almost always better to have the option of drawing from the top of the discard pile rather than drawing blindly from the draw pile. There wasn’t a good way to get the same effect in MtG Alpha, but drawing more cards and keeping my hand full was a way to mediate this problem.

Zombie Master + Evil Presence

Since my deck already had a bunch of Scathe Zombies I wanted to get the Zombie Master to give all of them regeneration and swampwalk.

Therefore, I also had to track down an Evil Presence to turn and opponent land into a Swamp allowing me to (maybe) get through with unblockable ranks of the walking dead.

Changes

There were other trades of course, but the details of the transactions have been lost to the dustbin of time. However, looking at the deck now I’m sure the trades were meant to get multiples of existing cards. The cards available to me in the initial pile of cards bought by Max’s father were singletons for the most part. I do recall have a couple Dark Rituals and Plague Rats, but for some reason I decided to part with for some reason or another.

I eventually gave up trying to improve the Lich Deck because of two reasons: first I was big into Revised and second I was about to venture off to college and didn’t have the same amount of time to scour BBSes and arrange trades that were becoming increasingly difficult to materialize. Therefore when I left home for college I took my box of Revised and left my Lich. Over time my family went through divorces, children leaving home, illnesses, and moves and my memory of the Lich faded until I opened an unassuming black box laying in a bedroom closet.

This is the deck that I found (with fresh sleeves to boot!):

The Lich Deck — brought back from the dead.

The sideboard is basically whatever cards I wasn’t playing anymore and/or duplicates and such:

The “sideboard”

I have a couple points of note here. First, I had the Crystal Rod solely to play against Max’s blue deck, but I don’t think I ever got it to the table. The Stream of Life is an oddball green card and probably something that I got as a throw-in to a trade. I probably had grand plans of splashing green and getting even more card draw.

What’s next?

It’s been a blast finding this deck and reveling in the flood of memories that it triggered. Now that I’ve found this deck again I’ll never lose it again, but I might play with it and I’ll certainly try to make it even better. Certainly the costs of the cards required to add to this deck have increased exponentially, but my income from back in those days has increased likewise. Therefore, just spit-balling I can see a few ways to make this a little better quickly:

Add another Healing Salve, another Plains, and another Swamp

Find a Will O the Wisp or two to help with fliers and my curve

Maybe replace the Wall of Bone with a Forcefield

Get Wooden Sphere, Iron Star, and Ivory Cup to build out a real sideboard

Maybe a Dark Ritual or two is in order

A lot has changed in my life since first discovered MtG with a small group of great friends. I don’t keep in contact with my old D&D group anymore, but I will remember them forever. As these things go, people change and grow apart and in John’s case some pass away. I’ll never experience the glee of discovery that I had in 1993 and 1994, but in this deck I may just capture a hint of those halcyon days.

That’s the magic of Magic.