The Beginning of Something Beautiful by Cam Wall

It was during the summer of 2016, on one of a string of record-breaking sultry evenings in Portland, Oregon, that I fell in love for the second time in my life. I was at some unnamed bar with a couple of high school buddies, sweating out the night over Man-cans of Pabsts and periodic drags from a rapidly disappearing pack of Newports.

As I am prone to do, I wandered off from the group of people we were hanging out with. In times like these, I find myself oftentimes seeking some solitude within the maelstrom of inebriated people talking at one another, but never listening. My thoughts wandered to work stuff and other things that clutter up your life but don’t add a lot of value. Little did I know my life was about to change in dramatic fashion.

I was jerked out of these sardonic thoughts by three words I hadn’t heard in almost twenty years;

“Magic the Gathering.”

My head whipped around to the group of people I had come to the bar with, my head flooded with images of my childhood.

“What did you just say?”

I hustled back to my group of friends, eyes darting from person to person. Two of my friends then explained to me that they get together once a week to play casual, kitchen-table games of Magic.

I had left the game behind in 1996, when a forced family move from Illinois, back home to Oregon, had separated me from my playgroup. Magic had quickly faded from my attentions at the start of high school. I simply didn’t have the time or energy to stay involved with the game.

I don’t remember much of the rest of that evening, except for a feeling of…Elation? Nostalgia? It was as if my life had been a ship at sea, and my face had felt the first caress of the wind, pushing me in a new direction.

I woke up the next morning with a hangover and a mission. I looked up the nearest card shop and drove there as fast as I could. I walked in and bought the first two decks I saw on the shelf. As soon as they legally belonged to me I ripped open the packages and started looking for the good stuff. To my dismay, I had no idea what these “new” cards did. The borders were all wrong, the colors were off, and they looked nothing like what I had remembered of “Magic Cards.” I went home, threw them in a drawer, and pouted like a child who had just learned that Santa Claus isn’t real.

I tried again, at a different card shop, a couple days later. I walked into Red Castle games and asked the very nice young woman behind the counter about any old cards. She shrugged her shoulders at me and handed me a binder. My hands shook as I laughed to myself. Northern Paladin. Shivan Dragon. Royal Assassin. Vesuvan Doppleganger. Icy Manipulator. My heart raced as I grabbed four of every card they had (How was I supposed to know Balance and Regrowth were restricted?) and prepared to get killed when the bill came. My fondest memories of a middle-schooler were my face smashed up against the clear glass counter at the game store, dreamily staring at the $15 Nightmares and Forces of Nature. These huge, rare, beautifully drawn cards had to be at least $50 a piece now. When employee finished ringing up the cards, she asked for $40. I asked her if there was a mistake, because these were the best cards in the game, and the most expensive when I played the first time. She politely guffawed at me and said, “You’re interested in the older cards? You should check out Old School. But I have to warn you, the game has changed.” And she pointed me to MG’s blog.

My head spun like a top as I scanned through Saint Magnus’s blog, pouring over decklists and descriptions of the feeling I had gotten back at the bar, that fateful summer night.

My first concoction was a black/white knights and orders plus lifelace and deathlace, for value, of course. I hopped online, thinking I would chop it up with some like-minded casual players. Boy was I wrong. My very first game was against the immortal Jeff Watkins, who mercilessly outclassed me with a Rasputin Dreamweaver/Tawno’s Coffin/Tetravus machine. It was at the end of the match, though, when I had my first glimpse of the old school community. Jeff, aka the Wood Elemental, took a half hour to talk to me about his deck, and his alters, and old school in general. It was obvious that I was not in the same realm of competition with him, but it didn’t matter. He was welcoming and genuinely excited to have another person interested in old school. He set the tone for my future with this format and set the importance of the community to me.

I’d like to end this first blog post with a piece of advice I would like to pass on to new members of the old school community:

“It is OK to lose your first 100 games of old school.”

This format is not about winning and losing, it is about having fun and playing a beautiful match. Treat every game as a learning experience, and every opponent as a new friend, and you’ll never have a bad day.