relapse.

I'm on the cusp of doing something bad. I'm really close to falling off the wagon. I'm about to renew my addiction to cardboard crack.

in high school, I played magic the gathering. my friends had been playing it for months, but I had a girlfriend. boobs trump nerds, hands down. but when we split up, I spent a LOT more time with my friends. and all they did was play magic. since it was boring to watch, they set me up with a starter deck. we went to the hobby shop and I paid ten bucks for a "precon" deck. it sucked. I got my ass handed to me every time. and since I'm incredibly competitive and more than a little neurotic, I started buying cards. that's the downside of the game, money usually equates to winning. kinda like everything else in life. your ability will take you so far, but your bankroll can make you unstoppable. if I spent more than my friends, I'd win more.

I had a better job than my friends. I worked in a library for about $7 an hour while they made less than $5 at a movie theatre (this was 1994, mind you). over the next several years, I dropped close to a thousand dollars on cards. and I was damn near unstoppable. the only one who could match me was moe, and he's the friggin' master at all things games. well, and piper, but he's a freak. he built a deck out of nothing but our cast off commons and pwned all of us. before pwned even meant anything. but he's a genius, and he rarely played.

I've been REALLY nostalgic for those halcyon days, ages 17-20. and the two themes of those years, more than anything else, were drugs and magic cards. now that I'm thirty, married and have a stable job, drugs don't seem like such a hot idea. magic cards are relatively harmless, with the exception of the hit my wallet will take. and my street cred, of which I have none anyway.

I'm drawn to the customisable nature of the game. I played with three of my friends in high school almost exclusively, and we all interpreted the game very differently.

moe always played white, or sometimes white with a red tint for direct damage. he liked the notion of a "weenie horde" to overrun opponents with simple infantry type, easy to cast and easy to replace. he was also drawn to the "pure" notion of the white knight/paladin/hero/etc. he loved playing shit like "wrath of god" and wiping everything off the table. fucker.

steve prided himself on being "black and blue". steve is an asshole, even moreso than me. he enjoyed more than anything else the idea of fucking with people. those two colours offered the most disruptive combos and he ran with it.

wilson played black and red, the two most destructive colours. he did a lot of damage, but always lacked balance and ended up losing, usually by harming himself as much as everyone else. he didn't seem to care. he just enjoyed the chaos.

I played an italian deck, with equal parts green/white/red. I started out with just green and white because I thought those colours best represented my personality, but also came to figure out that they suited my playing style as well. I only added red because playing without direct damage is for pussies.

we had various theme decks too. moe's "quicker than shit" was incredible... red/green, lots of creature based mana and direct damage. he usually won within two minutes. I made a novelty deck called "tossed thallid" that was a variation on weenie horde using thallid spore counters and hurricanes for the direct damage (hence the tossing). it wasn't very effective, but it was cheeky.

I'm trying to find people to play with again. I looked it up, and they're up to series ten. I quit playing after series four was released, and bought a shit-ton of revised (series three) cards (including a full sealed box) when I realised they were getting rid of the best cards. I'm scared to see what they've done by series ten. every time they released a new set, it seems like they weakened the best cards (or killed them entirely) and things got gimmicky. I'm going to start off slow, buy a couple decks and a few booster packs, and see if I can even recognise the game. if it looks too lame I'll chalk it up to "you can never go back again" and give up. but if it's remotely promising, I'll probably sink a ton of money into it and fuel my compulsive desire to do whatever the hell it is I feel I need to do but can't properly explain.

I just hope this doesn't end up like that damn pirates game, and I have some people to play with. it'll suck to drop a hundred bucks or more on shit I'll never get to use. again.

may the flying spaghetti monster have mercy on my soul...