Gaming Stories

Cool moments and (mostly) stupid mistakes from our gaming sessions.

Magic: The Gathering

My First Tournament Experience by Aki

I haven’t really been nervous since my first game in my first tournament. It was an “everyman” tournament, a format based on race car rallying here in Finland. Besides the normal constructed rules of the time (this was in 1995, before multiple constructed formats were introduced), the rule was that if anyone would offer you a hundred marks (roughly 17 euros) for your deck after the tournament, you’d have to sell.

I played a monoblack deck with [scryfall]Erg Raiders[/scryfall]’, [scryfall]Black Knight[/scryfall]s, [scryfall]Terror[/scryfall]s, [scryfall]Dark Ritual[/scryfall]s and even a [scryfall]Necropotence[/scryfall], which had just been printed for the first time and I had traded for just minutes before the event. I felt it had potential, but I didn’t really know how it would play. It was so unpopular, however, that I felt I didn’t risk anything by putting it into my deck. Especially since it was pretty much the only rare in the deck.

So, when the pairings came, I was paired with someone who was just some guy to me. Gladly, a friend of mine informed me the guy was the reigning Finnish National Champion at the time. Sadly, I don’t remember his name and Wikipedia doesn’t seem to know either. Well, this was 1995, so there weren’t any real veterans of the tournament scene yet, but basically, he was the top dog at the time. Being a sort of MtG pseudo-celebrity, he attracted a crowd.

… and I won. 2-1. I made a few moves I felt were mistakes, but surprisingly it didn’t faze me. My opponent made much bigger mistakes. He made poor attacks and never even tried to play around my [scryfall]Dark Ritual[/scryfall]s with his [scryfall]Power Sink[/scryfall]s, even though he had the mana. A [scryfall]Yotian Soldier[/scryfall] or a [scryfall]Brass Man[/scryfall] should have been able to keep my forces at bay, but that didn’t happen.

He was a pretty sore loser (I guess now its good I don’t remember his name), as he had a bunch of excuses, such as the deck was just something he through together and stuff like that.

In the end, I got something like fifth place. I’m not sure. I didn’t win any prizes and I don’t remember any of the other games. besides having hazy recollections of a bunch of [scryfall]Prodigal Sorcerer[/scryfall]s and its ilk taking down my creatures. Still, without any experience, I did pretty well, even though it was a single elimination and thus with more variance the final standing doesn’t matter that much.

Lauri Has Trouble Keeping Track of His Hand

Aki tried to win and EDH game through [scryfall]Doomsday[/scryfall] and some select cards in his deck. This was a risky move, as the cards needed to protect his position hadn’t really emerged.

Gladly for Aki, this was again one of those games, where he didn’t really need to win, as his opponents were happy to lose the game themselves. This was topped by Lauri, who went to search for a card from his library and managed to shuffle his hand into his deck.

Aki Buys Cards

Back when Aki was restarting his MtG-hobby, he used the premade deck with [scryfall]The Mimeoplasm[/scryfall] as its commander. At first, he tried to keep things cheap, but the urge to tweak the deck grew strong quickly. Therefore, he ordered some cards from a vendor, who shall remain unnamed, because of their generally good service. When the cards arrived, Aki noticed one of the cards was missing, so he notified the vendor, who promised to send a replacement immediately.

The replacement arrived quite quickly, actually, but it was [scryfall]Primeval Titan[/scryfall], which had been banned in the meantime, therefore making the purchase unnecessary.

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