#113. Beginner’s Luck (Tuesday, August 31, 2010)
What was your best day…of winning thanks to beginner’s luck?
Magic: The Gathering is the original trading card game. I introduced the novel concept of integrating traditional playing cards with collectible cards: creating the whole genre of buying your own cards and building decks with them to play against other people’s decks. To this day, this game is going very strong, and still hasn’t gotten the credit it deserves for how groundbreaking it was.
Magic has always been a huge part of my life; but for the longest time—from fourth grade to this particular Tuesday ten years later—I never actually played the game properly. I bought packs of cards, built my (totally non-competitive) decks, played against my friends at lunch, and played tournaments between my decks by myself. But I never actually competed in any sanctioned events.
Well, it took me until I was nineteen, and falling into the throes of depression the past year and a half, to realize how fun it could be to play Magic properly. So when I looked into it and found that my university, Waterloo, had a big competitive Magic scene, with the Science Fiction and Fantasy Club organizing several events a week, I was pumped.
The fall term hadn’t started yet, but the first event was on this day. I spent the afternoon on campus taking care of pre-term stuff, then made a stop at J&J Games to pick up the booster packs for the event, and then eagerly waited for the event at seven.
I can still recall how excited I felt walking into the classroom in the Physics building and seeing a bunch of other people at my university who liked Magic, and whom I was going to play Magic with.
The competition on this day was of the Limited format—where you open your cards from packs on the spot, and build your deck from those (as opposed to the Constructed formats, where you built your deck beforehand).
And this day was my lucky day. The first card I opened was the super-powerful Doom Blade1, and I rolled from there with a very strong green-black deck. I played four best-of-three rounds, and I won them all. It couldn’t have been that easy, right?
So out of twenty people, I got first place at that event.
(This meant I got first pick of the prize cards, where I picked a two-dollar Ajani Goldmane over a ten-dollar Fauna Shaman. The only thing I messed up that day.)
After all I had gone through in my first two years at Waterloo, a positive sign was finally here—right on the eve of my critical third year.