#162. Sliver Doesn’t Like That Hand (Wednesday, August 26, 2009)

What was your best day…of getting someone else to partake in your esoteric ritual?

Based on the extensive documentation of my Magic: The Gathering history, you may be under the impression that I only started taking the game seriously with the Modern land-destruction saga of LIBOR & Taxes (#88, #73).

Well, you’d be wrong. Because I had always taken this fantasy card game several degrees more seriously than was healthy. The problem was that, for most of my life,¹, I had a crap-ton of cards and nobody to play with.

So I did what any normal, socially deficient kid would do: I started playing against myself. Then I turned that into a full league. I built decks around different archetypes, ran them through mock playoff brackets—usually seven-game series—and kept records like a proper sports league. The first tournament in 2005 had six primitive decks. By 2007, after a major singles splurge at J&J Games (#42), I was up to sixteen. By Season 21 in 2009, there were thirty-two.

I took the integrity of these games absurdly seriously, trying to play each deck only with the information its pilot would actually have—as if the two players’ brains did not, inconveniently, occupy the same skull.

There are many, many concerning things about this multi-year epic. But during my last week of summer—off after three months as an aide at a government warehouse—one aspect became slightly less concerning: I finally played against someone else. My eleven-year-old brother.

I’d taught him Magic over the previous year, and he was interested in joining this arcane tournament he’d watched me play for hours on my bedroom floor, kneeling and scrunched over. I was happy to have him join, but if we were doing another season only weeks after Season 21, I wanted to change the rosters first. So we biked to Wizard’s Tower.

At Wizard’s Tower, I start digging through the singles binders and quickly settle on three new archetypes: green saprolings, blue-red storm, and four-color slivers.

Slivers were creatures that shared their abilities with every other Sliver you controlled—flying, mana production, bigger stats, whatever. They had this weird faceless hive-mind aesthetic and were wildly popular in casual Magic. My brother latched onto them immediately. I picked up about twenty cheap Slivers, including a forty-cent playset of the key card Gemhide Sliver, and we suddenly had the core of a real deck.

That night, during my favorite part—updating all the decks—my brother asks if we can build Sliver first. I insist on updating the existing decks before using their leftovers for the new ones. He looks disappointed and says, “Then Sliver is sad.”

Halfway through, he reminds me, “Sliver has feelings too, you know.”

“Well, yeah,” I tell him. “They have a hive mind. Whatever one feels, they all feel.”

And I continue ignoring the Sliver deck.

We finally build Sliver and start Season 22 the next morning. To fit more matches in before I return to Waterloo, I switch to a double-elimination bracket with five-game series instead of seven.

Later, after midnight, we’re whispering on my bedroom floor under a single light so we don’t wake our parents when Sliver faces my green enchantress deck in the loser’s bracket.

Following the traditional home-home-away-away-home series pattern,² we split the first two games, then I pilot Sliver to a Game 3 win, putting them one victory from advancing, at which point my brother goes, “Sliver is jumping!”

In Game 4, I keep a mediocre opening hand and Sliver gets destroyed. My brother asks to see the opener and says, unhappily, “Sliver doesn’t like that hand.”

But then, against the odds, my brother wins the decisive Game 5 with Sliver. They advance, win another round, and finish in the Top 16. The championship eventually comes down to white weenie versus red goblins, with white weenie winning in five games at three in the morning—only a few hours before we leave with my parents for Waterloo.

Truly Magic: The Gathering as it was meant to be played.

1. Especially before the following summer, when amid a period of deep depression I started doing weekly drafts at Waterloo. Even that didn’t replace this obsession: I eventually ran twenty-two more seasons of these tournaments.
2. For seven-game series, I used HHAAHAH, like hockey and basketball, rather than baseball’s HHAAAHH. My reasoning was that HHAAHAH was fairer, and baseball only avoided it because of travel constraints—which did not apply to two boys playing on a bedroom floor. Why not use the even fairer “loser gets home field next game”? I was far too committed to the sports facsimile to consider it.