#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 on my Magic: The Gathering history, you may be under the impression that it was a game I played only semi-seriously until the Modern land destruction saga that was LIBOR & Taxes (#84, #67).

Well, you’d be wrong. Because I had always taken this fantasy card game several degrees more seriously than was healthy. The thing was, for most of my life¹, while I had a crap-ton of cards, I didn’t have anyone to play with.

So I did what any normal, socially-deficient kid would have done. I started playing against myself. But it was a lot more than that. A lot, lot, lot more. I created decks with different archetypes and played them against each other in mock playoff brackets—with each matchup determined of course by a seven-game series—to determine a champion. And starting from the first tournament in 2005 featuring only six decks—very primitive, high-school-freshman-with-no-money versions of goblins, blue control, five-color domain, land destruction (of course), suicide black, and white weenie—I kept track of all the results, like a proper sports league would.

My big J&J Games singles splurge in 2007 (#42) expanded the field to sixteen, now mostly-coherent tournament participants (for Season 10), and as I kept identifying more cool, standard, relatively inexpensive archetypes to build and continued collecting singles, by 2009 and Season 21 had featured a total of thirty-two decks. (Though I’d say three had no real theme—I just needed a round number for single-elimination.)

To this point, there was only one real player playing these games. Me. But I took the integrity of the games extremely seriously, playing each side with as close an approximation as I could to what their actual information set would be if it was piloted by a reasonably intelligent human (me, I had hoped) whose brain did not occupy the same physical space as the brain of the person he was playing against (not me).

There are many, many concerning things about this multi-year epic. But with the last week of summer, which I had taken off after three months as an aide at a government warehouse, at least one aspect of this became a lot less concerning: a played against someone else. My eleven-year-old brother, who was at home with me for that week.

I had taught him how to play Magic over the last year, and he was interested in participating in this arcane “tournament” he’d seen me play playing kneeling down and scrunched over in my bedroom (really bad for your back, by the way, as I started discovering in my final pre-LIBOR & Taxes seasons in my late-20s) for hours on end. I was keen to have him join; but if we were to do a new season (just a few weeks after I’d completed Season 21), we needed to change the rosters. A bike trip to Wizard’s Tower, the pre-eminent hobby store in our part of Ottawa, was in order.

Once at the store, just like at J&Js in 2007 (#42), I instantly start scouring the binders for singles to both enhance the existing twenty-eight coherent decks and, more important, build a more thematic foundation for the remaining three decks. I start with my favorite set (Time Spiral), and after a few minutes of flipping through and conveying my excitement to my brother (who doesn’t fully understand what’s going on), the three new archetypes—which all had key pieces printed in that set—clearly formulate in my mind. Green saprolings, a deck that has creatures that have abilities that create more small creatures (allowing you to win by swarming the opponent). Blue-red storm, centered on cards whose effects multiply if you played many other cards already that turn. And, four-color slivers.

Slivers were creatures that possessed the unique effect of giving all other slivers a certain ability: the ability to fly, to produce mana (Gemhide Sliver, the centerpiece which I got a playset of for ten cents each), to have stronger offensive or defensive stats (or both), among many others. These hive mind creatures, all with an simple faceless, vague invertebrate-weapon like design that somehow each carried a distinct personality across hundreds of cards, were wildly popular in Magic casual play. My brother attaches himself immediately to them, as I pick up about twenty or so common but decent-powered sliver cards to form the core of the deck.

That night comes my favorite part—updating and creating the decks based on my new additions. My brother asks if we can start with creating the sliver deck, but I figure it makes more sense to start with the existing ones: because some of the cards I remove due to new additions could potentially be additions to the sliver (and other new) decks. My brother is disappointed, telling me, “Then sliver is sad.” And as we get halfway through, he gives me another reminder: “Sliver has feelings too you know.” (And I respond: “Well, yeah, they have a hive mind. Whatever one feels they all feel.” While continuing to ignore the sliver deck.)

Eventually, we do build the sliver deck, which I think is pretty solid, and the we start the tournament the next morning. For Season 22, I decide to mix it up and do a double-elimination bracket—which means doing five-game series instead of (my favorite) seven, because we want to complete this tournament within the next week before I return to Waterloo. In the first round, sliver loses decisively. Then, at night, on the floor of my bedroom after midnight with a single light on (and us whispering to not wake our parents), we play the loser’s bracket of the next round, it’s sliver facing off against my green enchantress deck.

For these series, we follow the traditional home-home-away-away-pattern that MLB 5-game series do.² With me naturally being the home side that went first and had the advantage. With him piloting the lower-seeded sliver deck, we split the first two games. Then I win with sliver in Game 3 to put them one win away from advancing, at which my brother goes, “Sliver is jumping!” Game 4, I keep a mediocre opening hand and sliver gets destroyed; my brother asks to see what I had in my opener and says, unhappily, “Sliver doesn’t like that hand.”

But then, against all odds, my brother pulls off the decisive Game 5 victory on the road for sliver. They’re through. And they win one more round to finish in the Top 16. The championship series ends up being between white weenie and red goblins (significantly powered up since Season 1; and the two powerhouses alongside land destruction in the 10s and early 20s), with white weenie winning it all in five games at three hours past midnight—only a handful of hours before we’ll be driving with my parents to Waterloo.

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

Especially before the year after this, when amid a summer of deep depression I started does weekly drafts at Waterloo. But even that didn’t satiate my obsession, as I conducted twenty-two more iterations of this day’s insanity since that point.
For 7-game series, we do HHAAHAH like in hockey and basketball instead of HHAAAHH in baseball. My reasoning is that HHAAHAH is superior for fairness, and is only not done in baseball because of travel constraints—a constraint that does not exist in the context of two boys playing on their bedroom floor. (As for why I didn’t just do the even fairer “loser goes home field next game”? I was way too deep into the sports facsimile to even consider that.)