How did you start playing Vintage?
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A friend gave me a longbox of cards sometime back in 97 and I've been hooked ever since. I was just a kid but the people on my paper rout were generous tippers. I bought my first real vintage card sometime in 2000 when I saved up to buy a Library from the local store for $80 to run in my mono black ritual negator deck like a champ. I met some friends that I still have to this day, one of whom I owe a great deal for preventing 11 year old me from trading my library for 4 finkles and 4 morphlings.
I want to get a lot more games in and learn a lot more about vintage so any time you see me online I'd love to get a game in or hear what you have to say about anything vintage.
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I went from kitchen table to Vintage in the late 90's. I started buying packs at the end of Revised and was able to get into a decent amount of the staples for cheap. It took me just over a decade to get fully powered, I bought my first card, a Mox Jet in probably 98 or 99 and I got the last card, a Time Walk in 2012 or so.
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I'm still "starting to play Vintage".
I started to play "Magic" with my first booster from Revised, but I can't really remember the year. I was a kid, this is the only thing I'm sure about and also not knowing about anything, like restriction of maximum 4 color of the same cards in a deck. I then stopped magic for financial and others "kids" reasons...Few years (10 years ?) later, I (re)meet an old magic friends and he brought me to the local MTG association. It was fun, but the guys there were almost only playing draft (a thing I still don't like today). So I started Standard with Affinity, then 1.x with "Red deck wins" and finally 1.5 with a wired Aggro zoo.
In vintage (finally), it mostly because one card : Doomsday. It has no real viable deck in other format and since I already have Lotus, Recall and Mox Sapphire, there isn't much to buy for a complete Doomsday deck. If TO accept proxies, I usually play Bomberman, but it's another storie
I also don't (yet) play on MTGO, but if Inwant to get some Doomsday practice, I will have to do it one day or another.
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I started magic just after summer holidays, by 1995. One of my friends had at least 5 decks (one of every color) with most iconic cards at that time: one white winnie, with crusades and serra angels; one goblin deck with mighty keldon warlord; blue deck with terrific control magic; a green weird deck featuring Gaea's Liege; and of course, the black deck with royal assasin, sengir vampires, sorceress queen, nightmare...
That autumn the rest of friends decided to buy our own deck, and after several payweek I had a black-blue-red deck that was good for nothing, but not terrible at anything. We played for a couple of months and then magic vanished. Next summer we got hooked again, played several months, and then next summer again: winter simply cold our magic passion for years.
In 1999 I met a friend of a friend, who had more idea than me or my friends. He shown us real decks and convince us to spend same money on cards, but buying 1 good card instead 10 bad cards. He also brough us to play our first tournament and we had a blast (I managed a 4-2 with my custom mana flare monored deck, running over slights). Then, when I was starting to get my first duals, we stopped playing again. For years we used to play at pre-releases, at least half of them (I skipped urza's saga and judgment cycles). Prereleases were a great excuse to meet with old friends and have a good time not having to buy expensive cards. In the middle we played some standard in the 2003-2004, but just at LGS.
And then in late 2008, that friend convinced me to try vintage. He lend me a UWB deck with confidants, meddling make, kataki, and we went for a small tournament. Despite getting a 2-3, it felt special. Those were really tuned decks, nothing like prerelease decks or standard crap. 10 zombies could appear from nowere. A stupid 2/1 spirit was destroying my opponent plan before his first turn. I saw myself facing Tidespout Tyrant and losing miserabily. Next month same friend lend me another deck: a UR "italian fish" with spellstutter, grim lavamancer, gorilla shaman... I was 4-1 before I lost two final battles (yep, LCV had 91 players at those times, 7 rounds), barely knowing how to play those cards. I started reading elsantuario.es and themanadrain and learn as much as I could about theorical vintage, getting hooked quickly.
In few weeks and after just 200€ I had my playset of fows, wastelands, null rods, dazes, 5 fetchlands, hundreds of sleeves, and some rogues to play 2009 february tournemant. That deck was quite bad, but next deck (merfolks with spellstutter and vendition) gave me my first top 1 year later. 5 years after my first vintage tournament I bought 8 P9 pieces, library and 4 duals to a retiring player, so I became another blue mage (with a taste for tribal decks)
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I started playing Magic in 1995 with three packs of Chronicles. Fell in love with it quick. I had quite the collection the first time around, which I sold like a chump for a fraction of what it would be worth now. My rationale in selling was that I wanted to party and chase women more than I wanted to play Magic, and I never got to use my Type 1 and Extended staples anymore anyway.
I had a Type one deck with partial power and dual lands (fetches hadn't been printed yet, at least not the good ones from Onslaught) , deck had Fork, Wheel, Regrowth, Time Walk, four Forces, my one Mana Drain, and FELDON'S CANE! Sick.
Then MTGO VMA happened and I suddenly could afford to play so I did.
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I started in 1995 with Fourth Edition and bought a lot of Fallen Empires, Chronicles, and Homelands. Mostly then I played against friends, but there were a few local conventions we attended where we played in tournaments. We were not good.
I took a break in high school (actually when the new frames were printed), but got back into Magic in college in 2000 or so because I had friends at home who played. The Internet was a thing now, so we got more competitive, reading strategy and even taking decklist ideas. Our metagame was "Casual Vintage": you could pretty much play any card you could afford. One friend played UG Madness with Tropical Islands and Force of Wills. My cousin played Thallids with four Gaea's Cradles. I played Four Black Vise Combo with multiple Sol Rings and Wheel of Fortunes.
When I graduated in 2004, a local game store started hosting weekly Vintage with zero proxies. There's a point where you stop being a casual gamer and start being a competitive one, and that's pretty much where I started. I acquired many of the cards I needed to play, staples like dual lands and Forces. I never pulled the trigger on Power or other higher-end cards, unfortunately, but I could play many decks with 10 or 15 proxies.
I played my first Mox tournament in Cleveland in February 2005. When I moved to Columbus later that year, I started playing regularly in Meandeck Opens. It was all downhill from there.
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In 1994 my best friend’s parents took us to the local comic book store to buy a starter deck each of Magic the Gathering revised edition because that is what his older brother was playing with his friends in middle school. 11 year old me opened true vintage staples in Demonic Attorney and Personal Incarnation. We quickly learned the rules and knowledge of the game spread through our group of friends. For the next 6 year I continued to play kitchen table (and picnic table and sidewalk) Magic with my friends. Knowledge of any higher level of play eluded me until one of my friends bought the World Championship decks from the year Kai won. These decks introduced concepts like redundancy and sideboards. More importantly it introduced me to the concept of tournament Magic.
A couple of years later I reached an important point in my Magic career. I got a job and enough hours to afford Magic and rent. This was around 2002 and I dove into limited formats. While playing in one of these tournaments I saw a flier for the monthly 15 proxy Type 1 tournament the store hosted for a piece of the Power Nine. At that time cards were mythical for reasons more than the color of the expansion icon, so I wanted to have a shot at owning one of these. I researched budget decks to get started and settled on Sui-Black for my first Type 1 deck.
I got curbstomped.
However, the experience also inspired me to actually acquire cards and learn the format. I bought up duals and Force of Wills (no Power unfortunately) and read a pile of Oscar Tan and Stephen Menendian articles. Month after month I went back to the store and over time my performances improved. This continued until around 2006 when the demands of work and women cut down on my free time significantly.
I occasionally played casual Magic but stepped away from competitive Magic until around Vintage Champs 2013. Reading the coverage of the event lit the old spark again and my new LGS announced they would be having Vintage events so I got to dust off the old cards again. However, these events never really caught on. A few months later, Wizards announced Vintage Masters. Before this I had never really played MTGO much. After the announcement I knew I wanted to be able to play Vintage regularly so shortly after Vintage Masters launched I bought up a collection of Vintage staples and have been playing Vintage online ever since.
This spring my wife (who was the woman I stepped away from the game for) encouraged me to take the plunge and pick up a set of 9 truly mythic rares. Along with the cards I bought over a decade ago I am planning on playing in my first sanctioned vintage tournament in a side event to the Minneapolis GP later this month.
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I first got into Magic with a buddy around the tail end of Revised. Those decks disappeared from the shelves pretty fast, but by 4th ed / Ice Age we had a group of around 20 together playing every Friday night in a friend's basement. None of us were old enough to drive at the time, so it kept us out of trouble.
I stuck with Magic pretty heavily up through Urza's Saga, mostly playing Type 1 so I could use all the expensive stuff I traded for or won. I was a senior in 99-2k, and by then I had college looming. I ended up selling most of it over the summer for a brief stint with 40k, thinking that painting was something I would be able to do in my dorm. That turned out to be a pretty boneheaded financial move.
I was out of Magic from then until RTR block when some friends opened a hobby shop nearby. I started hanging around, borrowed a Standard deck, and within a year I was solidly invested in Legacy and getting into judging. I didn't actually get back into Vintage until last year, when I finally completed the set of power that I never managed to finish as a kid.
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On an off magic player starting around Homelands, Ice Age, Alliances. I came back in around Invasion, then out again, back in with Alara Reborn. I had a roommate in college that introduced me to one of friends, the late and great level 2 judge Danny Maher - RIP - that plays magic. He built me a B/R prowl deck and brought me up to the WarZone for standard. I met some degenerate regulars up there like Nam Holofoil Tran, Randal The Red Wizard Witherall, Mark Snooptrog Trogdon and Jerry the JerrBear Yang who all happened to play vintage as well and invited me out to learn. I figured if all these fools had nicknames they cant be a terrible bunch. I played one more standard event, and have not played in anything but Legacy or Vintage since. Its crazy how small crossroads in life can change a large protion of your future. If I never met my friend in college who introduced me to his friend, who brought me to the only cardshop in the area sporting vintage players, I would probably be slinging at the kitchen table and missing out on a lot of awesome freindships over the years.
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Started playing during UNL but never really took the game seriously (still don't really). Dipped in and out as I grew up. I didn't realize how deep I actually liked the game until after I left the US after joining the Marines. After a few deployments I had plenty of disposable income so I bought in heavily into Type 1 in the early 2000's. I bought and sold after that. My collection took hits over the years, eventually grinding down to a few pieces of power and a commander deck and a legacy deck. A good friend got me into the 93/94 format and I figured since I had the P9 stuff I could give vintage another chance after walking away in 2006 due to what I feel was a caustic state (due to people).
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When I started playing in 1994 revised was the core set and the Dark had just been released and we played for ante. Most people had fairly kitchen table decks (several players including myself just ran decks with every card they owned). I started running 40 card decks as I quickly realized this made then more consistent - spell blast your battering ram!
Then my playgroup pointed out that 60 card decks were the minimum and you could only play one sol ring so technically that's when I started playing vintage. Started collecting a few pieces like ancestral and library (If you can only play one and they draw you more cards they must be good), almost bought a lotus (100 pound for a piece of card board?!?) and then the bomb shell - Type 2 announced and my local tournament organiser saying that there would be no major Type 1 sanctioned tournaments. Can't believe I was relieved I hadn't shelled out £100 for that lotus at the time and I stopped collecting Vintage staples.
Had a brief stint in 2001. We'd moved, one of the local tournament organisers was a real cheerleader for vintage and I played in a couple of sanctioned events he organised. While I was always still skeptical about collecting more power I picked up some of the Urza's block restricted cards, and played "1 power Oath" deck to some success.
Then came across VSL, TMD Smemmen's history of Vintage articles and I've been hooked online since. Next weekend will play in my first 93/94 old school tournament. Who knows maybe I'll even resume collecting the power. Attending the Vintage Worlds is on my bucket list.
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@kistrand Wow, your experience seems to almost exactly mirror mine, except I grew up on the other side of the world (New Zealand). I picked up a Revised starter deck in the mid-90s and after setting eyes on a Mahamoti Djinn would forever be a blue mage. I quit the game in the late 90s (unfortunately sold all my cards and bought a new stereo amp - still have the stereo but wish I could swap it back for the cards, especially all the dual lands) and started playing again when I went to the Origins prerelease last year. I've been playing online (just draft and pauper) until now, but the Vintage 101 series and the VSL got me interested in Vintage. I haven't fully assembled a deck on MTGO yet but bought my first piece of power today. By the time summer rolls around (I'm living in the UK now) I hope to be duelling with many of you fine folks online.
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@Ked Nice, I forgot about good old Mahamoti, not to mention Vesuvan Doppelganger or Craw Wurm
Hope to see you around on-line then. Made the same mistake as you did and sold almost all my cards around 2000, too bad but can't roll back time. -
I was introduced in December 1993. My friends and I were into Talisman, and one of these friends older brother went to William and Mary and brought Magic home during his winter break.
We played with his cards for about 2 hours before we realized this game was awesome and set off to the old Dragon's Den in Yonkers to spend our meager high school income on Magic. They had Unlimited Starters but no more boosters when I first went so I bought a few starters. They had Arabian Nights when I came back but limited each customer to 5 packs. Well, I introduced my aunt, my grandfather and my grandmother and both uncles to Magic and bought as many Arabians as I could. My unlimited starters notably contained 3 scrublands. Which at first seemed shitty. Other people had Force of Nature and Clockwork Beast. Nobody wanted my SCRUBlands so I traded for everyone's black and white cards. Sengir, Serra, Black and White Knights, about 10 Terrors, etc.. I also traded for 4 Sol Rings as it became apparent that Dark Rituals and Sol Rings made Vampires come out faster. I also traded for 3 Mox Jets. Because they seemed better than Swamp. We returned for an event in early winter 1994 and I had my finely tuned ~80 card B/W heap with me. We somehow were told about the 4 x of limit, but when we arrived for some single elimination dueling were told of a 1 of limit for certain cards. I remember having to remove several cards, notably Sol Rings, Jets and my second Icy. Rather than replace them with mana I put Black Vises and my lone Armageddon in; which our play group had house banned. This would begin my love affair with mana screwing my opponents and having them suffer an agonizing death to the grip of the Vise.
I won my first match against a deck with Islands that did nothing except get Sinkholed, Vised and Beaten to death by a Sengir Vampire. I later learned it was a 'steal deck'.
Second match I got obliterated by what we'd call Zoo today. Kird Apes, Bolts, Vises, Ghazban Ogre, and I believe multiple Wheel of Fortune. Notable in that his deck fit neatly in the starter box with a rules insert.
That initial exercise of pruning a deck to ~60 cards was eye opening. I got destroyed in a few more events but finally won one in the Spring post Antiquities. By then I was totally hooked and my final few months of high school were just notebooks filled with decks, and statistics on them. By the end of the Summer I had traded back into everything.
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I saw my first magic cards during Xmas 1994 when my cousins came over for the holidays. I live in northern Canada so we spend alot of time indoors during winter and after they taugh me how to play wasn't long i got them to buy/send me cards in the mail, since the nearest place i could buy them myself was about a 4 hour drive away. I played with my brother and a few friends all winter and spring, then came the black summer. Through some miracle we convinced my mom to drive us to that card shop 4 hours away for a little tournament. I played a BW discard deck. Most fun i ever had in my life.
Once i got to the end of high school(2000-1), i moved from my small remote community to Ottawa. At first, i was blown away, there was a damn card shop inside my University! I was in heaven, but with school and everything it wasnt long that i lost time/interest in playing, My younger brother took control of our combined collection, and at some point they got stolen during a house party. I was so bummed (i had stuff from Revised to Masques Block in that huge collection) that i forgot about magic till about a year ago.
I used to play magic on MIRC in #apprentice alot for the simple reason that my location made it impossible for me to find RL opponents. To this day im still in the same place. When i found out about MTGO, i knew that i had found the solution for my problems. I proceeded to get into Theros just as Ravnica block was rotating out and played Standard online till Origins. Being an older player i checked the prices of power every now and then cause lets face it, i was gonna play with those damn op cards at least once before i died. When my Standard collection was valuable enough, i liquidated almost everything i had and was FINALLY able to pilot a REAL (digital) VINTAGE DECK!
Here i am almost 6 months playing real Vintage and i realize, switching formats was the best magic decision i ever made. Once u have the staple blue/artifact things, i think it ends up being cheaper in the long run cause screw the cash grab that is standard rotation. So after reading TMD randomly for the last decade, here i am. I plan on getting involved as much as i can in the community, cause lets face it, most everyone i've interacted with has been welcoming/helpful/understanding compared to the bunch of kids that terrorize standard. Watching VSL and random twitch streams i also feel like i'm really getting to know some of the important vintage people. The fact that i've msg'd a few of the guys on mtgo with questions and they actually answer, instead of poker pros for example, who are too "good" to respond, is just icing on the cake.
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I had been playing Magic for some time, but mostly standard and a little bit of extended. I played regularly with Rich Shay, but my only attempt at vintage had been a brief stint where I threw together a burn deck that got crushed by keeper. I attended the local Pro Tour to do side events and was wearing a T-shirt with the name of the part of Ireland that my mother is from. An Irish guy approached me to ask about the shirt, we spoke a bit and exchanged pleasantries and went our separate ways. I was surprised to later bump into him again at my university's cafeteria and approached him. It was a team Pro Tour and one of his teammates attended the school. This would turn out to be Jeff Anand, who had posted on previous versions of this board as Samite Healer. Jeff was a very dedicated vintage player and he made some compelling arguments for the virtues of vintage. Some of them hit home about Vintage cards being a better long term investment and not having to constantly rotate your cards like with standard. He had a substantial collection and was able to fill the gaps to get me within the proxy limit as I acquired cards and we split costs of traveling to tournaments.
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A lot of guys at the local shop in Grafton, WI (notables would be myself, Jamison Bryant, and Tommy Kolowith for you more-seasoned Vintage Players) would play 'type 1' back in 1998-2002ish. It was realisticalyl just our casual decks with Sol Rings, Force of Wills, and Duals since they were easy to obtain; we didn't have power or Legends/Antiquities cards. Eventually, Tommy and Jamison and I all started picking up Drains/Workshops etc, and then we found an event at Game Universe in Milwaukee. Jamison Top 8ed and I scrubbed, but I loved the format, and we played ever since.
Jamison and I eventually created Team ICBM while working at a Burger King (I was like 18 or something), which the joke was "I Can Beat Meandeck" but in reality stood for "I Come Bearing Mediocrity".
I quit ICBM after some drama surrounding the Sullivan Solution being leaked before the tournament TK Won with it, and then I joined GWS, eventually that team died, and I joined Meandeck... also quitting.
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Back in 1994 I played revised in my dorm room with my roommate and another 2 or 3 guys. One guy a few doors down had complete alpha, beta, antiquities and legends? sets with him. He worked at action hobby craft and they would get magic cards for counter top sales. A few cases were dropped by the delivery guy and were deemed 'not for sale' so he got them pretty cheap. He introduced us to competitive play. Which lasted a few months until I found other interests. Then at the tail end of college I sold my cards. Shortly after college, I got back into it playing casually and moved to Collegeville and started collecting again. Built my collection thru repacks and buying collections on ebay so I got a lot of old stuff back. A bunch of us would play casually with anything goes. Then 3 of us took a trip up to Waterbury in (I think 2001 or 2002?) for the Waterbury tournament and got crushed. We then went down to Richmond for an SCG event with over 100 players where I placed in top 16 for prizes with an Oath deck (modified meandeck oath using serum visions and sensei's diving top when nobody else was). After that I talked Mike Smith who owned CCG to start a T1 tournament which turned into the blue bell scene. Played until 2008 and found WoW thanks to a birthday gift from my wife. When I stopped playing last year I picked up hearthstone but found it very lacking in depth and went back to magic. I found an old from from CCG had opened a shop in Boyertown and when I went to the store I pushed him to start T1 tournaments which is the Boyertown Deal Me In Games tournaments now.
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I played Magic from 1995 till 2000 and then left the game. Came back to it during my cousin's bachelor party in 2011,for which some former players had bought some decks to play during the train ride...and I re-fell in love with the game.
Qualified for the Swiss championships at the last standard qualifier, playing infect and was definitively hooked. Fast forward to 2015 when one of my favorite opponent/sparring partner and travel companion put together a vintage deck (unpo standstill) so I started looking into Vintage.
Discovered mono-u Belcher and took the deck to the monthly Swiss Vintage League in Zurich. My friend won and I finished in top 4...bought his emerald mox and that's it :-).After getting my P9 last summer, Top 8ing BOM next step is Eternal week-end.
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I blame garbageaggro.
