then we found out there was a card called Cockatrice.

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Originally posted by MTDetermine:
Started in 1998. For a few months, I could not figure out why my friend tore the "awesome craw wurm" for fun. My friends are nice and one gave me a 60 card green common deck, with 4 craw wurm and 4 rootbreaker wurm, of course.

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__________________
"Her mind is an incredible mix of emotion and power, Even if i could grasp it, i couldn't hold it for long."

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Originally posted by mm1983:
My first real competitive decks for a casual environment was a Stasis deck with Time Elemental and other creatures that don't tap to attack and an Oath of Druids/Gaea's Blessing deck with Dragons but those decks weren't until 1997/1998. Back then nobody cared about net decking and having the best decks out there.

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I find MTG more fun back then in 1998-1999. There seem to be a greater variety of decks and more casual cards were used.

I first learned that original printings had black borders and were more desired than the white bordered reprints. Later when I saw my friends play, I asked them why they would play with white bordered lands?

They then explained that the white bordered lands they were playing with were dual lands.

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Originally posted by BoltBait:
I remember one...

I first learned that original printings had black borders and were more desired than the white bordered reprints. Later when I saw my friends play, I asked them why they would play with white bordered lands?

They then explained that the white bordered lands they were playing with were dual lands.

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Royal assassin was my first favorite creature, followed closely by hypnotic specter. I remember one day I was determined to pull a assassin or hyppie and I bought a pack of stronghold in hopes of getting one (I didn't let trifling details like how neither of those cards were printed in stronghold deter me) and all I pulled was a lousy mox diamond - I looked at that card (which was worth $25 at the time, the highest valued card amongst any set still being printed at the time) and thought it was total crap - basically I had to give up two cards for one and all it did was give one mana. What garbage.

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Originally posted by rockondon:
I remember everybody arguing about how much damage fireball did when divided among multiple targets.

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Originally posted by mjdanielsm:
I don't recall many house rules back then but I do remember some horrible trades like trading off my 2 lions eye diamond for some huge meat sacks like avatar of might, I do remember playing a mono green deck with low land count (16-18) and big power house creatures, it never did too well XD

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Originally posted by Jazaray:
Let's see. When we first started playing, we thought the more cards in your deck, the better. We played with three tier decks. As in we had to split our decks into three piles so they wouldn't fall over. I remember casting stream of life for 183, after I drain powered my opponent.

We also didn't understand the "tap" symbol. If it had a mana cost, and then the tap symbol, we thought you could pay that amount of mana, as many times as you wanted, and THEN tap it. I got braingeyered for over 200 cards (and I almost had enough to survive, and this was AFTER we cut our decks down, lol) because of a blue mana battery that my opponent had been tapping 20 or so mana into it a turn. Conservator was an awesome card too. "Ok, I pay 9 mana, tap and prevent 18 damage."

Ahhh the good ol' days.

Thanks,
Jazaray

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We also played with the super large decks that required 2-3 stacks. We also kept track of damage with beads as we didn't understand the healing phase as magic pamphlets were also not very good about describing the game mechanics and the Healing phase at end of turn. We thought you used healing salve if you had one, just like D&D.

Also when I first went out to play magic, the only packs I could find were antiquities and so I had to buy land to build a deck and antiquties packs were not creature friendly and pretty much sucked. Had to have some of my friends help me locate UL starter decks (aka tournament packs) and boosters. They were hard to find until I found a cache of 19 of them and bought them all.

My first deck's fatty was a single Derelor. I built my deck out of a few assorted cards and five boosters of Fallen Empires I got for >99 each on a trip to NYC in 1995.

edit: and oh, yeah, Shivan Dragons were expensive. Of course this was before I knew anything about pricing, so maybe I was the only person in the word who got his grandfather to pay $20 for a Shivan Dragon.

My buddy's each had decks based around Elder Dragons, Arcades, Nicol and Vaevictis were so bad*** to us. Oh naive youth, sometimes I miss you. :P

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