I've been playing Magic for about 3 years now; at first it was all casual play. We met to play one on one or 4 player games. Exactly one year ago, I played my first DCI-tournament, a Mercadian Masques Sealed. Although I had never played limited before, I managed to go 5-1 and got 4. (Limited is still my favorite format)
2 Months later, on December I finally got my internet-access and traded a bit in a German forum. At the very beginning of the year 2000 I coincidently found MOTL on yahoo and registered on January 13.
Since that point of time, I did a lot of trades and got cards I hadn't even dreamed of before knowing about MOTL. I watched how the league slowly grew from 4,000 to more than 10,000 members.

About 4 months ago I changed my behaviour: At first I was mere a consumer that did nothing but trading. But since June I made suggestions, helped people with their decks etc. because I had realized how much I owe MOTL and wanted to pay back a bit.
That is also one of the reasons why I decided to write columns (the other cause was that I wanted to increase the quality of my English).
I was very happy when my fourth article made it to the front page and got even happier when tedman chose me as a columnist.

But now things have changed; I'm still having fun writing articles, but I haven't been trading a lot these days. Whenever I posted an h/w list I got quite a few replies, but after some time, the topic eventually disappeared, because there were so many people having the same cards as I do.
I didn't want to up my list every day, though. I use to do it only twice per topic at most.
I don't now where it comes from, but at the moment I dislike trading here, maybe because everything is so crowded… (Perhaps I should suggest dividing the h/w into 2 forums, one for America and one for the rest of the World, possibly even a special one for Europe…)

I was in a humor like this when I got an email; usually I would simply delete emails like this because it was kind of spam. It was about a new magic board and it was written in very bad English. I decided to visit the side, though. And I liked it immediately although it was very simple.
It is similar to MOTL, but has only about 40 members at the moment, because it is rather unknown.

As the founder of this page isn't really good at English, I helped him and changed the descriptions of the different forums etc. for him.
Therefore I became moderator and am now looking forward to watch the side grow.

If you are also interested in having a look at this nice little trading page, you can click on this link:
http://pub28.ezboard.com/bmagicboard89428
or
http://go.to/magicboard (a short sponsor message will appear)

I'm not quite sure, whether I can get back there what I'm looking for or not (the joy to trade),
But we will see…

If you have any questions or suggestions, post them,
thanks for your time,

Christoph

MOTL Columnist

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Posted by Christoph

The trader in Germany with the most refs

MOTL columnist

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"Cardboard crack keeps bringing us back!" -Warlord X

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Posted by Christoph

The trader in Germany with the most refs

MOTL columnist

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Magic1264@hotmail.com

Quote of the Week:

While there, I noticed that A LOT of those members are members of MOTL as well. Now I can understand using another site to broaden your trading horizons, but when your still trading with basically the same people, I don't quite see the point.

But to each their own and if this brings back the joy of trading which we have had once before, then all the power to ya!