I started playing Magic: The Gathering in 1995 when Ice Age was the most recent set. I saw a box of cards at a shop with really cool art that resembled a dragon and decided to ask my grandparents to buy it for me. It was a Magic: The Gathering Ice Age starter deck. Back in those days you could buy starter decks with a random assortment of cards from all 5 colors and some basic lands. I opened the cards, checked out how cool the art was and flung them around on my table for a while. I discovered that the kid across the street from me played and invited him over to teach me. We played and played and played, ALL THE TIME. What I didn’t know when I was first starting was that this kid was a MASSIVE cheater. He would slowly shuffle with the text of the cards facing him so he could stack the cards he wanted towards the top. He played white in all his decks so he could play the “Circle of Protection” cards. When I would attack him, he would active the circles and claim that it prevented ALL damage to him for the entire turn from whatever color the circle stated. Turns out that wasn’t how those cards worked at all. I lost almost every game but that didn’t stop me. In fact, it drove me to find ways to beat him. I would run cards to counter his cheating strategy and gradually I started winning nearly every game. Once he started losing most of the games, he decided to stop playing against me, so I had nobody to play against. We didn’t have internet play at that time. In fact, I didn’t have the internet at all. It was shortly after this I discovered the glory that is the local game store (LGS). I started playing there and learned just how much my previous opponent cheated as I began to understand how the game actually worked and what the cards were supposed to do. I played casually and gradually got in to playing for more stakes. I would call myself casually competitive at that time. I subscribed to magazines like The Duelist and Inquest, the paper equivalent of web sites like MTGGoldfish. Although I made a number of top 8s in local Pro Tour Qualifiers I never made it to the Pro Tour, and it wasn’t until years later when playing other games that I understood why. I had no idea how to be a competitive player. I played decks that were known in the community to be good, and that’s what won me games. I didn’t understand matchups very well and I didn’t understand the intricacies of strategies that real competitive players had a grasp on. Eventually I had an amazing collection of cards with a full set of all the dual lands (x4) and everything a good player would need to play multiple formats. All of that went out the window when I started a family. I had a crappy job and needed to provide for my family. One way I could do that was to sell of my MTG collection. So that’s what I did sometime around 2002.
Fast forward to 2015. I learned about a game called Hearthstone. It was right around the release of The Grand Tournament when I downloaded the client to my phone. I got that same buzz I got from playing Magic, but I could do it at home, on my couch, against players everywhere! After playing for a little while I started to get that itch for organized play, so I decided to do some research. I discovered something called Team Hearth League. It’s an organization that allows players to but together teams and compete over the course of a season. There are no prizes, but the competition is real and can get quite intense. I reached out to the organizers and found out they were bringing on a new format for their next season called. The format was Last Hero Standing, and the league was called Selfless Hero League (SHL). I opted to be a team captain for the season and put together a team of 3 including myself. I recruited players Direstbear and Veganzombie to play in the league alongside myself. We ended up winning that first season and I got really into the playing in THL, to the point where I was creating content, starting with weekly matchup graphics and eventually to hosting a Twitch show called “After the Salt Settles” or ATSS. After playing for many seasons and producing written and visual content I landed on a new upcoming team called “Amber Flight Gaming” led by Dragonrider (@Dawniedk on twitter). At some point I heard that Magic was releasing a new client called Magic: The Gathering Arena. I managed to get into the closed beta and played a ton of the game alongside Hearthstone. Ultimately, I stuck with Hearthstone as they’ve had continual economy improvement and it could be played on mobile. I had trouble growing a decent collection as I played primarily on mobile, so it was tough to find time to get on my PC and grind Arena.
Fast forward again to the present. I’ve found the Hearthstone meta stale since the release of the most recent mini set “Onyxia’s Lair” and have found respite in playing MTG Arena on mobile. There are many issues with the way the client works, and the economy is still garbage, but the meta diversity in Historic has felt incredible and the game itself is better than it has ever been. The options that you have in the client, such as multiple ways to draft, in client events that are always on, and a continuous flow of individual card rewards makes the game feel exciting. With the recent announcement that the Pro Tour is returning and in person events will be a big part of that makes me want to transition fully from Hearthstone back to MTG. I will be going to my first prerelease in ages at the end of April to play some New Streets of Capena and will be trying my hand at the upcoming Historic Arena Open.
With everything going on in the world of MTG and the upcoming release of Voyage to the Sunken City in Hearthstone I will have a lot to evaluate and some decisions to make. I have had no passion for making Hearthstone content recently and MTG is rekindling those flames. If I have the time to play both I absolutely will, but other than clearing weekly rewards I haven’t touched Hearthstone in over a month. The transition was natural and the passion I have for card games in general is as strong as ever. I’m excited to see where this journey will take me, and I can’t wait to see you all in upcoming events.