Friday, April 19, 2013

Memory Lane with Cards


So, a few days ago I decided that it was time to sell off my old Magic: The Gathering (a trading card game) cards to help come up with some extra money for bills.  What they have actually sold for does not even come close to buying me a tank of gas in this day and age, but there you go.  The initial cost of nerddom is high and the resale values suck.  While I am disappointed that all the money I put into this game during my high school years has turned out to be a poor monetary investment just over a decade later.  It is kind of like trying to decide between the used 1994 and a new 2013 Honda Civic.  The ’94 just does not stand a chance.  This does not mean that I did not enjoy the many, many games that I played with these same cards; it just means that unfortunately my treasure is pretty much considered junk these days.
                Despite the disappointment in knowing how much my cards are worth in this day and age, there has been a ray of sunshine.  The ray is that of memories of games played.  Through all the recollections I can only point out two games where I just happened to have the right hand at the right time to inflict maximum devastation upon my opponent(s).  Both of these memories bring a giant smile to my face.  Not because I won these games, I actually lost one and rather badly, but because the card combinations just worked perfectly, the way that I had always envisioned them working.
                Recollection number one:
                Back in high school, circa 1997-1998, my friends and I all gathered in the cafeteria in the mornings to hang out and play card games with Magic: The Gathering (MTG) being the preferred game.  I was enjoying a rousing, if not slow going, game with a friend on one particular morning.  He was playing what we at the time called a “Salad Shooter Deck.”  This deck contained mostly monsters that resembled large fungi and could create more minor fungi monsters with only a minimal amount of spell points being used.  The main fungi monsters all had attack and defensive values of two (2) or more.  The minor fungi monsters had a straight “1/1” value where the first number is for attack and the second is for defense.  After about twenty minutes had passed my friend announced that he was attacking me with two hundred and thirty-seven of the minor monsters.  My life count was nowhere near that high and even if I used my own monster cards I would still not have been able to stop the tidal wave of fungi coming at me.  I was doomed.  Everyone knew it.  Game over.  It was time to put the cards away, conceded defeat, and head to class.
Or was it?
                As my friend reached for his cards, I informed him that I needed just a moment longer before I surrendered/died.  Looking through the cards in my hand I found what I was looking for.  The card I held up was the game changer, so to speak.  I smiled, extended my hand and offered to accept his surrender.  I was flatly refused.  He thought, just like everyone else at the table, that I was screwed.  There was nothing that I could do to stop him. 
                That was when I played the card.  I spent one spell point and laid the card on the table in front of him.  As he read the text on the card explaining the effect his eyes began to widen in shock and horror. 
                “What card did he play” a friend who was standing there asked.
                Another friend picked up the card and read it out loud to the assembled group.
                “Sandstorm, deals one point of damage to all attacking creatures (monsters).”
                At this point laughter erupts all around me.  My friend had spent twenty minutes and almost countless spell points to build an army that I had successfully destroyed in thirty seconds at the cost of only one spell point.  But, it was not over.
                With my friend’s turn finished and time running out before first bell I quickly scanned what cards I had on the table and in my hand.  My monster cards now outnumbered his.  I attacked.  His monster defended against several of mine and died.  With all of his monsters engaged with several of mine we calculated how much damage he took to his personal life counter.  He only had five life points left.  Another quick scan of the cards brought me to the conclusion.  I spent one spell point to activate a card and then immediately spent another twenty to make it more powerful. 
                With his army annihilated and his life points down to five he suffered the indignity of being hit with a spell that dealt twenty damage to him directly.  His life count was now at negative fifteen, the day was mine, and I collected my cards from the table.  As I walked out of the cafeteria, feeling like General Meade must have after the Battle of Gettysburg, I noticed my friend walking down the same hallway to his class.  I quickened my pace to catch up with him and offered him one final parting shot.
                “Next time, just surrender.”
                And with that I turned into my class ready for a day of tax payer funded education.

                Fast forward about a decade.  Yes, it took me a full decade to pull another great move out of my collection of cards.  I was at game night at a friend’s apartment and we had already run a gamut of various card and board games.  Finally the five of us settled down to play MTG.  We were all laughing and having a good time taking pot shots here and there at each other and stalking smack.  Early in the game I had managed to get out one of my favorite cards, “Craw Giant.” 
I love this card.  It does have a high spell points cost, seven points to be exact, but that is because it is a BEAST of a card.  The text on the card says that the monster, with attack of 6 and defense of 4 (6/4), has both Trample and Rampage: 2. The trample effect means that any damage dealt to a monster that is over the target’s defense goes onto another target.  The Rampage: 2 effect gives a bonus of two to the attacking monster’s attack and defense scores, i.e. one blocking creature makes the Craw Giant an (8/6) and so on for each additional blocking monster. 
I immediately cast a spell called venom on my card thus ensuring that anything that blocked him died, as that is the purpose of the card.  After combat is resolved all blocking creatures that did not die from your monster’s attack still die.  This was to discourage my friends from attacking me before I got the third and final card into my hand and onto my monster.  This process to another few rounds of game play, but, finally I let out a loud “WOOT,” paid the spell cost and placed the third and final card on my monster: “Lure.”  Lure forced all creatures owned by a player to block my monster if I attacked that player. 
I quickly scanned the table for my target.  There he was, sitting to my left, one of my best friends, who was hiding behind a wall of his own monsters.  I put on my evil grin and in my best Emperor Palpatine voice said to my beefed up monster, “Wipe them out.  All of them.”
 With that I declared who I was attacking.  My friend groaned, he knew what was coming and he did not like it, at all.  All twelve of his monster cards were forced to block my one card.  When everything was finally tallied up my monster had gone from a nice (6/4) guy to a (30/28) god.  When compounded with the venom spell that killed anything that blocked him it was no contest.  The round was mine.  I had enough damage left to deal out when I was done with his blocking monsters that it removed him from the game.
My friends were impressed.  Hell, I was ecstatic.  I had built that deck of cards two years before and had played it countless times.  NEVER, in all those times had I managed to get all three cards out on the table, let alone in the combination that they were thrown into the deck for.  I was elated.  I was overjoyed.  I was a king.
It was at that moment another player asked if my turn was finished.  I said it was and he promptly cast a card that gave him control over my own monster with both effect cards still in place on it.  He then attacked me.
Needless to say, five minutes later my cards were put back in their box and I was outside smoking a cigarette reveling in my short lived triumph.  Yes, I lost the game, and horribly so, but I had finally managed to pull off a move that I had dreamed about for two years.

Now, fast forward a few years more and here I am.  I’m looking through these cards and remembering all the battles, all the games, the laughs, the jokes, and general good times.  Then, I remember how much the guy at the store told me they were worth now.  My heart sinks a little and my gut ties itself into a knot.  With one last look at the boxes that contain so much fun I pocket the cash and walk out the door.  You can never go home, but you can carry the memories with you for a lifetime.

4 comments:

  1. Excellent story, thanks very much for sharing a piece of your heart with us.

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  2. Some of those stories sound familiar. I never got very much into Magic, but I played it a bit back when. I always dreamed of crushing a salad-shooter with a 1-point Pestilence, but I never got the breaks. I did get Venom, Regeneration, and Lure all on the same creature a few times, but never anything with Rampage and Trample, so I could kill creatures all day, but didn't get to damage the player with it ever.

    M:tG did teach me one very important life lesson, though: Even if you don't particularly like the specific game very much, it can still be a blast to play with your friends. Often, it's not what you're doing, but who you're doing it with that matters most.

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  3. Huh... weird how it had me sign into Google, and then still says I'm unknown. This is Will.

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  4. Though you were going to sell them to me Great stories

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