MTG Nostalgia: My Very First Deck & My Dad’s Badass Collection

MTG today guys! So far you have heard me moaning about certain things ingrained in the game due to Wizards of the Coast being an evil corporate. However, I have been playing the game for donkeys years, and me having a personal/moral issue with the producer doesn’t necessarily mean all I have to say about the subject is negative. I started playing MTG with my dad when I was in school – it was before my Warhammer days so I couldn’t have been much older than 9 or so. I believe it was also around the time that Pokemon the Trading Card Game came out and became really popular, so one thing kinda escalated to the other. My dad had a lot of Alpha/Beta onward cards and I seem to recall this was triggered by some sort of starter pack being released either with a magazine, newspaper, something like that. We bought the stuff and I was taught to play. Then when I got the grasps of the game we made my very own first deck – great father and daughter bonding exercise, don’t skip this part of your parenting skills!

I had seen my mum and dad play MTG countless of times: dad used to play with his friends at the pub like once a week, and sometimes they played at home too. I remember my mum getting proper salty at my dad winning occasionally and how it was not fair. Mum and dad had cool kick ass decks and I wanted mine to be like theirs, but because back then they were pros and I wasn’t, I couldn’t do that. My parents had dual coloured decks – I should start with a cute, powerful mono deck. The staple decks for my parents were dad’s evil green-black and mum’s tenacious red-blue – which still exist today, they are like family relics! The red-blue deck featured some classic control-burn tactics that we all love:

-Plenty of counters: Power Sink is my fav.

-Cheap burn spells: Lightning Bolt, 1 mana, first turn 3 points of damage?! Hell yea!

-Elementals as the big creatures: full set of Fire and Air Elementals, with the old drawings which are just gorgeous.

-And then the wild cards: Clone – could be a game saver, could be a game winner, could be just staple.

Overall, an effective, quick-paced deck with some interesting features. Nice! But it had a great rival to go against. The green-black deck combined some odd but powerful things:

-Cheap elves for extra mana: staple Llanowar all the way!

-Unbalanced green creatures with odd abilities like “Flanking”: Centours of Jorael, Lethal Insect, Elf Explorer, cost-effective mana – may die, but will punch you hard and quick.

-Nasty black voodoo magic: a full set of Senguir Vampires, Unholy Strength, Dark Rituals and Diabolic Tutor, you can start crying, it’s fine.

–I mean, just pure evil man.

Seen those titanic decks battling each other, I did fear I may never be able to win. But the fact that dad was helping me make a beginners deck didn’t mean it was going to be a losers deck, and damn was it glorious! As the other 4 colours where in much demand and there was always the possibility of tweaking decks, white seemed like the natural choice. But more importantly, mono white was a powerful introductory level deck, not in a patronising way, it was a deck that made a statement. We focused on flyers and kill spells. Those were the days of spending the first couple of turns spawning pegasus and griffins with banding alongside my always handy Yotian Soldier: one of my most trusted cards. I know it is an artefact! It is probably because they don’t make them cool like Yotian Soldier anymore that I don’t use artefacts! But that was just the staple. That deck is full of gems:

-Full set of Serra Angels.

-x2 Wrath of God – best board wipe spell. Ever.

-Full set of Represalia – because I needed to be able to kill the Senguir and those Elementals!

-And the other 2 game changing artefacs: x2 Meekstone and Sol Ring – Yeah! You Heard Me.

And that is how after I stop falling for my dad’s trap of killing the creatures he wanted me to kill while with vamps and other evilness where still in hand, I eventually started winning. I remember that day I was clever (ish), waited for all the creatures to be on his side of the field, me with a Serra Angel in hand, next move board wipe, Serra Angel comes and wins the day with a bit of help of Spiritlink – yeah kids, the things you had to do back in the day to gain life!

And that is how it all begun. A few years later MTG became popular again amongst kids/teenagers in Spain so I started playing with others, and acquiring a couple new cards here and there, and we built new decks. We added to the collection the classic blue-green deck: bigish creatures, shadows and islandwalking, a few counters and booster spells. And then, the mean black-red with land destruction cards, infect creatures, little things spawning the whole time and odd abilities like dash, or shadow. Now, all these years have gone and I have my own decks and my own cards, which are great. But there is something special about going home and dusting out that amazing mono white which I will never be able to replicate 🙂