Old School Mtg

menagerie (noun)   a   : a place where animals are kept and trained especially for exhibition   b   : a collection of wild or foreign animals kept especially for exhibition      : a varied mixture Let's talk about the second Chaos Orb playtest card from this post . This is my current understanding of the history. Some of details could turn out to be a little off, and new information may be unearthed in the future to clear things up a bit more. There are some numbers here that I simply don't know for sure, and it can be hard to evaluate information even from reliable sources. Like how many playtesting iterations there were. The lead developer of the set suggested a while back that there were three or four iterations, but there seem to be (as far as I've found) up to seven different card designs from playtest decks for this set. Even trivia-guru Mark Rosewater (who worked on the set) has shared trivia on his podcast that I su...

A couple of people asked me to go into some details on the three cards I flashed in the previous post, so let's do it. These cards have a special place in my collection and carry some history. As Magic players, we all sit somewhere between "100% player" and "100% collector" on the proverbial Player/Collector spectrum. Sure, there are players who don't own any cards (or don't care about the few cards they do happen to own), prefers to proxy up the decks they play, and couldn't care less about the flavor, editions or conditions of cards they use. And sure, there are people with vast collections and sealed rarities they never intend to sell that don't know how to play the game. But for most of us, we land somewhere in between the end-points of the scale. I used to see myself as far more of a player than a collector. If we look at the spectrum as a 1-10 scale, with 1 being "100% player", I would probably have stated that I was a "3...

So here I am. Sitting by the computer late at night, sleep amiss, waiting for screams that may not come. Maybe she'll actually sleep this time. Maybe I should try to get some too. It's been five or six weeks since I last logged on to facebook, which is a simultaneously stressful and calming feeling. There was too much going on at work and home to enjoy the notifications, so I opted to cut it out for some days. The urge to return gradually just vanished. It was not really a conscious move or a statement of any kind, rather a realization that being continously connected took more energy than it gave. It might change in the future, but for now I find myself perfectly satisfied with e-mail and a phone number as the non-physical contact points. Anyway, sitting awake, looking through the binders. I like the binders and the cards they hold. Tangible stuff, building blocks that would eventually shape my spare time and friendships in ways I could never imagine when they were created...