Magic The Gathering 

One day, I don’t remember exactly when, I was shown these two cards.

In 2011, among the pile of vampires and creepy looking cards from the first Innestrad set, the Wormcoil Engine from the previous sets was the coolest thing I ever saw in the cards at the table. 

We set out to play a match or two and I lost because I didn’t have enough mana to cast most of my things and my opponent just went over the few blockers I had because the creatures he had all were ‘flying’. For a number of years after this, I though that flying was the most broken mechanic in Magic.

Fast-forward to 2014, where I was playing in a homebrew D&D campaign based on the Magic plane of Ravinica.  I got to look at some of the cards that my friends had and I was obsessed with the artwork on Door to Nothingness. Again, as a minimum wage part-time IT support at the time, most of my money went to my gas tank and not any interest in Magic. These cards stuck in my mind though. One was a massive metal worm like in Dune, the other was a card which you could win the game with and the flavor of the art was just too cool.

I then left for my masters degree in Germany in 2015, where all my friends were mostly based in the East Coast of the USA. Around the time that I finished writing my Masters Thesis in early 2018, a friend of mine mentioned they would be releasing MTG Arena and that we could play from a distance if I joined the beta. I was really interested in trying it out after all these years and I finally had some free time. I hopped on during Rivals of Ixalan, but I didn’t get immediately hooked. I mainly played hodgepodge of Golgari cards because that was what I had access to, most notably Wildgrowth Walker and Vraska, Relic Seeker. I played a little again during the Guilds of Ravnica and War of the Spark but due to work commitments dropped for a while.

Finally, when Magic Arena fully released in 2020, we all got locked into confinement and one of the many games I had on rotation was MTG Arena and I started to play much more. The first deck I started with was a mix of Gruul cards which I called “Hey, Hey, Hey”, which was 100% what I thought Krenko, Tin Street Kingpin would say. In the end, this was very much a pile of cards that I had pulled from packs and I liked. The goal was to ramp until the more powerful cards and just smash. Nothing really elegant but just something that was kind of fun to run. I also really liked Domri, Chaos Bringer and thought I would be Gruul for life.