[Diary] Vintage from Scratch: Update #1

Heya,

So last week I began a diary declaring that I would attempt to begin a Vintage community in my small hometown in Kentucky where a new gaming store opened. This is my first update in that endeavor.

On TheManaDrain, Godder suggested that I participate in the weekly FNM’s. That was good advice, and I took it. But before that, I got a chance to go to the store early before all the school kids showed up. I brought my cube which has all kinds of Vintage cards like Ancestral Recall, Skull Clamp, Mental Misstep, RedBlasts, etc. I asked the owner if he could play since there were no customers in at the time, and he agreed to oblige.

We had a great time. The match took almost an hour. He almost poisoned me out with Rancor on a Vector Asp. It was pretty cool, but importantly we got to get to know each other. He’s had some personal tragedies in the recent past, and I have to say I greatly admire his courage to open a gaming store in a small town in this economy. I respect him a great deal for many more reasons I’ll not go into here. He told me a story that his first Magic pack was a pack of Alpha he won for some type of DnD tournament back in the day. I didn’t get out of him how much of his old collection he still had, but I imagine it’s some.

I also brought in some old roleplaying books, Yu-Gi-Oh cards, and legends from Chronicles to stock the store with some cheap Commander Generals. I donated them to the store for him to sell. He said, “I owe you a big one.” I said, “No.” And he replied, “Yes I do.” I smiled and said, “You’re right. You do. Keep this store open.” And with that, we shook hands.

The FNM rolled around. It was an M12 Draft. I’m not accustomed to draft. This would be only my third draft tournament ever, but it gave me a lot of time to get to know the people sitting around me. The guy across the table from me started Magic about the same time I did. We swapped old stories about Arena League, the miserable string of sets from The Dark to Fallen Empires to Chronicles to Ice Age to Homelands. I told him that I like to play Vintage, and he said he had lots of old cards, but no Power 9. I explained the idea of proxies to him. He seemed a little ambivalent. But I offered to bring some proxy decks some time if he would like to play. He said, “Sure!”

The tournament started and I ended up placing second out of 12 people. Not bad. My final opponent was a Legacy player to likes to travel to nearby PTQ’s and SCG Opens. He’s got a fairly large collection and an affinity for older cards too.

Thus, I think I made three pretty good contacts and got to interact with the owner in a one-on-one environment. Not bad for one week’s work. In the next update, I’ll talk about working on making up some updated proxy decks.

Peace,

-Troy