...having a 81/82 Frozen Shade. The Unlimited version of Frozen Shade didn't say 'B: +1/+1 until end of turn', it just said 'B: +1/+1'. We didn't know the bonus went away.
...trading off this funny-looking black-bordered Shivan Dragon (that would be Beta) for four Antiquities commons, because it was the cool new set and I didn't have any money to buy packs.
...opening no more than three packs of Legends because it was undershipped and I could only open what the people who pre-ordered didn't want.
...asking my mom for a box of The Dark when it first came out, for my birthday.
...buying packs of Mirage for $2.00 and packs of Fallen Empires for 75 cents from the bookstore next door when I worked in the nearby mall.
...ordering a Dark-edition Inferno to complete my Dark set, then buying a pack on a lark, opening it up, and getting an Inferno...
...working at no less than three different stores that sold Magic cards at different points in time, including right now...
...going to my first tournament with a 200 card deck because I simply didn't know better...
...opening packs of Unlimited and Antiquities, but missing Arabian Nights by one week...
...selling out of Magic once, and forever regretting it, because I basically had to rebuild my collection from scratch (I'll never sell out again)...
...seeing an Alliances Balduvian Horde in one of the local card store's card binder for $40, looking in the latest Scrye, and muttering "$10 more than high Scrye? No way!"...
...my first theme deck, the Rampaging Kobold Hordes of Doom...
...selling a Black Lotus for $200 online, and considering myself to have gotten a pretty good deal...
...the first time I actually won a tournament with my Kortari deck, full of En-Kors and Soltaris...
...hearing a rumor that Bad Moons would be taken out from Unlimited to Revised, buying one, and using it ever since...
...swearing never to spend more than $10 on one piece of cardboard, a rule to which I've adhered for 5 years...
...a friend of mine giving his entire Magic collection to me, which included a very large amount of old Arabian Nights and Unlimited cards...
...my first deck, a white/green monstrosity that was so good that I actually retired and disassembled it...
...a time when combo decks simply didn't exist, aside from Lotus/Channel/Fireball, and that got banned pretty fast...
...opening a pack of Magic, getting a Mox Emerald, wondering why they made such crappy rares, and putting it with the other one I already had...
...a 24-person game I played way back in the day when Ice Age had just come out, that lasted for four and a half hours...
...my very first trade binder, a gutted AD&D Monster Manual that I put card sleeve pages into, the same one I use to this day...
...hating foils for three full months before finally accepting their existence...
...thinking that Shadow was the worst mechanic WotC could have possibly made, that it was incredibly broken, and refusing to use it for upwards of two months before finally realizing that I could use it, or lose to it...
...winning a foil Balduvian Horde when I won a contest on magiccampus.com about who could write the best article teaching a newbie how to play Magic, and my subsequent acceptance as a staff writer...
...posting vigorously on the mtgnews.com message boards before coming here...
...seeing a Kezzerdrix, grinning and thinking 'Rabid bunnies...must have!' and starting my collection (currently at 71 and counting!)...
...starting up a collection of Knights of all colors and rarities, discovering that green was the only color with no Knights, and reaching the 1000 mark on my Knight collection...
...making a Knight deck out of that collection that did some serious damage...
...and finally, writing this big friggin' post about the whole topic.
Excelsior!
