Sorry, but I never saw this here
Thanks for the compliment, I do like to think I have a little skill, and I've been doing quite a bit recently over in the Deck forums (hence the reason I never thought to look here).
As for my story, I've played magic since about revised, then quit after homelands, thinking the game was dead. The local game store closed at about that time. I rejoined the game at about Urza's Legacy, after me and some classmates were musing about the older days, and one of us mentioned they saw a new game store in town. That store is still with us and remains the only game in town (and it's called the Only Game in Town too ironically enough). For a few months I was clueless, and played much in the old style, using the biggest creatures I could find. Had I rejoined with Urza's block gone, there would have been no problem, but I soon realized that my skills consisted of beating my opponent with the biggest creatures I could find. That wasn't good, so I started reconsidering the game.
MM came out and a lot of the dead serious tournament players started grumbling about how terrible and slow this set was, haveing been blinded by lightning fast Urza/Rath combo decks. I was still learning the new ropes, and as such came to love the new set and all the fun it had in store. I was still blinded in thinking that every deck must use masticore or it would lose.
NE came out, and I went to several local tournaments. It took me about a month, but I was finally struck with the revelation that the current T2 tournament scene was a bunch of no fun asses. If you go to MTGnews and check under the billion posts about Sivvi and Port being banned, then you will see my first rant. From there on, I started getting vocal in denouncing that which was killing magic (MASTICORE), and I became a rogue magic player. I have since never included Masticore, Rishadan Port, Grim Monolith, or any other godly powerful artifacts in any of my decks. PY was the final straw. People, this is the most fun set in a LONG while. And yet it has been verbally abused by combo deck players constantly near me, and I can't help but hate it.
Now, I've gone from being angry to being a crusader. If I go to a tournament, I find out what will be the dominant idiotic and mindlessly noninteractive combo/beatdown deck to beat, then I build a deck to smash it utterly. When bargain was huge, I built what I like to call Pyromancer Red, which was a massive collection of haste creatures and burn spells to waste bargain decks down to nothingness. When replenish was huge I built Nether control, maindecking 4 rapid decays and 4 carrion beetles, basically making them cry out in despair when they replenish nothing into play. Stompy running rampant? I built SBD (stupid blue deck), consisting of but one Palinchron to beat them with and maindecking almost 30 counters/bounces and card drawing spells. I just am doing my best to help out the poor, underappreciated Masquerade Cycle.
My deckbuilding skills are now quite good because I have spent so much time in the frying pan, trying to figure out just how best to focus a deck to do what its builder wants it to do, not what some dojo-player says it should. I developed a sense of analysis and focus by spending time analyzing a "Deck to Beat", finding out what they do and how, and figuring out how best to stop them from doing that. Anyone who wants to join my crusade has done so, just by joining the CPA, the anti-Dojo. I've seen some of Gizmo's posts, and I look forward to working with him on potential deck ideas. He is an excellent deckbuilder, and has most of the same ideas about deckbuilding as I do. Hopefully I can add in a new perspective, and we can get some deck to put Dojo players to shame.
I look forward to many great times with the CPA, and I hope everyone here enjoys my two cents as much as I enjoy theirs. I'll see everyone on the boards!
-Cateran Overlord, CPA Member for life
