While I am on the subject of my obsessions, I would like to take the time to talk about a previous one that lasted me well over a decade. They call it cardboard crack.

I got introduced to it in my last year of grade school. I didn't really have the funds to pursue it then, neither did I have the connections for sourcing individual cards. Buying a pack was only for special occasions. The pack would be shared between me and my siblings, at first equally in groups of twenty then later by color.

I remember when I first saw people playing it, they seemed to be having so much fun. I felt sort of left out, and the cards had such unusual pictures. I was the one who prevailed on our parents to buy us the cards, it's funny since we didn't even know about preconstructed decks. We just assumed back then that each box was randomly put together.

My brother got the fundamentals of playing pretty quickly; I floundered quite a bit. I didn't really have a good grasp of building decks - I gravitated toward cramming together creatures and spells that seemed interesting to me and in my colors and adding enough lands to make it a deck. My brother went the creatureless route - focusing on black and red, and getting multiples of cards for more consistent drawing; I invariably would trek to a shop and buy cards that were in my budget, without a plan or a focus to what I wanted to do with them. I remember thinking for every card I bought back then that "This might be it." That this might be the card/pair of cards that would make my "deck." I'd range for shops to find; in high school it seemed like the initial craze for Magic the Gathering was dying down in my area. Back when we bought our first sixty 6th Edition cards most groceries had a small hole-in-the-wall selling; in high school the only shops would be inside malls. I had gotten a more substantial allowance and spent almost all of it on cards and comic books (the latter being a story for another time).

I only ever played at home - playing in school was out of the question as they had very strict policies. I didn't want to lose my "collection," which I kept in a narrow wood box that was originally for keeping teabags. In college, though, the perception of greater freedom caused me to go overboard. We had by then gotten an Internet connection, access to sites with information about the game enthralled me. I'm not proud of my conduct during this period. The game became the focus of my life, to the detriment of my academic work. I was so focused on trying to win, as within the circle I played with I had the biggest loss percentage. I just couldn't seem to get the game. I was dogged by the thought that one more card, one more idea, one more article read would somehow turn everything around.

I finished college, but my grades were disappointing. I found work at a call center; the pay was good, so I could still buy cards. But I had at that point no one to play with.

It felt at the time that I had nothing. Things have gotten better since then, I've gained some things to call my own, even nearly lost them again, but recovered and fought back. I managed to reinvent myself, but the regret is still there. Let's be clear that it wasn't the cards that were at fault; it was my own addictive personality that doomed me. If I had chosen not to play that game all those years ago, I would have found something else to waste myself on. I've distanced myself already; I don't play anymore, though I do occasionally visit my old haunts in the Web - those that are still up, anyway. Every once in a while, I still think - what if I paired this card interaction with this one? What if I bought this or that card? It's a small flash of competitiveness as my brother still plays to this day, just with our cousin - the both of them managed to avoid the pitfall. They play during the New Year, I just retire somewhere to sleep and ride out the fantasizing. I still have a deck, you see - all tricked out in fact, with nice sleeves. It's my final keepsake of that time in my life, the first deck that I had any success with, tweaked quite a bit to satisfy my delusions of Legacy grandeur.

For the interested, here is the list. It's crap, I know.

7 Mountain
6 Forest
4 Wooded Foothills
3 Taiga

4 Kird Ape
4 Basking Rootwalla
4 Wild Mongrel
4 Phantom Centaur
4 Arrogant Wurm

4 Lightning Bolt
4 Faithless Looting
4 Violent Eruption
4 Fireblast

3 Cursed Scroll
1 Umezawa's Jitte

I'd wanted to replace the Kird Ape copies with Goblin Guide, and the Phantom Centaur with Boggart Ram-Gang. Then I thought, this is never going to be Legacy-competitive, so I may as well consider it for what it is: a casual deck. And for a casual deck it's not that bad. I'll leave things at that; I don't want to be pulled back in.