How it all started

Why Play Magic? It is a very simple question, but is much more difficultly answered. Many of us Magic players found that one thing that kept us playing the game since we picked up our first cards. Many of our stories are very similar. Us and a friend pick up a few cards or decks, play for a few hours, and immediately fall in love with the simple mechanics and complex strategies. We then went out and bought a few more cards, added them to the decks and played more and more until we began making up our own decks and interactions between the cards.
My story is much the same as the “normal” story, but with a few twists. I started back in 7th edition with the CD game that came with a couple intro pack decks. I played the computer game for a while but quickly grew bored of the stacked decks and overall lack of originality in the deck. I was about nine years old at the time, so I asked my dad to play. He obliged and we played a few games, as I “taught” him the rules, some of which I had just made up as I went along. I’m not sure what sparked the next move, whether it was my father’s weariness of the game or he just couldn’t figure things out, but it ended with a trip to the local music and game store. I saw a large group of people sitting around tables in the back of the store and my dad walked me over to see what was going on. The block was Invasion and the store was having a draft. I saw all the people looking at the cards and picking the one out of the pack and I knew that’s what I wanted to do with the game. A nice guy came over and started talking to my dad about the store and the game and stuff, but I was enthralled with the draft going on. The guy was nice enough to help me out and teach me how to play past the basic idea that I had. From then on, every weekend I spent much of my time at that store, playing, buying, and drafting, anything with these little pieces of cardboard. One afternoon, my dad brought me to the store, but it was dark inside. All of the shelves and bookcases were gone. I was distraught. That store had been my Magic headquarters and now it was gone. Where was I going to find people to play against? The closing of that store led me to quit Magic for a very long period of time. Approximately six years I missed because of that store closing. Luckily for me, in late 2007, a few friends decided to bring their decks to school. I went home that night, dusted off the boxes of cards and began sorting through to find enough cards for a deck. It was a terrible deck, but I played it because I loved playing. I didn’t care if I won or lost, I just liked playing; winning was an afterthought. I am now playing regularly at tournaments and doing fairly decent. I owe much of the little success that I do have to my dad for buying me the CD and decks way back when.