Another thing just came to mind... my sister. She asked me today if she could go through all my old cards and sort them and stuff. Of course, I asked why, and she said she wanted to take them and build random fun decks to play against her friends and stuff. I doubted her friends knew how to play, and was somewhat curious about the matter, but just let it slide. So she's now going through the giant stack of cards at which I used at some point... and it was kind of interesting. MTG is a fun game. It just cost way too much.

Wow. Memories.

I used to be an avid fan and player of the game Magic: The Gathering, made by Wizards of the Coast. So I was sitting here being bored and trying to get work done on my famous Economists project for Economics... and I think, hey, I used to read The Dojo a whole lot... so why not check it out again.

So I did. And I looked around a little. There's a whole lot of new cards since I stopped playing... I had some fond memories of going to tournaments after nights of 3- hours of sleep due to last minute tweaking and practicing with my decks... usually totally crazy and bogus and non-functional. My best performance at a tournament was my last. Maybe I was put off by the high price of playing the game... perhaps it was the people I had to deal with on a regular basis. Who knows. I enjoyed playing at tournaments... playing (and in some cases beating) legends of the Magic community... like the time I beat some guy who was rated somewhere in the top 1000 players... and apparently was in the circle of David Price (MTG legend... in a manner of speaking.) And there was that time I beat Michelle Bush, alleged creator of some deck that absolutely dominated the extended (a tournament format for the game) environment last year... and it was all great fun.

Of course, with the good comes the bad. The people who when they lost tried to pick fights, the greater-than-100 dollar sums of money put into keeping up with the environment on multiple occasions. Stuff like that.

So anyway, enough babbling. I was looking at the Dojo, and decided to take a look at the "Decks to Beat" section which apparently hasn't been updated since September, when the format I used to play was still the current one. I recognized the kinds of decks there. I have played most of them at some point... and then I noticed one that was particularly interesting to me. It was entitled "Chimera." This is a deck that I consider myself to have pioneered. A month before it hit the mainstream, I had been experimenting with it, and although I'm sure I'll get no credit in saying anything about it... it's a deck that I spent a lot of time working on, and figuring out. Of course, before I got it to a working version, I quit the game... but it gave me a great deal of joy to see that something I had come up with independently was being used by some pros.

Ok. Back to a biography of Thomas Malthus.