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Magic
This Space |
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Baneful's Column How and
Why I Started Playing Earlier I wrote an article explaining why I was (and you
are) never too old or too cool to keep playing Yu-Gi-Oh! As
a corollary then, I guess you're never too young or too
nerdy to start playing either (if that makes any sense
whatsoever). If YGO is (or was) special to you, you're sure to
remember how you started: your roots. I was 11, a total nerd
and socially awkward. I'm 22 now (twice as old) and see how
much I've changed. But I never kept up with the latest fads
or trends back then. Some of my friends in school had shown
me their cards. I was really impressed at the time, even if
I have the misfortune of now knowing I was so impressed by
effect-less monsters with weak stats. I saw a couple of
others with them but never thought too much of it.
Eventually, I would come to playing the game and loving it.
Why? Probably because it was ubiquitous and I wasn't hard to
influence at the time, but years later I found myself loving
it (it was hard to stop). When my best friend came over to play (at that age, it
was "play" – not hang out), he showed me his cards. Oh, him
too? At that point, the next day, I decided to go to the
supermarket with my allowance (YGO was so mainstream at the
time, they sold it well outside of comic book stores) and
spend $11 on Starter Deck Yugi. Tough decision at the time,
but for that age it was a big one. Yugi was the good guy and
Kaiba was the anti-hero. I realized that having Dark
Magician (2500-ATK) as my boss monster, I was at a
disadvantage to the Blue-Eyes White Dragon (3000-ATK), but I
figured the other cards in the Yugi deck would be good
enough to make up the difference. I surprised him next week
by dueling him, but I lost horribly. I was watching the
anime to "practice my dueling skills" so I could finally
learn to beat him! I bought 3 packs of Pharoah's Servant to
help boost up my deck. I got a super rare Fairy Meteor Crush
out of it, and not much else. Needless to say, I got my butt
kicked again. The tides soon turned as I got lot of packs on my
birthday and I really buffed up my deck. And I also figured
out one more thing. We were playing incorrectly. For Level 5
and higher monsters we had to offer sacrifices, and we
didn't. He had lots of Level 8 monsters in his deck and I
only had the Dark Magician and a few others. So, I helped
fixed his deck to a more stable beatdown with a leaner deck
count (from 50-something to 40). I surpassed my "mentor"
easily at that point, but a month after Labyrinth of
Nightmare came out in 2003, he quit playing after losing
interest. We haven't spoke (no bad blood) in a long long
while, but I was the one who turned out getting sucked in
where all my friends who strongly insisted I played did not.
The irony. In the Legacy of Darkness (the next set) , I met a new
friend who re-sparked my interest but after he moved, I quit
and sold most of my collection (aside from like 50 cards I
stumbled upon in my garage later on). I moved to a new town
(by the time Dark Crisis came out) and there happened to be
3 neighbors my age who happened to play, so I started up all
over again and rebuilt my collection. That's where memories,
a lot of good and some quite bad were made. I remembered
having cards stolen, being ripped off in trades (trading my
Black Luster Soldier – Envoy for a bunch of commons) and
losing my entire deck once. I built a deck from scratch
after losing it, and kept using it for a few months. One of
the happiest days of my life was months later when I found
the original deck I had lost in my pant's pocket (of pants
that were thankfully not put in the laundry wash). The
original deck was stall-burn and the new one was aggro. I
had the luxury of mixing the best assets of both combined,
but I digress. I would play it obsessively until 2008 (for about 4
years), moving from comic book store to comic book store.
It's a tough business and many of them don't stay open for a
long time. Even if I didn't think much of them at the time,
I still miss all of the old ones I went to that went out of
business. Cherish them; take pictures of them. You'll miss
them. But anyway, in 2008, I was age 16 and got a
summer-long job in construction. When I started in July, I
was working to save enough money to get several boxes of
Light of Destruction so I could have all of those holo-foil
Lightsworns, feel like a king with an expensive collection
and win lots of games. But, by the end of that job in early
September, I had a different change of plans. I quit after
being jaded, as well as caring too much what people thought
of me. I did come back in 2011, but today I don't play
nearly as often as I used to. Today, I just have fun writing
about it. And there it is, full circle. Contact:
banefulscolumn@gmail.com
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