Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - #742: Brian Weissman

Episode Date: May 21, 2020

In this podcast, I talk to Brian Weissman, an old-school pro player. He and I talk about the early days of the game as well as how he created the first Magic deck to ever get a name.

I'm not pulling out of my driveway. We all know what that means. It's time for the Drive to Work Coronavirus Edition. So as I've been doing, I've been interviewing people. So I went way back to get somebody from Early Magic. So I want you guys to introduce you to Brian Weissman. Hey Mark. Hey guys. How are you all doing? So I thought it'd be fun today to talk a little bit about early magic, since you and I both go way back. So here's the question I've been asking all my guests, is how did you get into magic? How did I get into magic? All right, very simple answer. In January, I believe, I can

actually trace my magic origins down to a single day, because it correlated to a friend of mine's birthday. It was January 14th, 1994. I was attending a friend's birthday party. We had a bunch of activities planned during the day. And one of my friends bought two unlimited starter decks for my friend for his birthday. I think he was turning 21. And they opened up the starter decks and the friend that brought the starter decks as a gift actually brought some of his own cards. So they kind up the starter decks and the friend that brought the starter decks as a gift actually brought some of his own cards. So they kind of puzzled through the rules for about 15, 20 minutes. And then they played a group game on the floor while I kind of watched from the

sidelines. And I thought it would only, they told me it only take 15 or 20 minutes, half an hour went by, then an hour, then two hours. And I'm busy sort of tapping my foot and saying, guys, when are we going to go and do, you know birthday activities before I had no knew it an entire half a day had gone by they weren't anywhere close to finishing and I decided that maybe I should give the game a try as well so I went down and I played my first game of magic on my friend's literal kitchen table the birthday boy's kitchen table won it with a flying crawlworm and uh was hooked ever since in the uh the local game store which is one of the few places pretty much on the west coast of california as far as i knew that actually still had cards because cards were incredibly scarce back in january of 1994

they just had unlimited edition for some reason i went over there and i bought two starter decks for myself opened them up brought them back to uc UC Santa Cruz where I was living, and got started. Introduced it to a friend of mine who was an avid Street Fighter 2 competitor. So real quick, let me just, for the people that might not know Magic of 1994, I just want to set the scene a little bit. So Magic comes out in August of 1993. They print Alpha. And what they thought was going to be enough for a six-month supply, they sell out of it in a week or so.

They make Beta. No, really what they thought would be a six-month supply, they sell out of that in a week. And then in December of that year is when Unlimited comes out, or starts coming out. And then it sells into early 1994, which is when you got in. At the time,

whenever Magic product would come out, it would just evaporate almost overnight. And you really, in the early days, if you wanted to buy Magic product, you had to know when it was coming out and you had to be camped out at the store the day they got it.

Yes. Okay, so you lived in San Francisco at the time, correct? Actually, I was going to UC Santa Cruz. Okay. I'm originally from Palo Alto, California, so sort of midway between San Francisco and Santa Cruz. But I was actually in my sophomore year of college at Santa Cruz. Okay. So one of the things I want to talk about today a little bit is, so Brian obviously is one of the old school players, and we'll get to one of his major claims to fame in a second. But one of the things I want to talk about today is that the nature of what magic was in the

early days of magic was a very different thing and one of the biggest changes to me was i lived down in la at the time los angeles you lived a little more north um and the metagames of where we were were just radically different because there was no i mean the internet existed on some loose sense but not people weren't sharing deck tech or anything yet that wasn't going on yet yeah it's it's almost impossible i think for someone anyone who's come along and started playing magic in the last 15 years to have any conception of what the game was like and not just because of card scarcity as you pointed out which was i think the sort of over arching factor that everybody who was playing the game and collecting it had to contend with but obviously also the free flow of information there was no modern internet there was

a semblance of internet at a thing called the usenet yeah these very convoluted news groups you basically had to know i don't know what was it wrecked up games dot deckmaster dot trading cards dot marketplace or something like that if you're interested in it was like a bulletin board i mean you could people could post something and then you could there could be threads but it was very and right you had to know where to look you had to go and find it totally totally inaccessible to the average person and as a result of that not only was there there was no free flow of information about deck tech there was there was no free flow of information even really about the rules or the restricted list none of that stuff it was all kind of just rumor there were rumors would sort of

percolate through the community that voices on high had ordained that one particular card was restricted or banned you'd go to a gaming place and people would have their own idea based on their own personal predilections about the cards that they liked and didn't like about what was banned and restricted. And you kind of just had to take their word for it because there was no official list. There was no way to know that. In the early days, Wizards of the Coast's original policy for a couple of years actually was they wanted to share no information about the cards because they wanted the audience to experience it for themselves.

So in the early days, they didn't share deck lists. They didn't tell you what rarities of cards were they didn't even put on a deck list like you want to know what was in a set go talk to your friends and look around but conversely the mystery that surrounded the release of new sets was so profound as a result of that right i remember when um i i missed the introduction of Arabian Nights by, I think, about maybe a couple weeks or a month. It was in stores for sale. No beta, but Unlimited and Arabian Nights were the two boosters you could buy when I first started to play. Right.

Arabian Nights came out in December in a few places and mostly in January of 94. Yeah. So it must have just been released. Although, of course, due to scarcity, there nothing available yeah at the store that i played at um but on subsequent releases certainly antiquities and legends again because wizards wasn't releasing anything related to rarity at all everyone had to just sort of speculate what was rare there was no way to really know that and the packs they they made that further complicated that by making Antiquities packs only, what, eight cards too? Yeah, yeah. No idea about commonality.

No idea what anything should be worth in trade. There's just no way to even know at all what your – the scarcity of anything, relatively speaking. And then, of course, there was the other things where Legends came out and some of the boxes were just missing cards. You could get entire – We're right. The uncommon – actually, I talked about this with Matt, I think, is that the uncommons, either you were an A box or a B box, and half the

uncommons were in one box, and half the uncommons were in a different box, and they didn't overlap. Yeah, and one of the boxes had Mana Drain, the other one didn't. So we were utterly convinced that Mana Drain, for example, was a rare card. It had to be, because nobody got any at one store down in downtown Santa Cruz where they were

rationing Legends packs to two per person. People lined up down the block, around the block, waited for three or four hours to buy two booster packs of Legends. So the day that Legends came out, do you know how much I bought? I would love to know. Four boxes.

Oh, you... What happened was I had a friend, I mean, there's a game store in Westwood, which is where UCLA is, and he just went all in on booster boxes. And so that was my store, and he

bought a lot. So much so that on the Usenet, it's a post from me saying, hey, do you want Legend boxes? We got some, and I gave his information. When you said he went all in, how many did he buy? Like 400 or something.

400? Yes. Who had that kind of resources in 1994? He dedicated them. I mean, he did it. He went all in. So,

luckily for him, he sold them all. Yeah, it's pretty amazing. But anyway, okay, so part of what I want to get to is I want to build kind of your initial claim to fame, which is back in the day, there was no such thing as deck tech, right? No one shared deck lists.

So I want to talk a little bit about the deck. All right. So share with the audience what that is. Some of them might know what it is, but some might not. All right. Well, it actually relates a little bit.

I mentioned that when I, the first thing I did when I, after buying my first few starter decks was go back to Santa Cruz and introduce the game to a really good friend of mine

who was a fellow Street Fighter 2 competitor of mine, a guy named Matt Wallace. And Matt's really just a brilliant guy, very gaming oriented. And the first really just brilliant guy, very gaming oriented. And the first thing I did was show him the game and said, hey, this game's amazing. Let's

play some games. You're going to love it. And let's sort of put our heads together and figure out how to get good at it. And so we spent the next couple of weeks just going over everything. Matt had more resources than me. More importantly, he had a car, which allowed us to travel around the Santa Cruz area. And like you mentioned before, whenever cards would show up for sale, resources and me more importantly he had a car which allowed us to travel around um around the Santa Cruz area and like you mentioned before whenever cards would show up for sale people would descend like vultures they'd find out within a day maybe if you got lucky they'd be completely exhausted so we were able to go around and find little pockets of product here and there uh and get enough cards so that we could start actually deck building and so we went through a

million different iterations of all trying out all sorts of different ideas over the next two or three months. First, we obviously had the introductory period where we were trying to actually figure out how to play the game in the first place, which took some time, figuring out the rules, talking to other people, kind of getting a semblance of how the rules worked, and then gradually moving on to actual constructed deck strategies. And it was around the time of antiquities, actually, when we started to build decks that felt more cohesive.

I built this gigantic deck that had a million Urza lands in it because I reasoned that because they were lands, they shouldn't be restricted to a four-of rule. And I remember going through these metal contortions, like, why would they make these lands that are clearly designed to put as many of them as possible into a deck if they're meant to be restricted, that makes no sense. So eventually my deck was this bloated 300 card monstrosity with,

I don't know, 28 Urza's towers and so on in it. Meanwhile, Matt had built this blue deck that his, his theme of his deck was basically just, I'm going to put every card that draws cards into one deck and see how it goes. And we would play these insane monolithic games. We also played, we had decided early on that 20 life was too little. deck and see how it goes. And we would play these insane monolithic games. We also played, we had decided early on that 20 life was too little, so we were playing with 40 life, which completely skewed our entire understanding of the game's balance and made all the sort of fast things that you can do in Magic somewhat obsolete. So we played these epic...

Ah, that explains so much, Brian! Yes, it does actually. Seriously, the decision to play 40 Life completely informed all of my deck construction designs for the next five years or so. And Matt's blue deck was incredibly strong, and we noticed it consistently game after game after game. We would get into a place where he was just drawing tons of cards every turn. We didn't really understand the full impact of what the value of a card really was at that time, but we knew something very important, very palpable, and obviously conducive to winning was going on. And so after Matt built his blue deck, we tried a bunch of different decks. We built the permission deck. We built the direct damage deck. We built the land destruction deck. We built the

protection deck. We were trying out all these sort of different ideas that were focused around one particular theme. And then we touched on the card Mind Twist, which at the time, this was pre-summer 1994, I would say it was probably May. Mind Twist was unrestricted at the time. You could play with four copies of it in your deck. And on top of that, crazily, the card Library of Alexandria. I would say it's probably the third most insane land ever printed behind Tolarian Academy and probably Bazaar of Baghdad. But I would say Library of Alexandria, overall the third most powerful card ever printed. For people who don't know what the card does,

immediately off the top of their head, it's a land that taps for one generic mana, but if you have exactly seven cards in your hand, you can tap it to draw a card. And as an unrestricted card, and the fact that you start with seven cards in your hand and back in that format, the mulligan rule is different. Basically, you play a Library of Alexandria on turn one, tap it, draw a card. Next turn, you play a Mox or something. The following turn, you play another library. Now you draw two cards

a turn. So we had a deck that had four copies of Mind Twist, four Libraries of Alexandria, four Mana Vaults as well, mock set which was restricted black lotus and it didn't really matter after that and we built this deck started playing it against everything that we had designed up to that point and it just annihilated everything that we had and lacking a real way to easily describe it we thought of calling it the mind twist deck because that was primarily what it did but it also went with library of alexandria, too, so we couldn't call it the Library of Alexandria Mind Twist deck, and we eventually settled on, let's just call it The Deck. That just seems like the perfect name for it. This thing beats everything. So be aware, I want to make sure the audience understands,

the idea of naming a deck was not a thing, really, at the time. People tend to just, right, they pick the card that mattered the most and that's my stasis deck or whatever yeah no i i agree with you or it'd be built around like a pet card and later on people would build there would be uh decks would generally be associated with the name of a person that became sort of the standard nomenclature was that a deck would be like the sly deck for example was named after apparently paul sly and there was the handelman deck there was the masonette deck these decks was named after apparently Paul Sly. And there was the Handelman Deck. There was the Masonette Deck. These decks were named after their designers rather than having just a sort of intimidating non-pronoun type name.

Although I guess the deck did become a pronoun eventually. But a tournament came up maybe a month after we had sort of built this original design. And it was a tournament called Manifest in San Francisco. Oh, I've heard of Manifest. Yeah, you probably went there. I went to a couple of Manifests, yes. It wouldn't surprise me if you were actually at this tournament. This was 1994, I think.

I would say it was around a little bit before the summertime. I would say May. Oh, so this might have been where I met richard garfield for the first time really at manifest and i met him at manifest for the first time 94 you think is this a 94 95 must have been 94 though because my puzzles came out in yeah it was 94 because my puzzles had just started coming out well anyway um going into manifest matt and i knew that we wanted to go in it we wanted to attend the tournament to sort of represent our brain trust and I knew that we wanted to go in it. We wanted to attend the tournament to sort of represent our brain trust. And we knew that we had this deck that was just absolutely unbeatable. The problem was, is that between Matt and me, we only had, I think, five copies of Library of

Alexandria, which is obviously a nice problem to have in modern context. And we had, I think we had plenty of mind twists, but the point was we didn't have enough cards to assemble two versions of the deck. And so we rolled a 20-sided die to determine who would go, and Matt won the die roll. So he went to manifest with our modern version of the deck, which still obviously needed tuning, but its fundamental core was so degenerate and ridiculous that it was pretty much untouchable.

And he cruised through the entire tournament, and actually the guy that he played in the finals of the event, I learned many, many years later when I heard this story anecdotally told to me from the opposite end of the table. None other than Andrew Finch. Andrew Finch. So Andrew Finch ran the DCI for a while, for those that may not know that name. Yeah, I mean, he was the guy that would call the drafts and stuff

in the early days of the pro tour. He was the guy with the microphones. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, he was the tournament director. Andrew, they would call the drafts and stuff in the early days of the pro tour. He's the guy with the microphones. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, he was the tournament director. Andrew Finch and Matt played in the finals of the event. And Andrew Finch was playing a really streamlined Wicked Land Destruction deck. And Matt somehow convinced Andrew,

and this was back before the play or draw rule was in effect. You both played and drew. And Matt convinced Andrew to let him go first. And Matt mind-twisted Andrew for five on turn one of game one and for seven on turn one of game three, after Andrew beat him in the middle game and won the event. And that sort of catapulted this design into the public consciousness. Although it wasn't until it wasn't until the release of the dark, a couple of weeks after the release of the dark,

when I won a big event called DundraCon. And there were a couple of Wizards employees who actually attended that that interviewed me after I won that event. When I think the name The Deck really stuck and began to kind of propagate across the Usenet. So here's, I'll tell you my story of sort of interacting with the deck for the first time. So I lived in Los Angeles at the time, and there was a Los Angeles magic community. And it's like Henry Stern and Frank Gilson and Mario Rubina and anyway, people that would go on to... Les Douglas. Yeah, yeah, Les Douglas. So anyway, there was a big tournament being held up in, I think, San Francisco.

And so we all drove up. We drove up in like two or three cars to go play in this tournament. And before we left, Mario or somebody said to me, he goes, bring all your moats. They'll make crazy trades for moats. We had no idea what you guys were doing with the moats, but they, you know,

cause LA was very, very aggro, you know, like back in the day that a lot of the decks were, were very sort of aggressive and fast and control really hadn't taken off yet in, in Los Angeles. So like the idea of moats meaning something is just that that's what it was.

Bring your moats. They trade really well. Yeah, that's hilarious. I remember playing against, I think I actually, I certainly met that contingent of Los Angeles players when they came up for a different event, this crazy sealed event. The best sealed deck tournament I've ever played in in my life run by this crazy guy named Anton, where I could go into the details of it it's not terribly important I'll tell you another time but um but I ran into Les

Douglas and Brian Pugnier who were sitting around kind of looking very sour and unhappy because they had believed that they had come up to attend a sanctioned event but because it was Anton's crazy madhouse sealed event it wasn't actually sanctioned so they were looking for things to do and when I played against Les he was playing what I believe I know that aggro was very popular right that was sort of mario's thing apparently the other side of the metagame back then was a deck involving uh unrestricted balance balance was unrestricted yeah yeah and so they were running jade statue and misha's factories their ways to win yeah and naturally if your ways to win are factory and statue then moat is the worst

card you could ever have so moat had no value in that metagame at all right and probably related to why they said you should go up north everyone plays with moat it's worth 20 times as much up there yeah that makes perfect sense so yeah it is uh one thing that's really interesting to me looking back because one of the things i like to think of is that this podcast gets to do some magic history, is there's so many things that sort of, like just the idea

of the metagame and like all this shared, like you can go on right now and you can find infinite decks and people telling you

how to play those decks and all sorts of deck techs and back in the day, like you just heard whisper, like I remember the first time I in the day, like, you just heard whisper, like, like, I remember the first time I saw the deck, like, if someone, like, oh, I have a copy of the deck

my friend showed me or whatever, you know, it was like two-thirds of the thing. It didn't even have all the cards. Yeah, but it's guessing what it is, right? Yeah, we had heard some of it, so. But it's really interesting because early on, the deck really had this legend of being this, like, famous deck, but the deck list wasn't out there. So you had heard like whispers of it.

It was very, a different time. Yeah, well, we were certainly, we had an incentive to do that, of course, mainly because at the time, this is, this is another thing that I think it's very hard for people to relate to. But Richard's original vision of playing magic of course was playing for ante ante was written into into the rules relate to out to ante right even in Arabian nights there are anti-cards yeah when was the last time anti-cards were printed was it are they up all the way through homelands I think has the last anti-card yeah so ante was a theme in the game, right? And clearly it was intended.

And obviously Ante's place, if you ever play with it, getting back to Anton's tournament, we actually played for Ante in that event, which is kind of cool, like actual permanent Ante. Yeah. Revolutionary. But the original vision of the game was for that you have a small pocket of players,

you play sealed deck, you build your constructed deck, you play for Ante. If there's a black lotus, it kind of passes around between the players. It doesn't cause problems, you know, know there's scarcity and we were looking for a way to kind of preserve that obviously we understood that ante didn't make a great deal of sense once you're actually building your deck particularly with a restricted list too and you yeah you know anyone who knows the deck knows that it didn't have a lot of win conditions that ran

that was one of the things that really differentiated it from a lot of decks at the time was that it only really ran two to three ways to win usually in the form of a pair of serra angels and brain geyser and then later mirror universe yeah but if you're playing for ante and you ante up one of your win conditions right or you ante your ancestral recall it dramatically changes how your deck runs so we determined okay well we can't play for ante but we kind of want to preserve the spirit of this idea and so we would actually uh everybody carried around an anti binder that they would before you played a game against somebody you would actually go and pick a card from their binder from their anti binder and they would pick one from yours and you would that would

essentially that would be the ante the stakes that the match was played on so it was that was something that was um it was just part of sort of the original aesthetic that I don't think a lot of modern players would ever understand that we were actually playing for stakes back then, too. Yeah. OK, so I want to. OK, so let's get to probably the other thing you are famous for is playing on the Pro Tour. So how did you first learn about the Pro Tour? on the Pro Tour. So how did you first learn about the Pro Tour? I learned about the Pro Tour actually right after I had just taken a hiatus from college. I was going to UC Santa Cruz when the game came out and Magic completely interrupted it. I just wanted to say one other thing. The reason why I was mentioning playing for

Antti actually, and this related to the publishing of Decklist, is that if your livelihood is sort of based around how well you play a game of magic then then having your deck list publicly shared sort of weakens your ability to uh to defeat others if you make some changes and stuff or if you do innovative things it can affect your ability to win anti-games which can ultimately affect the bottom line so that was i think part of the reason why a lot of people were very secretive about the uh their deck list back in the day. I just wanted to add that as an addendum to what I was saying before. But anyway, yeah, Pro Tour.

So I had just gotten through about a seventh or eighth month hiatus that I had taken to play, quote unquote, professional magic that started, I think, around, I think it was early 1995 I was going to Santa Cruz at the time in my beginning of my junior year there but found that playing magic for probably 10 to 12 hours a day and thinking about it for the remaining 12 hours a day was not conducive to college education so I took some time off lived in a an apartment in I think it was in Cupertino. And I played basically every day for again, 10 to 12 hours. And then after the store closed, we'd go to Denny's and play until late at night. Magic was entirely my life and was for like about seven or eight months straight. And then my, with pressure from my, my dad and my grandfather decided that I needed to go back to school and I didn't really want I needed to go back to school.

And I didn't really want to go to Santa Cruz anymore. So I went down to UC Santa Barbara, started up school there again. And literally within, I don't know, like a week after I started school there, they announced the inaugural Pro Tour in New York City. Okay. And I was, I mean, this was like the ultimate event, right? This is the ultimate opportunity to sort of put all of these, well, at that point, I guess, this was like the ultimate event, right? This is the, this is the ultimate opportunity to sort of put all of these. Well, at that point, I guess two years of work that I had invested in learning to play magic

really, really well to the, to the true test and, and for actual real monetary reward. Yeah. So I was super excited about it. The problem was, is that I had absolutely no resources at the time. I had no ability to actually go out to New York to play. And my parents were unable to subsidize this mad endeavor. Yeah. So instead of doing that, I helped people prepare. And in fact, the Necropotence deck that Graham Totomer used to win juniors was a deck that I had helped playtest and co-develop in Santa Barbara. I certainly won't take credit for the design. The deck that he ultimately played was his own design.

But I was helping to playtest Necro decks in Santa Barbara. Graham was from Santa Barbara. And I remember reading about it and being so excited about it, and I resolved, because once I found out that the Pro Tourer, the second stop was going to be in Long Beach, that I absolutely had to qualify for that and play in it. So that was the first Pro Tourer that I actually played, and I didn't get to play in the inaugural one. But you played on the Queen Mary which was where the... Yes and my very first match on the Queen Mary was against Bertrand Lestray, the French player that you had written about in the very first whisper I'd ever heard of Mark Rosewater's existence. The I guess prosaic retelling of the match between Zach Dolan and Bertrand Lestray at 1994 World Championships.

And lo and behold, my first round opponent in my very first Pro Tour, which was the craziest format that I think ever existed on the Pro Tour, except for maybe the Mirage pre-release at Pro Tour Georgia. What was the format of... What was that? What was the format of uh what was that what was the format of uh los

angeles los angeles was um fourth edition homelands booster draft yes yes not rochester not we did rochester draft it was booster draft with two sets that were probably just about the closest to most discordant power level that you could ever find. You had fourth edition, which contains like absolutely insane stuff, including ridiculous creatures, cards like Mind Twist and Balance, Swords to Plowshares, Fireball and Disintegrate as commons,

Pestilence as commons. These completely ludicrous cards juxtaposed with homelands were like a 1-1 flyer for two manas at Powerhouse. That was the format that we drafted on the Queen Mary. Right. This was, so in the early days of the Pro Tour, each Pro Tour was a single format. Later on, they would be like constructed and limited, but it was just either, we alternated.

It was a constructed format, next Pro Tour was a limited Pro Tour, then the constructed Pro Tour. So, New York, the first Pro Tour that Brian had missed was a constructed pro tour. So this was a very forced limited pro tour. Yep, and it was the Wild West. Not only that too, but every match was three games.

Draws were worth two points instead of one. You weren't allowed to intentionally draw, however, but you had to play every match three games, regardless of whether or not you won the first two games and so tiebreakers going tiebreakers for the cut of day one were based on games one rather than matches i mean obviously there's somewhat correlated but you could go you could go undefeated and get a lot of lost games and be in a different position from other people who had also gone undefeated, but had lost fewer actual total games. And yeah, I mean, obviously,

a lot of history has been told about that format. It's quite hilarious. So here, I don't know if you know this or not. So that was the very first Limited we had done, Limited Pro Tour. And at the time, we had been pushing limited play. And so in America, we were doing a lot of limited play. But the European office didn't like it and refused to run limited play. And so in America, we were doing a lot of limited play. But the European office didn't like it and refused to run limited tournaments.

So what happened was none of the European players had any practice with limited. They just never played it. And so in the top 64, how many Europeans made day two? Because it cut to 64. How many made day two?

I'm going to guess zero. One. I don't even remember who it was. It was one European, two Japanese, and 61 Americans. 61 North Americans. They were Canadians, but 61 North Americans. Working as intended, clearly.

That's hilarious. I didn't realize that. I know that I beat Bertrand quite easily. He seemed like he had not done his preparation. He was very bitter. Yeah, I mean, it's funny because at the time, it just wasn't something they did in Europe. So they just had no familiarity with drafting, right? Yeah.

Well, how could they be expected to understand that? Oh, no, no, no. Drafting's hard to do if you've never done it before. Yeah, particularly in that format. Okay, so you play allies. So what was your first top eight? How many top eights did you have? Two. lot so what was your first topic how many top eights did you have two two what was your first top eight my first top eight came at um it was at pro tour well i

guess it was pro tour columbus the thing is it's a little bit a little bit funny because it was held it was a pro tour that was held simultaneously with u.s national yes columbus ohio i actually road tripped out there with two friends of mine. We drove all the way from the Bay Area all the way out to Columbus, Ohio. And I played a mostly black splash white Necropotence-based deck. This was an Ice Age Alliances constructed format where the best card was Thawing Glaciers. And Force of Will was in the format. where the best card was, uh, thawing glaciers and, um,

force of will was in the format and, uh, mana bases were hilarious to say the least. This is the format, the tournament that Ule Rade won with this famous red, green spider deck. And, and what, what was the format for Columbus?

Columbus was, uh, U.S. Nationals was type two. Yeah. U.S. Nationals was standard. And then Columbus was like ice age

ice age alliances constructed ice age alliance is great alliances have been released quite quite recently i think within just a few weeks before the events we didn't have a lot of time to practice with it and uh we hadn't we certainly had not made the determination we hadn't realized how good thawing glaciers was i have no the irony too is that there are two other people who played with me on my team yeah we were called team amnesia one of them was john immerdino another big player from way back in the day who you might want to talk to if you can track him down yeah um but john played uh he and i played basically identical black white necrodex and matt place was the third team member of team amnesia as we were called and matt was the only person who decided to put Thawing Glaciers into his deck.

And ironically, we teased him about this for years afterward, Matt did not make day two. And John and I both made the top eight. And then, of course, everyone was in an uproar about how insane Thawing Glaciers was. And it became kind of the defining card in the format. I don't know if it ever got restricted or not. But that's the year Matt made the national team, right? It is, because Matt went on and played Turbo Stasis. Right, Turbo Stasis.

No, he didn't play Turbo Stasis. He played... He did play Turbo Stasis. Did he play Turbo Stasis? Yeah, yeah. So real quickly for those historians out there, on the national side of things, there was a breakout deck at that event called Turbo Stasis

that I'm almost positive Matt played. I think you're right, yes. In retrospect, I think he had played Green White up to that point, but he did learn about the Turbo Stasis deck. And Matt would go on to make the national team and they would win. Well, Matt did make the top eight on this side. Oh, the other weird thing

about this event was, because they were held together, we did like top four and top four or something i was gonna get to that okay go ahead when was your first top eight yes i i'm still a little salty about this whatever 25 years later because um well i guess it was 24 years later yes the first top eight that i make is the only top eight in pro tour history that doesn't have a top eight playoff. Yeah. Ridiculous.

I was, I think in, I believe I was in fifth place after the Swiss on day two of the pro tour. I was in fifth place and they cut to top four. Right, because we had to play both the US Nationals and the pro tour on the same day. So we couldn't do top eight. So we did top four for each. Utterly ridiculous.

However, the only silver lining to this, of course, is that I played all of the matches, all the permutations that existed among the decks from the top eight just to see, just to find out. I think I probably played every deck, every deck that was in the top eight against my own deck a fifth times at least. There was no way I could have won that event, objectively.

Ulay rod's deck crushes my deck yeah utterly provided that he draws mana of course right but uh but my deck has no chance against the spider there's no way i could have won i feel like i i had reasonable chances against the other decks the other three decks in the top four okay so um i'm almost to work here so i i want to wrap up because you have one more pro tour so tell me about your second the top eight where you get to play in the top eight. Yes, the top eight. Okay, so the other one was Mirage Visions Rochester Draft,

one of, I think, the last tournaments. Where was it? Do you want to explain what it is? Oh, Rochester Draft? Real quickly. People do not know what that is. Rochester Draft is you open up a booster pack, you lay out all 15 cards, and then if you start from player one to player eight,

one takes a card, two takes a card, all the way to eight. Then eight takes a second card, and then seven, six, five, four, three, two. So, but it's all open. Everything, everybody gets to see what everybody drafts. Yes. So there's crazy politics. It's pandemonium, honestly, particularly because the drafts are always held at whatever,

eight in the morning, and people have been been up people have been up drafting and playing and unable to sleep until 4 30 so you have people falling asleep in the middle of the event when it's their turn to pick and so on and and having to just pick a random card at the table and there's crazy politicking going on and all this interesting signaling out of me i think it's a fascinating format it'd be neat to see it revived at some point although we we early on wizards thought that that was going to be the draft format and that booster was like just a backup yeah no it definitely switched the other way it's it's its own animal and i've done it a few times since yeah it's a fun format but it's very intense because you have to track so much information

yes so this event was um mirage visions rochester draft and i had prepared i think more for that event than i did for just about anything else and while most of the top players had concluded that uh super aggro decks were the best usually because flanking had just been released in the mirage set and flanking really pushed aggressive decks forward particularly in limited formats because you could just get past all the big blockers that usually stop the two twos. And so because everybody was chasing after all the aggressive flankers, my team, Team Amnesia, developed a three-color draft strategy that was based around getting all the leftovers. And we found that we could build these, and banding was also around back then. Our deck took advantage of banding, which was still being printed.

Mirage Visions and Weatherlight has amazing Bending cards in it. That's the last block that had Bending in it. Yeah, well, it went out with a bang because we definitely utilized Bending to the fullest. So this blue-white-green strategy that we employed in pretty much every round utilized Bending, big green fatties to stick the white banners to,

and then flyers to win just through evasion or as good blockers. And yeah, the strategy performed incredibly well. John Emerdino, who drafted the same strategy as me, also made top eight in the same event. So how'd you end up doing? Well, I went all the way to, i don't think i went i don't remember if i went undefeated i think i went undefeated day one and um even played the last round instead of drawing when i could have drawn just to go 6-0 i'm not sure why i think i didn't

understand the math or something um but i wound up playing and having everybody walk up to me at the end and saying dude why did you play the last round you didn't need to right that was pretty baller i said I don't know. It just seemed like my deck was good. And then did very, very well on day two. Drafted on table number one at the end. And had these crazy matches, including a match against the infamous Mike Long. In the first round of the final table.

That includes some stories that I would be happy to relate maybe in another podcast. But people have always asked me what it was like to play against Mike Long and I have a an anecdotal story of what it was like to play against him in his prime from that match that uh I still tell to this day honestly it's just an incredible match so after I beat Mike Long I don't remember who I played in round two but then I had the most intense match that I've ever played in my life against Igor Freeman, playing for top eight with just this unbelievable, every single turn, just had the amount of thought that went into every single turn and how the game was sort of hanging on this knife's edge, knowing that he had a Kervix torch in his hand

and knowing that I had exactly two turns left to kill him, figuring out exactly how to do it and top decking the exact right card on the last turn which was a nyaro bee sting my bane my bane and you know the green direct damage two damage burn spell yeah i know i mean you have an iconic card in mirage right maro itself yeah i do that's that so i'm sure it's very near and dear to you but anyway so i top deck on your bee sting to make the top eight uh on the final day, we did Rochester draft again in front of the cameras so that all the commentators could, of course, scrutinize and criticize every single person's pick.

And I strayed away from my game plan. I got lulled away by a volcanic dragon early on when I should have taken a ray of command. And that came back to haunt me. I wound up basically with a kind of clunky three-color monstrosity. And I played against Tomi Hovi, the first two-time Pro Tour winner, the great Finnish player in the first round in the quarterfinals. And I was playing blue, and Tomi Hovi had three river boas in his deck. And they were impossible for me to deal with.

And I lost very quickly in two games. So that was the last top eight I made. I think I made top 16 once. I was definitely in contention for top eight in a bunch of other events. At least three other events I was in top eight contention up until the very end and fell a little bit short. the team pro tour at Pro Tour 9-11, the one at Madison Square Garden the weekend before the September 11th attacks, which is the only crazy story in and of itself. Unfortunately, we're out of time because I've made it to

my den. I want to thank you for joining me, Brian. Of course, Mark. I'd love to come on again later on. When I make it to my den, we know what that means. This is the end of my drive to work. Instead of talking magic, it's time for me to be making magic. So Brian, thank you so much for being here, and

it was a blast. Alright, thanks for inviting me, Mark. It was a real pleasure. Thank you. Bye-bye.