Back when we were new

How to not play Magic:

Today might be different than what we normally do. This is how Lolzor and I got into Magic.

Okay so everyone and their mother's own Magic cards. I had played a little when I was like 11 or 12 years old, including at an FNM. It was a WUBRG-whatever-I-wanted deck. I remember the store owner giving me a bunch of shitty commons like Llanowar Elves to help me out. I was grateful. Even though I had played with my only friend who played Magic at the time, it wasn't a real experience for me because he ran like 6 lands in his deck and didn't know the basic rules.

I didn't actually start playing until bitllorente aka bitlo actually started playing again. It was more like "hey guys look what I found!" and me and Lolzor were like "oh I have some of those cards too! let's play!"

So we did awful, awful things when we started. For example, we thought regenerate worked the same way as Monster Reborn/Rise From the Grave. We thought that Penumbra Kavu/Wurm when it was counterspelled it still entered the battlefield so its shadow would still trigger. Counterspell was basically the most broken card because I had remembered "everything is a spell, except lands" as a rule from the FNM so many years ago. So basically counterspell stopped spells and was a Terminate.

The worst offender was Chlorophant. Who we actually read as "At the beginning of your upkeep you may pay {G}. If you do, add a +1/+1 counter to Chlorophant and repeat this process." 1-for-1s were a broken concept because you could eliminate the biggest threats while you army of 2/2s and 3/3s would build up. Every game ended the same way: either Lolzor won with his 6/6 trampler, or I drew some weird cards that functioned like Pacifism and pinged him to death over 20 turns.

I was astonished to find out my Hand of Death was strictly worse than Doom Blade. I was shocked that Lightning Bolt was strictly better than my Volcanic Hammer.

Despite our shitty cards, we didn't care very much until I found out my friend LightningCount actually played Magic. That's when I started playing more, and showing my other friend how to play, which as it turns out his roommate was an incredibly good Magic player who had already "gone infinite" on MTGO. I learned everything from him, and in turn, when Lolzor and I lived together, I passed all of my commons/uncommons from him and made bad decks so he would learn how to play.

Those were the days. And now we are rules advisors.