(no subject)

[stormdog]

I was at the Gen Con where Magic: The Gathering premiered. I thought it was one of the coolest ideas ever, and I bought a ton of the cards. I had four or five decks worth of the alpha printing cards, including some of the rarest and most valuable cards ever printed. Black Lotus, Mox stones, you name it, I had it. I don't have any of them anymore; I sold, traded and even lost most of them. My Black Lotus got me 20 bucks another Gen Con, before values went beserk.

Soon after Magic, there were a ton of copycat games, jumping on the trend as always happens when something becomes wildly successful. I gave a lot of those a try too, though I never got into them as much as I did with Magic. And of course, working and attending Gen Con for as long as I did, I got a lot of free promo things too.

So, I have a few collectible card game cards. By a few, I mean a lot. And by a lot I mean...well, let me see.

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There are a few I only have one card from. They must have been promos or something. I've never played any of them.

• Battletech
  
• Legend of the Five Rings
  
• Redemption (The Christian CCG. The card is called Obedience of Noah.)
  
• Shadowfist
  
• Echelons of Fury (Some kind of military simulation CCG?)
  
• C-23 (Which doesn't have it's own page anywhere, but was apparently, a "hot new game" in 1998....)
  

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Then there are five or six that I only have maybe a single deck (60 cards or so) of. In order of the amount of them I have:

• On the Edge, released in 1994 right after Magic. I have, like fifteen cards. I don't know where they came from and have never played.
  
• Star Trek Customizable Card Game. I only have about 30 cards, which is odd because I used to have rather more. I played this a few times, and it was an ok game, though not really worth writing home about.
  
• Monty Python and the Holy Grail, which was produced by Kenzer and Company, who I used to work for before I moved to Michigan. I can't find a good page about the game. I have about 40 cards, but I honestly don't remember ever playing it.
  
• Net Runner, a game which apparently was rather underrated, though I've never actually played. In fact, I remember picking the 55 cards I own up off the floor after someone dumped a bunch of them from one of the mid level balconies of the interior courtyard in the Hyatt in downtown Milwaukee during Gen Con one year.
  
• Wyvern, a game about dragons fighting over gold. I think I remember some buzz about this one when it came out (in 1994!) about 'ultra-rare' cards in the set that were rarer than other CCGs' rare cards. I have one full deck, in a box. About 60 cards I guess. I've never played.
  
• I have 66 cards (a number like that must be a conspiracy!) of Illuminati: New World Order. This is a collectible card game based on a similar non collectible card game that I like a lot. I think the collectible version was ok, but I never got a chance to play much, and it's been a long time. I think I prefer the non CCG version, truth be told.
  
• I have about a deck's worth of Towers in Time, widely considered by folks over at Board Game Geeks to be one of the worst CCGs ever created. I think I played this once, or tried to; we coudln't figure it out and gave up. I do like the art though; I want to describe Randal Spangler's contributions to it as a kind of pastoral impressionist surrealism.
  
• Spellfire. Ah, Spellfire. One year at Gen Con I got an entire couple of boxes of starter decks for free for working at the Games Library. I tried this game a few times and it was just awful. Every bit of art was stolen from one D&D book or supplement or another (this was published by TSR) and the play was just not interesting at all. Supposedly if you know the rules well and you have the later expansions, it's a good game. But I have no interest in finding out. I have about eighty or so cards, including a Gen Con promo card called "The Wardmeister Strategy" that has a picture of Jim Ward in SCAdian garb on it. Nifty. At one point, I probably had nearly a thousand of these, but I gave them all to my godfather for his daughter to play with many years ago. She liked sorting them or something.
  
• The Wheel of Time. I have two decks of this. Ahh, how I hoped this game would be somehow comparable to the awesomeness of the books. Regretfully, I honestly don't think I've ever played it. It requires special dice and stuff too, odd for a CCG. Anyone want to try it some time?
  

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And then there are games that I have a lot of. It's funny; for the most part, having a lot of something doesn't correspond to me having played a lot of it, or even liked it all that much. I actually have no idea how I ended up with a lot of these cards.

• Like The Star Wars Customizable Card Game. I have about five hundred cards from this game. I really don't remember buying any of them, and I don't think I've ever played. Maybe somebody gave me theirs?
  
• I have an even larger, and given the quality of the game, more shameful, number of cards for Highlander: The Card Game. I'd hazard a guess that there's about a thousand of these filling up the old single row box that I first bought to put my Magic cards in (they outgrew it and moved to a double row box). I played this a few times with people; it was a pretty lackluster and entirely unremarkable game. I don't know that I'd ever be really excited about playing it again. This game was so cheesy that they used a card to hock Highlander goods; the 'Quality Blade' card says right on it that you can send it in for a ten percent discount on a replica Highlander katana. I don't know how I got all these cards; I bought some, but I don't think it was that many. Maybe people gave me some?
  

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Then there are the two games that I actually liked quite a lot, bought quite a lot of, and played whenever I could find people who were interested.

• First, there's Jyhad, now known as Vampire: The Eternal Struggle. This was a really great game, build from the ground up for multi-player. I actually liked it more than Magic for a while, though I realize now that they're really apples and oranges. I'd jump at the chance to play this again with somebody. I'm guessing I have about a thousand cards, including what I think are three ready-to-play decks that I built way back when. They're filling up the two-row box that my Magic: The Gathering collection lived in until it outgrew that one too.
  
  
• Then, there's the grand-daddy of them all, Magic: The Gathering. As I said, I was at Gen Con in 1993 when it came out, and I spent every bit of money I could get on it. I played solidly up through every expansion until Ice Age, when I finally lost interest. I knew people who would buy entire boxes of booster packs when new expansions came out, but I never had money to. Finally, when I did, the expansions were things like The Dark and Fallen Empires which basically had no extraordinary cards and were worth squat in resale, unlike the expansions before them which are worth pretty good money as sets. I did, though, at one point, have complete sets of Antiquities, The Dark, Fallen Empires, and nearly all of Legends. Trying to collect entire sets of things appealed deeply to the bit of OCD collectorism I have. Even then, I imagined myself as some kind of preserver of knowledge through the ages; the wizard I imagined my character being would strive to keep all the ancient knowledge alive.
  
  I sold them all, years ago, for much less then they're worth now. But that's in the past, and I'm not anxious about it anymore. Most of what I have is probably common and not particularly valuable, though I haven't looked through it in years. I have...oh, I don't know. Must be three or four thousand cards. They live a four row box that I long ago lost the lid too, which is too bad, because at one point I was asking everyone I played against so sign the lid of my box. Oh well.
  

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I'm not quite sure what I'm going to do with the Magic cards. I think I may keep Jyhad. The rest, I don't think I have any use for or interest in. If you'd like any of them, please let me know and they're yours.

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And I'll end this with something that made me laugh and laugh when I came upon them in my collection. Back in the day, when I played Magic all the time and had more cards than I knew what to do with, I figured out something to do with them.





These are 'unique' cards made by cutting bits out of multiple cards and layering them together with glue.

Regrettably, these are too thick to shuffle, so I've never used them in a game. I'd love to see the look on someone's face when I played my 'Power Sprites' though. They're 'interrupt fairies; which either means you can play them at any point, even on your opponents turn, or that they fly around your face and shout "Hey, Listen!" over and over. I'm not sure which.....