DLBlog 1: An Intro with Too Much MtG

Okay! Let's try writing a blog post. Bear with me if it doesn't flow too well; this is the first time I've tried writing anything coherent outside of work emails since college.

I'll start off with my history with the gaming hobby. I started out as a casual Magic: the Gathering player sometime in 1995, when Fifth Edition was the latest and greatest. While wandering around during recess I found a stray Kjeldoran Dead half-buried in the dirt near some old metal picnic tables. I suppose some kids from an earlier recess were playing, declined to regenerate the poor skeleton, and it found its way into the dust, destined to hook another poor kid on the cardboard crack.

The next time I was at Toys"R"Us I picked up a Portal starter set and played some games here and there with a few friends. That hobby waxed and waned over time until I had graduated college 15 years later and found myself in Kansas to start my career. I didn't know anyone in the area and after a few weeks I saw a hobby shop just down the road had this thing called Friday Night Magic. I still had my random assortment of cards from over the years so I threw some together and made he journey up to the shop. I quickly found out that none of my stuff was legal for the standard format, so I just creepily hovered around and watched other people play for a bit before heading out.

The next week was a prerelease event for Rise of the Eldrazi, I joined in, and proceeded to get sucked into the Standard format. Every week or so I would find myself ordering the cards for an entirely new jank deck (Polymorph, Death's Shadow, Kiln Fiend, junk like that). I eventually progressed to modified net decks and was a fairly competent player (Level 0 judge) and started placing pretty high up in the rankings. I caught Matt's eye after thoroughly trouncing him with my Unburial Rites deck and we quickly became friends after that.

Standard became too much of an expense compared to the time I played each week, so I drifted into the realm of EDH and that's where I remain to this day. I have a handful of EDH decks and I'm gradually trading off the miscellaneous card for pimped out cards for those decks.

That was a longer MTG story than I had planned for, so I'll just skim over the intro to the more interesting parts of the hobby. The local game store also had a board game night which Matt talked me into going to. Combine that with my Lovecraft kick at the time and I immediately picked up Arkham Horror and its billion expansions. And logically that lead to this:

I'll go ahead and blame my intro into the miniatures hobby on Matt, too. After board games led to X-Wing miniatures my collecting habits led to owning multiples of the Millennium Falcon and Slave 1. I couldn't have identical looking unique ships, so I commissioned Matt to give them a custom paint job for me.

After he saw that I was interested in some Malifaux minis the shop had recently gotten in he convinced me to take up a paintbrush and try my hand at one of the finer sides of the hobby. Here's the result of day 1 of  "Lessons with Matt":

Which again, of course, led to this:

Anyway, mini painting is now the primary focus of my hobby time and I expect it to be the main focus of my blog content; detailing new techniques I'm trying out, new minis I've bought and assembled, stuff like that. There might also be some board game happenings and occasional MtG stuff as well.

I'll cut this off here and jump into my experiences at GenCon next time to complements Matt's mini-series. Thanks for reading!