Magic the Gathering: My

Story
by Dylan Zamani
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Before Middle School it was easy to make friends. There weren't things
in the way of you becoming friends because everyone liked the same
things Because there was very few things to like. During this time everyone
I knew only liked two things: Video Games, and Spongebob Squarepants.
Then came Middle School. People began developing their own personal
likings to different things. Today finding friends is hard with all the things that
have come along such as the Internet, different styles of clothes, card
games, video games, smartphones or even music. Each of these splits into
smaller categories. Before you could just make friends based on who like
video game, but now there there are sub groups in the Video game friend
group like FPS (First Person Shooter), TPS (Third Person Shooter), MMO
(Massively Multiplayer Online), MOBA (Multiplayer Online Battle Arena), RPG
(Role Playing Game), Etc (Etcetera). In smartphones there's really only
Iphones and Androids. and card games can be put into two categories
gambling and Trading Card Games. There are many trading card games,
including Yu-Gi-Oh, Pokmon, and the game I want to focus on: Magic The
Gathering which is where I now lie in the friends group.
The point of magic is to damage your opponent(s) until their life goes
from 20 to 0 using creatures and spells.
In Magic The Gathering there is usually two players but the game can
be played by any amount of people at the same time. The players take turns
playing different types of cards that are divided by 5 Colors(Soon to be 6
because Wizards of The Coast the creators of Magic are adding another
color). These colors are White or Plains, Green or Forest, Red or Mountain,
Black or Swamp, and Blue or Island. Most decks take 2 colors to create all the
colors have strengths and weaknesses like red usually has creatures that
have higher attacks than other cards but have a lower defence and Blue is a
good defence color so if I made a deck that had Red and Blue then I would
use Red to attack and use Blue to block incoming attacks but some people

still use decks using only one color or decks using all colors. Cards after that
are divided further as Creatures, Lands, Sorceries, Enchantments, Instants,
Artifacts, and Planeswalkers. In order to play any card you must have
Mana. The only way to get Mana is by playing a Land cards. There is a land
for each color and when it is Tapped(meaning that it has been used for this
turn so it is turned sideways, at the beginning of your next turn it Untaps to
show it is ready to use for this turn) it adds one Mana of the corresponding
color to your Mana Pool. The Mana Pool is an intangible part of Magic were
unused mana is stored.

The card on the left has a cost of 10 mana but it can only
be payed with 2 of each color; this is shown in the top right
of the card with 2 of each symbol of the colors

The card to the left of this,cost 2 Mana but of any color

because of the 2 in the top right of the card

There is a Type for each Creature too, the type is shown

in the bar in the middle of the card, in the middle of
Bloodlord of Vaasgoth it says Creature-Vampire Warrior
This bar shows what type of card Bloodlord of Vaasgoth is
because he is a vampire. I use him in my vampire deck
there is also a little symbol to the right of CreatureVampire Warrior it says M12. What that means is that
this card is from the Magic 2012 set and because that
symbol is red it shows he is a Mythic Rare. The highest
rarity there are 4 rarities Common shown as black,

Uncommon shown as silver, Rare shown as gold, and Mythic Rare

shown as red.
Below the bar it shows his abilities one of his abilities is Flying. What
this means if I was to attack an enemy with Bloodlord of Vaasgoth then they
would need a creature with Flying or Reach(Can block Creatures with Flying)
in order to block the damage he would deal. Another one of his abilities is
Bloodthirst 3 it comes with an instruction text. The instruction text is the
text in the parenthesis that describes the ability Bloodthirst 3 means that if
an opponent was dealt damage this turn, then this creature enters the
battlefield with three +1/+1 counters on it. For each +1/+1 counter on a
creature we add 1 to each side of their power and toughness. f I was to deal
damage to an enemy then play Bloodlord of Vaasgoth then he would become
a 6/6 instead of a 3/3. You can see the power and toughness of a creature in
the bottom right of the card the first number is the damage he is to deal, and
the number on the right is the damage he can take before getting destroyed.
His last ability is Whenever you cast a Vampire creature spell, it gains
bloodthirst 3. Let's say I attack my enemy with
Bloodlord of Vaasgoth and they cant block him. Then
they have to take 3 Damage bringing them down to 17
Life instead of 20 Life then after I play Vampire
Interloper.
Since Bloodlord of Vaasgoths ability gives all vampires I
cast Bloodthirst 3 and one of Vampire Interlopers types
is Vampire. Since I dealt damage to my enemy this turn
I give Vampire Interloper 3 +1/+1 counters and would
become a 5/4 instead of a 2/1. Meaning that he now
deals 5 damage instead of 2 and will take 4 damage
before getting destroyed instead of 1 damage before
getting destroyed.
There's a type of card called a Foil. What it means to be a foil is that
the card is Shiny and is rarer than its usual rarity and is usually worth more
money.
For example Profaner of the Dead is a card that I will show later worth
about $0.36 but when it is a Foil is it worth about $1.20.
It was a calm afternoon, school had just ended and my friends invite
me to go to the mall with them, I say yes. Little did I know I was getting my
first foil there. After some time we go to Comics-n-Stuff and I buy an
Innistrad booster pack, Innistrad is the name of one of the many sets of

cards Wizards of the Coast have released . Inside it held a foil Island. Island is
one of the many lands used to create Mana, Islands exclusively make blue
Mana, unlike the cards shown before you can see this card does not have a
mana cost because it can be played for free but you can only play one per

turn.(The Image to the left is an Island)

This was the most exciting thing that week and I
half treasured that card. About a month or two later the
card was sitting in front of my deck still looking for a
home and I left for a camping trip with my boy scout
troop. I brought my cards in case some other scouts
were interested in playing because we usually play
when we are bored. Sadly it started raining in the
middle of the night and the tent I was staying in had
many holes sitting underneath one of the holes were
my cards. My only foil, the Island got destroyed which is
ironic because the symbol for the Island is a water
drop. I was very sad after this happened but learned to check the forecast of
each camping trip before I go and to keep sleeves on the cards I see as
Important (I keep sleeves on the decks I use at the time, cards I am willing to
trade, and just cards that are just worth some money).
Of course now I own many more foils and have learned to take care of
my cards now before I was very care free about my cards and they got lots of
bends I didnt trust people so I wrote my name on the
back of each card in my first starter pack destroying
any trade value the card could have had. Now one of
my foils is Profaner of the Dead the card to the left, I
even have this card in a sleeve because it is one of my
Trade cards