14 Nerds enter...only one shall leave...

I cannot express the behind-the-back torment I gave to kids who played "Magic the Gathering" when I was in High School. Thus, the irony that I found myself and 13 co-workers playing a Magic draft tournament after work 12 years later. (Note for those paying attention...I'll be turning 29 yet again...29 minus 17 (when I graduated High School) = 12).

You can find tons of stuff online as to what Magic is and how to play it, so I'll give my strategy here.

• During the draft, when people pick cards for a winning "deck", select a random assortment of cards based upon the following criteria:
• Criteria 1: Does the card name make you giggle? If it has "Ox" or "Goat" in the title, the card is a must pick.
• Criteria 2: Does the card contain some sort of a way to intentionally make you kill yourself? If so, into the hand it goes.
• Criteria 3: Is the card literally unusable? Does the card require red mana to play but you have no red mana? Get it!
  
• Ok, once you have selected your cards, you must then realize that no matter how much you cheat (and that is literally all I do), you cannot win. Even if you purchased a $1000 deck and snuck it in...you'd still lose.

A draft works as follows. Everyone gets in a circle, opens a pack, selects a single card, and passes the rest of the cards to the person next to them. The process repeats until all the packs (3 per person) are gone. Obviously, the important bit is selecting the best possible cards. Highlight of the evening? When instead of picking up Ramon's "discard" cards for me to select a card from, I picked up the stack of cards he had carefully been selecting the entire draft. These then got passed around the table as others enjoyed the fruits of Ramon's labor.

I did do fairly well, though, and it had nothing to do with the fact that due to the number of people I got two "byes" that I automatically won.

In summation...cheat!


The pizza is from Pequods...and is awesome.