March 6, 2020
nascent – adjective : coming into existence; emerging
For perhaps the first time since rebooting my Magic experience at the start of the year, I’ve finally come close to feeling like a truly new player.
I returned to Magic, after a fairly prolonged absence, in 2017. Amonkhet came out in 2017. Great opportunity for a narrative connection and wistful reminiscing, yeah?
Yeah, no.
While I don’t recall buying it, my Magic collection included a sealed booster box of Amonkhet.
At some point in the past I also opened some Amonkhet boosters. Not a vast quantity, but probably 10-15.
And I even own a full set of AKH (at least 1 copy of every card in the set.) I acquired it via Magic Online redemption – the last gasp of my spoils from being a Magic Online Adept many years ago. Yes, I have a few stories to tell about that. No, I’m not going to tell any of them today.
While I never bought a full booster box of Hour of Devastation, the small follow-up set that’s part of the Amonkhet block, I have a sealed Fat Pack from it. And I opened a decent number of HOU boosters back in ’17-’18. There’s a story about that as well, but again – not telling it today.
And while Arena no longer features cards from the Amonkhet block, I played with some of them during Arena’s Beta, when they were available to tinker with before everyone’s account got wiped (after the wipe, Amonkhet was not made available.) No interesting story there, really.
So what IS today’s story? It’s this: for once in my life, having a crap memory seems to have paid off.
Evidence suggests I should be, at the very least, nominally familiar with Amonkhet block cards. Well, holy hell, did none of them look familiar when I opened packs from those sets! Literally none of them.
My son’s interest in Magic is flagging. He’s played Arena, his preferred method of playing Magic, twice since Christmas. But he still likes cracking packs. He recently expressed interest in building sealed decks, which I knew was his weaselly way of conning me into letting him have some packs to open.
It worked.
I let him choose the set/block he wanted to try, and he chose AKH block. I wasn’t sure how many packs of each set to use, but decided on 4 from large set AKH and 2 from small set HOU.
Six packs later, I was looking at a stack of 75 cards that I SWEAR I’d never seen before.
A blue/green Nissa planeswalker? With X in its casting cost? Is this thing fake? No way had I ever seen this before.
And yet, I knew I had. I filed one of these goofy things in a binder of my Amonkhet cards, along with one of EVERY OTHER CARD IN THE SET. How do I not remember any of them?
(There’s a pun here somewhere that combines “amnesia” with “Nissa”, but I just couldn’t get it to work. I tried. I really did.)
Feeling so clueless about something I should be familiar with is kind of funny. But…also not funny at all. What the hell is wrong with me?
That was not meant as a setup, so don’t answer that.
Rather than consider the possibly serious ramifications of this kind of mental block, I decided to pretend this is a good thing. I get to experience AKH block as a new player, just like my son will experience it. Nothing looks familiar, and it’s pretty flippin’ cool. I’m excited – to assemble a deck, to see how the cards work – and to experience Amonkhet again for the first time.
This feeling reminds me of my first ever prerelease experience – Tempest! In 1997! Oh wow…the Tempest prerelease…now THAT is a story.
But not for today. Today… today I get to feel like a new Magic player (who hopefully doesn’t have early-onset dementia.)
Casual Magicking 