Introductions Are In Order

     Hello there and welcome to my Magic blog! Allow me to introduce myself. My name is Nhi Pham, I am 18 and I have been playing Magic for about six months now. It all started when I was browsing Reddit back at the end August last year and clicked on the top post that day. Remember the Gizmodo fiasco with Jon Finkel? Well, that's when I started hearing about Magic: The Gathering. However, that is not when I started playing the, what I now believe to be, fantastic game. It was on that Gizmodo article when I happened to click on a hyperlink taking me to OKCupid. At first I had no intention to make an account or to try online dating, but their opening page was so compelling. E-mail address and birthday? It really was that easy? So I thought "Why not?" and decided to sign up, but mostly because I had recently turned 18 the week before and was able to legally try out the site.

     Anyway, after several messages it seemed like at least 75% of the guys in my area enjoyed Magic: the Gathering. When I was younger, probably about 8-10 years ago, I played Pokemon. After that I played Yu-Gi-Oh for a few years before finally giving up trading card games in high school. So I thought "Well, I am no stranger to this scene, maybe I should start playing Magic so I can have another thing in common with these guys." Off I was looking for people to teach me how to play Magic. After posting a Facebook status about my desire to learn the game a friend of mine offered a box of old cards he had laying around since he had given up the game. Of course I accepted it! It's about 1600 commons and uncommons from Ravnica and not worth much, but I was really excited.

     A month later one of my dates from OKCupid offered to teach me after dinner one night and to his surprise I was thrilled because I was much too shy to ask. (I'm one of those really, REALLY quiet and shy girls...) I borrowed one of his decks, mono green with cards mostly from Worldwake and Zendikar, and started slowly playing as he explained the rules. After that first game I understood most of the basics and was excited to start building my very own deck. The next day I went on another date with a different guy who took me to the local gaming store. This time I brought along my box of Ravnica cards which we then sorted by color. I told him I wanted to built a deck but didn't know where to begin. Then he asked me which color I liked best. Well, metallic emerald green is my favorite color so I decided to try making a green deck. My date then told me to pick out all of the cards I liked, which I did. When I was done reading through all the green cards I had a nice little pile of the ones I thought were interesting. After that we added lands and I had a deck!

     It was a pretty bad deck. All of the cards were different and did not go very well together. My date had made a deck of his own using the white cards I had in my box and we started playing. That's when I truly got the gist of the game. I basically learned 90% of everything I needed to that night. I don't really remember much, but I do recall figuring out what flying and trample are which doesn't seem bad for a beginner. After that I bought a beginner's deck from Target that was GW Infect and slowly started improving it. My deck wasn't standard though. I included Invigorate, Vines of Vastwood and Armadillo Cloak. After that deck I purchased the five intro Innistrad decks and really grew to like the vampire one.

     A couple weeks later my second date then brought me over to his friend's house to draft for the first time. I was told to stick to one or two colors and that the cards I choose would be placed in a deck to play against other draft decks. I read each card from every pack and chose which ones I thought were the most powerful. After drafting my cards I took out all of the ones that weren't in my colors and added lands. I played against my date's friend's wife and lost. This really confused me because I was sure I had chosen the best cards! Upset, I asked my date what I did wrong so he looked through my deck and chuckled. Turns out that four creatures is not enough for a draft deck.

     After that first draft I began drafting at my local gaming store and won second place at FNM during my third draft ever! Most people told me that it was beginner's luck but I know I drafted a pretty good WU deck that night, even if I chose Doomed Traveler over Gallows Warden. The following week I decided to try out the standard FNM and borrowed a friend's mono red deck, which he told me was simple play. During my first round I felt like I was doing pretty well with Koth on the field at four. Then I learned that you can only have one of the same planeswalker on the field. My opponent let me take him back though which was pretty nice of the guy. Also, I'm pretty sure he felt bad for me since it was my first month of playing Magic. I went 3-3 that night and felt pretty good about myself. I was so surprised that everyone stayed out so late to play though, I was getting so tired!

     I decided to only draft and enter the draft FNM for a couple months and began collecting cards this way. My decks slowly improved as well as my playing skills. Soon I became good enough to be feared at in my school and becoming recognized at my local gaming store. After playing for about two and a half months I was on winter break and randomly decided to take a bus to New York. Since my boyfriend knew about my Reddit story and Magic he told me that Jon Finkel lives in New York. He then texted me Finkel's twitter username and I tweeted the guy who started it all if he had time to play casual Magic with me. During my bus ride to New York I received a direct message on Twitter and was so ecstatic that he gave me a "maybe"! Playing with Jon Finkel the day I had to leave New York is probably one of my favorite memories relating to Magic. Unfortunately, I was much too shy to really talk much to him and even forgot to take a picture! However, I did manage to get my Shadowmage Infiltrator signed which is in my Wrexial Commander deck.

     After New York my boyfriend gave me a werewolf deck for Christmas which I played with for quite a while. I made top 8 at a standard FNM for the first time with it and felt like I was on top of the world! Then I tried it out at a grand prix but failed quite miserably because I made top 8 the night before at CoolStuff's $500 tourney and stayed up until 4:30AM. Lesson learned. Now I just like to build my own fun decks to play standard but consider myself not too bad at Magic. On Tuesdays I draft and pay for them with the packs I've earned on credit, on Wednesdays I play casual commander and on Fridays I play standard FNM so I can earn more packs to put on credit for drafting! It's a challenging cycle.
   
     So there you have it, my background on Magic. I really do love this game and hope to be more involved in it which why I started this blog. People have told me that writing about my experiences will help me become better. I also hope to develop my writing skills with this blog and try to at least keep you entertained for a bit! Well, I should really go to sleep now. It's past three, but I was so ready to begin this adventure! Goodnight. :)