Excuse the blurry picture (and the bad hair) but this photo, circa winter 2007, documents Patrick Holder and myself in the midst of an epic 3 way game of Magic: The Gathering. While Patrick's current whereabouts and status in the band (last time I heard he started all lady-boy Fishbone tribute act in Thailand called Chumhard), I wanted to write a few words on my longest running recreational activity.
I started playing Magic with Revised, released in 1994. My best friend and I didn't quite comprehend the rules, but we mutually sensed the inherent badassery in "summoning" unicorns to fight off vampires and hurling lightning at treefolk. This predates my first strum of a guitar by a good two years, although I've never put the instrument down and did stop shuffling cards between the release of Odyssey (2001) and Lorwyn (2007). Little did I know that copious amounts of my free time after school turning cards sideways would result in my first meeting with Country Dave.
Dave and I went to different middle schools, but we shared a mutual friend in Mr. Douglass X. Carter, Esq. Doug ended funding my first playstation with his purchase of some of my more powerful cards in the 7th grade, but before he cashed me out (it's occurred twice in the course of the past 16 years) he got six of his cardboard flopping friends to "gather" at his house for a draft. My memory of 1998 is fuzzy and while I consider the biggest achievement of that year to be the release of Refused's The Shape of Punk To Come, the second is my meeting of Country Dave. It's too bad that I can't remember the set we drafted but I can, however, remember that I won the makeshift tournament and the first prize was an out of print pack of "Legends." Hails to victory!
Truth be told, I might not have even played Country Dave that day - or talked to him for that matter. Doug has since moved on to better things (he is currently in pursuit of reducing his waste output and carbon footprint as much as humanly possible) but, one of the other participants, Dane and I play to this day.
Fast forward to two years later and Country Dave (he had a shorter epithet in high school, drop the first vowel, the second consonant and the last two letters to get a better idea) were properly introduced whilst playing bumper pool and somehow that begot Free Jeff, which begot all sorts of other bastardizations of "the ska band."
If (and I'm not taking a very big risk here, this is the blog of a SKA band) you too have shared a love for magical cards at any point in the past two decades, please introduce yourself at the next HP2 show and I will feed you your own underwear...while riding a unicorn to victory.
Better yet, if you are actively playing and will be attending this Saturday's Rise of the Eldrazi prerelease at the LAX Radisson on April 17, be sure to let me know and we'll compare our pulls. And once we look at how much more awesome mine are, I'll feed you your underwear.
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