Man that is pretty impressive... sorry to hear of your tragic loss twesterm... I feel your pain man... still have all my cards but I only play once or twice a year... did play for a few weeks last year since I found a guy to play against but it stopped beeing fun since he was such a bad player... all his decks were pathetic and when I offered to make a good one out of his cards he got all pissed of and challaged me to a best out of three duel with our best decks (he never beat my best deck...in over 50 games)... first game I hit him with a 50 damage fireball in turn three.... next game went about the same... he never even played a good card before round six or so... I still have the elf deck I used to pulverise him... I felt kind of sorry for him but I did offer to teach him how real players play the game...
I used to be the king of magic in my highschool, I even got money for building decks... but those days are dead and gone... the game went downhill after Alliances or Mirage if you ask me... to many new rules... to many new übercards you had to buy to compete... give me back the day when a game was longer than five minutes and even ten to twenty bucks could make you a good deck if you knew how... I still remember beating my friends with common decks just to show that skill is better than money... I miss those days a lot...
On a side note: I used to hang out at a magic shop a lot and one time as blue counter decks where all the rage we played a game with 8 playes and they all had blue counter decks except me... every time a card was played two or three guys yelled "COUNTER" and then we had to sort out who was countering what and what counter was being counterd... the best part was when I tried to play a Wrath of God and half of the players wanted me to and the other half didn´t... there where ten counters on the table and it took some time to figure out that the Wrath did get played... game lasted about one and a half hours... happy days :)
