32 min
2013
So, 2013 isn’t going to start off with a lot of mirth. Min January I would receive a call from Cindy informing me that the home Dad was staying at called Mom in and that Dad had passed away.
This was the end of around six years of struggles Dad had with his illness. Sadly he died from the flu, which kind of indicates he wasn’t feeling well, probably turtled up in bed and no one really thought to make sure he was communicating his issues to them.
While very sad, Mom and I during the procession did realize that the last six months at least for Dad probably weren’t all that happy and that the future of not remembering who he was, would be pretty bleak to it did help with the sting a bit.
Dad’s funeral which was a trek to get to going from work on Wednesday, getting ill on the plane and landing on Thursday, setting up Friday and having to deliver some sort of speech on Saturday was something else. I took the easy way out and gave representation to those that couldn’t make it that quickly. I read emails I got from Justin, Chris M and Jacke about their time with Dad as kids.
Then Sunday I watched the 49er’s in the NFC championship game, Mom and I cooled off a bit, and then it was back to California and work.
This of course was year four of the Media program and year one without Marque around. Luckily, as I said the year before, most of the mechanism were in place, so I just had to help push the kids to get done what we knew what possible.
While semester two got a little harder than one, the groundwork was there, and even making quarterly changes to the introduction became something that was not only done, but gave the team in charge of the anchor desk a big first project to come update the introduction with their spin on the video lead in.
This would also give us a quarterly change on anchors for the bi-weekly broadcast:
The first semester we got Ethan and Sarah, Ethan for whatever reason made himself into a rockstar that always wore that purple jacket. Owen, in quarter two would also dawn the coat, but wasn’t always playing an alternate persona. Owen along with Jaz, the quarter two anchors were hold overs from quarter one that were entrusted with teaching the new ropes to the next wave of students.
That at the time was a controversial decision, because all five of that year’s first broadcast team didn’t want to leave. Owen and Sarah had some experience from the year before as well, so I don’t remember what even was the last call on who got to stay and who got to go.
Fifth period, for semester one was the support team, who did segments but didn’t do the planning or news broadcast end of things. However as we will see in a second, one of those helpers, Bailey, will work her way onto the desk over the course of the year.
The Semester transition was interesting. I think, and I might be wrong, but I think there just wasn’t a morning Leadership class for second semester, transferring both reports and anchoring to the same class. There was also a whole change in students participating. Essentially it was like starting the year again, except without having a couple members of the news team with prior experience.
Quarter three then had some of the rougher episodes to get ironed out, because thanks to semester one expectations were high and the idea that having to start over might show some regression was hard for everyone to swallow, both from the adults and other students. All this aside though, quarter three did manage one of the most memorable episodes ever when for April Fool’s day we kicked out the norm and did a whole superhero based short movie, fitting in advertisements for the school in the very odd story the kids came up with.
This was probably one of the main highlights of all time with the program. I assigned a director, a special effects team, they then had to storyboard, get actors and over the course of two weeks shoot and piece together the whole thing.
It also had one of the rare times I was on camera, when both I and our leadership class teacher took the roles of our two new anchors, Max and Marcela to start off the divergence.
After that quarter four would show how weird it was to have that last group at the tail end of the year. They lose some time and at least one episode because of the end of the year schedule and the freshman portfolio project, along with getting assigned to help the portfolios and this year it was set in stone to make all the end of the year celebration videos. This was all done with a smaller group.
Luckily after waiting all year, Bailey, who had taken to the program finally got to sit at the big desk with McKenna and they helped juggle the projects and got to first duo to always sit in front of the now customized looping news background. (it had happened a ways through quarter 3).
I got a lot of work out of this year’s kids. Thanks to a grant the year before they had two Mac Final Cut stations to go with all the other lap setup we had, and between the Owens and the Baileys enough motivated kids to pull most of the episodes together.
Nothing against the next few years, but at times this was probably one of the more put together years, barring quarter three’s start over we got some of the most work and footage out of this year.
We are in for a weird summer. Jim and Jackie went on a trip, I want to say to Finland with Jim’s mother. Apparently at some point during this trip Jim started having a seed planted in his head that he needed a change. Before the next school year would start, that ich would involve him walking out on Jackie, and leaving the two of us at the house while he started a year of couch surfing and exploration.
This is going to make for a severely complicated year, because along with this drama at home, we are also going to be without Dino at harper for around a year while he convalesces after an altercation at the school. Luckily this year would see the return of Marque, and then the introduction of Game Night.
Magic the Gathering, of DORKS! 2.0
Okay let’s tackle some more current subjects. I just did some editing to my life in the year 2000. In that I had to expand upon Chris K’s box of Magic cards. I know I covered the bases with Jake, the box he wanted, Chris teaching us, Him making it not look fun and eventually selling them for a hot week during the winter of 2000.
Now we go from then in the year 2000 to thirteen years later in 2013. It’s the Fall. The third season of a small Monday night football group (a this point it was me, Karl and Chris R. I think, maybe by year three we had Laurance as well) was meeting up regularly.
Driving Chris R. home from the nights game I started to drone on about how I was getting worried that our adult lives have turned into work, then let’s all hang out and watching a movie, or tv, so something. Nothing that kept our minds working. In light of my father’s recent demise at the hands of Alzheimer’s I was getting worried that our generation was dooming themselves to the same hard brains.
I told Chris R. I was down with trying to start up some sort of games night to do something gun that isn’t TV based. I had recently got into watching tabletop games being played on YouTube and it looked like something that I could pitch to some of my friends. Chris R. said he was completely down with the idea. And then had a suggestion.
Turns out people discarding their Magic card collections is more common than I thought. As it was Chris had been accumulating his friends cards they no longer wanted for years and so he suggested since he had thousands of these cards that we start with it as the game.
I think at this point I had Illuminati, Munchkin and Boss Monsters as well, but he sold me on the idea. It was either that night or shortly thereafter that I picked him up with a backpack which he had filled with long boxes of cards and we drove over the C street house and then laid on the floor and watched TV while he went over the rules of the game and we deck built with his cards.
Picking up the game, he left the cards with me and I went over it with Karl soon thereafter. And so we slowly built up the ability to play sloppy games with Chris’s cards and the idea of maybe having a magic card game night was hatched in strength.
Karl and I then both individually went by the local comic book store and bought a couple of booster packs for some new cards of our own. We both ended up with a Planeswalker, which was a card type Chris didn’t have or even explained. Thinking this was a thing we weren’t sure what to do. But then we got another card expert enlisted.
Marque, who had come back to work at this time at the Junior High, was talking to me one morning and I mentioned we were trying to do this Magic game night thing and the reasons behind it and he wanted in. Not only that he had a friend who had been trying to get him to play already named Marty. No not that Marty, just like the name Chris, some names seem to just keep coming back to the friend group.
Marty was a current player, while Chris R. played, he really had not in a while, Marty was really into staying current at the time.
This then caused me to hunt around a little bit for my own cards. The first thing I did was find these two seventh edition starter sets for sale at a small card store in Sacramento. Thinking the term starter was good for me and Karl I bought the two he had so that Karl and I could have our own decks. These decks though were sorely lacking as we would come to find out.
Then on another day soon after Marque had me collect Marty and we drove to another larger card store in Sacramento for a run down with Marty on what cards were needed to play with. We ended up buying two 60 card premade decks featuring the new Theros set, which was a fictious ancient Greece-esque setting.
The decks came with two packs. Oddly both of us pulled a couple of the rare “god” cards. I noticed Marque’s enjoyment of having a god, I think he was hooked right then and there. Marque got the precon that featured the bestow mechanic, and mine featured the monstrous mechanic if recall. We then took those decks to an all you can eat Chinese buffet that was down the street and proceeded to try and beat one of Marty’s EDH decks for the next several hours.
We were their long enough they stopped serving us soda, and Marque had enough time to use the restroom and eat some more. But it got us a lot more versed on the modern nuances of the game that changed since Chris’s cards where around. We also learned that playing with multi people at once versus head-to-head was completely viable.
So, we started having a game night. With sort of a rotating hosting duty between everyone’s local, we would buy a couple six packs, build at the time some sixty card kitchen table style decks, drink and have a good time. We even used our bottle caps as tokens and counters, it was a very non competitive sloppy good time.
But things would change. For me, I had a friend online, Dalquist, which at some point when I go over my time in Wow will come up again, or before this. Anyway he started wanting to play as well, but he of course was in Canada, so we started playing over skype.
Dal was a little more competitive than Chris and Karl and Marque, so he started building decks that I then had to figure out how to counter. As I did this I noticed my decks getting a little more streamlined than Karl and Marques, but it wasn’t to big a leap, and Chris had us beat and whenever we played with Marty we were doomed.
So then next up Marque showed up with a deck a friend gave him. This introduced us too the idea of Commanders. None of us had commanders, so Marque had a day of blasting us with this trample based deck. I started researching these commander decks and found one at a Target store featuring a Kobold eating dragon named Prossh.
So Marque got his other friends that played this format of commanders specifically over and we started to learn how to play EDH. This broadened our player pool, but boy was it rough on Marque, Karl and I for a while. The format was much more intense and Marque’s other friends were deeper into the format.
Dalquist had introduced me to the Eldrazi creatures, I knew there were these big horrible things people could play. Daubert, one of the new players for us, introduced me to the Eldrazi Lords, which made the regular eldrazis seem “unplayable” to some.
So I had to modify and adapt, as I learned from countless losses, I decided to build my own deck. I went with mono-red, and with goblins. Goblins had been a creature type I enjoyed in our kitchen table style, I figured I’d try and modify it to the new 100 card EDH/commander format.
I settled on Ib Half-heart, goblin tactician, as my commander, and then started looking for goblins to fill the deck. I had some already, this really neat guy named Krenko, but while looking up goblins online I was introduced to one named Kiki-Jiki. He was an odd little goblin that could tap to make a token copy of any non-legendary creature I controlled. Seemed good, he apparently had a list of cards he had game winning combinations with, unfortunately those weren’t all goblins.
Well sort of. A goblin with a name I could get behind, Goat-napper. Another cute little guy that when he entered play took control of any goat in the game, gave it to me and made it useable for me until the end of the turn. Turned out, there was a card that could turn Kiki into a goat of all things, then Kiki could tap himself and make another goat-napper, which could take control of Kiki and untap him so I could make another goat napper. With these three cards, I could have any number of goat-nappers I wanted.
Now unlike with the pre constructed Prossh deck I bought, I had a deck that could surprise win out of nowhere in one turn. Now I could win some games with the new EDH crew if I got lucky enough to get the right cards.
This was also when we found out the local comic book store near the C street house had a Wednesday night EDH tournament. For a five dollar buy in you could win some amount of store credit. Which was enough to keep feeding cards into decks. So I showed up with my goblins.
Now we were meeting new players left and right. Also the surprise of the stolen goats got me to the victors table quickly. This is when I really got hooked in. Although still very new I was beating more experienced players and I started to notice why. When it got to people playing for small prizes there was almost a homogeny among some of the decks. Everyone was playing to very similar style wins with very similar cards.
One of these cards, which in 2023 still get’s used was Cratherhoof Behemoth. Noticing this pattern I would order up cards for a new deck playing the very commonly used blue and green colors I was seeing a lot of. In Magic this is called simic. Momir Vig was my new general for these colors, and he was consistently winning games.
So I would spend a lot more time talking with the competitive guys at the store, playing more. Realizing that having a consistent deck meant you had to keep tunning it to win faster since once people knew it won quickly it because a game of 3 versus 1.
While doing this I made new friends, and also found I liked playing my goblins, and another weird deck where I gave cards away named Zedru a little bit more. There was a narrow amount of stuff going on at the tournaments and it did seem more fun to play “outlying” strategies.
This picked up when I was introduced to a Thursday night “club” that met at one of the local pizza parlors to play recreationally. There I got to test out a lot more non, Momir Vig -> Prophet of Kruphix -> Cratherhoof stomp games.
Momir over time got boring, it was a linear deck that I had to win with fast or get hated out of the game by the other players. So as my overall amount of decks grew I retired the deck. Took the pieces out and built another stupidly good deck around a black, blue and green commander named Sdisi. That was to be my people are playing mean decks, well deck. Then I just kept building other weird ideas.
My collection was growing, I had a slough of different options to play and it was fun. I didn’t care about winning the tournaments anymore. In fact once during a rules dispute between me and another player named Nico that I had become friends with, I settled the argument by saying instead of fighting over it or getting a judgement from someone else why not both concede and let the other player we were playing with, who had a much less tuned deck get the store credit.
He agreed and we made friend of a new player to us that night, named Hugo. Who will become a member of the same friend group with Nico eventually. Of course feeding Hugo cards has turned out to turn him into a degenerate player, but at the time it seemed like a nice gesture.
So here I stood, years after selling my ties to this card game away for a week in San Diego, to someone who played these cards casually with some of my closest friends like Karl and had made a whole new group of them around playing the game from different adventures outside of my regular social circle. Only took thirteen years or so to come back around.