Introductions Are In Order

It’s about time I started writing here. I’ve been meaning to do this seemingly forever. I’ve been playing MTG since 2003 and I was blogging before I played MTG but never really blogging ABOUT Magic.

My name is Josh. I go by “MagicRage” on pretty much every MTG-related site, including Salvation and Star City. I’m about to turn 29. I knew about Magic: The Gathering back in 1994. I saw people play it, but it was intimidating to my 12 year old self and I lacked friends to say “No, this is awesome!” and sit me down and show me how to play it. I would not learn how to play Magic until 2003 when I was shown how to play by my best friend…who is a girl. I dove into the game with gusto, including reteaching myself the rules because everyone I knew was playing with this hodgepodge system mixing pre-6E and post-6E rules with a few things that were just flat out incorrect.

My first DCI-sanctioned tournament was Florida Regionals 2005. That was May 2005. In August 2005, my only local gaming store closed. The MTG community began a strange journey that led us to playing at Barnes & Noble, McDonalds, Borders, Burger King, Borders again, and finally now to a local store again after 5 years. Up until recently, I had to drive at minimum 30 minutes to play sanctioned Magic (and sometimes longer depending on traffic). Along the way, I’ve played in every States from 2005 to 2008, ever Regionals from 2005 to 2009, a bunch of PTQs, and 2 GPs (Daytona ’07 and Tampa ’09). My Constructed Rating was kicking around the 1700 range for a long time before tanking after a terrible Regionals/PTQ doubleheader weekend in 2009 and has not recovered (and I haven’t played much sanctioned constructed since then). My Limited rating sucked for the longest time before I finally started to grok Limited. I got over 1800 last fall but it’s back in the 1700s these days. I’m really loving Scars Limited so it should be on the rise. I am not a great player and I know it: I make way too many play mistakes.

I became a Rules Advisor when the program began in 2007 (after years of being a go-to guy on rules questions) and a Tournament Organizer in 2009 when the WPN started and allowed me to have semi-sanctioned casual events. I entered both Great Designer Searches without making it out of the qualifying rounds. I’m a Timmy/Spike/Melvin. I’m also a shameless fanboy of Mark Rosewater and Zac Hill.

My plan is to address whatever comes to mind MTG-related: the typical fare of tournament reports, observations on formats, and decklists but also observations on set design, homebrew cards, thoughts on casual MTG (and my experience has always been worlds away from Anthony Alongi’s articles), random card comments, and whatever the hell else I think of. For starters, I’m going to cover my unsuccessful entry into GDS2 which was the biggest motivator in finally starting this blog.