Posts by ObiWein

Store Showdown season is wrapping up at this point. I’ve been to three in Philadelphia and the immediate vicinity, with one more on the trailing end of the season coming up. If you’ll indulge me with the humble brag briefly: I’ve done well in these events. Top 8 in the first, winning the second, and…

The first really large tournament that I went to was roughly 1995 — before the Magic Pro Tour was even a thing.  I don’t quite remember what I was playing in terms of a deck.  I do remember that there were over two hundred players, and that the event was single elimination.  The other major…

Jumping back into collectible card games after nearly twenty years has been a blast. One big change, however, has been the increase in card rarities and variants. The first collectible card games had a relatively simple rarity system of Common, Uncommon, and Rare. Fifteen cards in a pack; One Rare, three Uncommon, and then Common…

Spoiler season is upon us. Nearly every day we are getting to see at least one new card from the upcoming set. Sometimes, we are getting videos with the game developers at Fantasy Flight Games that show multiple spoilers at a time and discuss some of the design choices and theory that went into creating…

We used to shuffle cards. It was not in the manner that happens today with splitting a sleeved deck into two parts and pushing them together. We truly shuffled. It was the same way that you would shuffle a fifty-two card poker deck. Riffling the cards, and then bridging the sides together to combine them…

Trading for collectible card games is so amazingly different than it was twenty years ago. The entire process of finding a worthwhile trade partner and putting the actual trade together is like being on another planet now. In the mid-to-late 1990s, the magazine Scrye included a monthly price guide for Magic: The Gathering. That was…

I think I may be a Boomer Gamer. Some background… I started playing Magic the Gathering in 1994 just as Unlimited was ending and Revised was starting its print run. I had dropped my first car off at a Jiffy Lube for an oil change and walked across the street to a Hobby Town USA…