Oh, wow. I, uh, was there at the start. I frequented a local mom 'n' pop (Gun Dog Comics, R.I.P.) when Wizards were just putting the Beta through its paces. Unlimited Rainbow decks, those were the days. We never thought those cards would be worth more than the cardboard they were printed on, so we played ante, lost, and gave away stuff that could pay off my house if I still had it around. The comic store gave away thousands of cards for the first few months, trying to generate interest. My circle of friends got more into Doom Trooper CCG and a few others, (man, I just remembered the Sim City card game, that was the most passive CCG ever) but of course, Magic outlasted 'em all.
As a side note, I remember when R. Garfield's own Vampire: The Eternal Struggle was called 'Jyhad' and came out a year later, and there was a brief period where we wondered if it would compete with MtG, until it became obvious that it was a Madonna/Cindi Lauper competition. Good luck marketing a game called 'Jyhad' now.
ANYWAYS, we kept playing fairly often, and the last official competition my beloved and I went to was for the Urza Block, 'Legacy' I believe. Still have the T-shirt from 2nd place on the sealed deck tourney.
After that, some of our friends got so 'hardcore' about it that my beloved and I didn't have as much fun against them. A few years ago a more recent friend found we used to play and challenged me with his then-unbeatable Sliver deck. My White/Blue Lockdown variant was obviously too slow and was destroyed, but my classic Red Burn took him down. My Artifact/Control tied him, and those were all the decks I still had built.
Since then, I've just gone back into retirement. So much time, money, and card-tracking, not to mention rules updates. Out of all my old hobbies, I had to pick what I'd still keep up with, and MtG lost out too the obvious.
And a final mental image to those who want to know how we never knew what we had back then, my buddy had his 1 1/2 year old with him while we played, and she had a bad habit of picking up and chewing on the cards. It was annoying and inconvenient, and some cards were certainly harder to find than others back then, but hey, just cards, buy another booster.
Three words. Beta. Black. Lotus.
I miss those freewheeling Magic days.
Oh, that reminds me; my personal favorite R. Garfield CCG was Netrunner, released in '96. I had given all my cards away almost 15 years ago and thought about looking to get it again for my beloved and I to play, and low and behold Fantasy Flight Games bought the game and remade it into Android: Netrunner. I picked up the base game for our anniversary and it was really fun. Not quite as good as the original, but certainly cheaper to acquire now.
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