25 years in the making

I have a ghost of a memory rattling around from what feels like early 1995, but could just as easily be from late 1994 too (huge difference, I know).

It's me and my friend, Steven (he was by best friend for about a decade), at a card shop somewhere in Portland, or possibly Gresham, most likely near the border either way. I can still picture the inside of the shop in my mind, but can't recall for the life of me what the name of it was. It wasn't one that I usually went to, and despite it's huge inventory of all things collectible at the time, it would be gone before I stopped collecting cards in or around 2000.

Steven didn't collect cards, or anything else for that matter, but he did like Pogs, so did I, and that's why we were there, for Pogs!

Word had come down the grapevine that this particular shop had a selection of Pogs like none other, and as it would turn out, that word was correct.

I'm pretty sure that my mom drove us (his parents would never have done such a thing, at least not unless they could've took their television with them. That's all they did when not working, watch television), and upon our arrival, we found the mother lode of all Pog mother lode's. I don't know what their official name is, but have you ever seen those circular discount DVD bins at Walmart? Well, that was basically what was sitting in a corner of this shop, except instead of being full of DVD's (which of course hadn't even come into existence yet), it was full of Pogs, thousands and thousands of Pogs! It was like a mini version of Scrooge McDuck's vault.

I don't recall how they had been priced, but they must've been reasonably so, because it didn't take us long to dive in and start making stacks, or possibly filling bags, I'm not sure. Anyway, at some point, I looked up to say something to Steven, only to find him no longer swimming in Pogs. He was now standing a few feet from our Pog pool, with his back to me, staring intently at some really different looking boxes of cards on one of the shelves that ran around the shop. I remember being annoyed that he was no longer elbow deep in Pogs, especially since that was our soul purpose for being there. I asked him what he was doing, and this part I can remember like it was yesterday, he answered my question with a question of his own, "Have you heard about Magic: The Gathering?". In all honesty, I hadn't heard of it, but I wasn't going to admit that, and as I said, I was a tad bit annoyed, so I replied "Yeah, it looks kinda gay!". [And before anyone loses their sh*t, remember the time period that this took place in. That was a very common way to describe an uncool thing, kids used it a lot, parents used it, heck, I even heard a teacher use it once. I could've sugar coated it, revised history if you will, but that's not what I do around here. I used to say it all the time back then, and am not going to lie and pretend like I didn't]

I'm not too sure about the MTG timeline, and don't feel like looking it up, but this would've been fairly early into it's still ongoing run. And a lot of those early cards are very sought after these days, some of which can fetch insanely high prices. This isn't the place for a MTG history lesson though, so let me finish the story, it's almost over...

After hearing my reply, Steven just let out a sad sounding "yeah...", turned around, and came back to the bin o' Pogs. I'll know that I'll lose most of this memory at some later date, but probably won't ever forget that defeated "yeah", sigh...

Steven never did take up MTG, and thankfully his memory was worse than mine, or maybe he just had better sense than me, either way, he never brought that day up again. And for the record too, I wouldn't have blamed if he had, I mean after all, I basically convinced someone that between Pogs and MTG, Pogs were the way to go 😞. Years later, we got into other CCG's though, namely WWF Raw Deal, and Buffy, neither of which was comparable to MTG in popularity, or potential future profit. We even started to create our card game at one point, but he got tired of all of the "work" that was necessary to create a game from scratch, and bailed on me. I never finished it. It seemed pointless to do so all by myself.

Steven and I ended up taking different paths in our early twenties, but I still think about him from time to time, a lot more so in recent years. And any time I come across one of those "YOU WON'T BELIEVE WHAT OLD MTG CARDS ARE NOW SELLING FOR!" articles, I remember that day at the card shop. 

The ironic part too is that we didn't even stay interested in Pogs that much longer (nobody else did either), maybe a year, but probably less. AND, in recent years, I've started to develop in interest in MTG, and have often wondered if anything would've changed had I just said "No, I've never heard of them, let's find out what they are". 

It's too late for me to take up playing the game, even though it's probably something that I would enjoy, and really would've enjoyed all of those years ago. I can still appreciate the artwork though, in fact that's where my interest lies with MTG. I keep thinking that I'm gonna start buying some singles at some point, especially since I see them for sale often enough (they even sell them at McKay's, individually, and in bulk), but never take the time to look through them.

I say that I want to start picking up singles, which makes it sound like I don't already own any, but I do, one whole card in fact. And not just any old card mind you, no, I went big for my first card - big as in large, not big as in expensive - it's a box topper...

Sometime last year I was doing some challenges on COMC, when this card came up. I fell in love immediately, and put it in my watch list. I had to wait a few weeks for to be added to the site, when it was finally added, it was done so with a $2.50 price tag, and there was no hesitating, I bought it right then and there. 

I don't know which set it's from, nor do I care. And being a box topper, I don't even know if it's playable, or if it was made just for show. I just know that it's a big sexy card that I had to have, not so much for the front either, it was the back that I fell in love with.

I scanned this in the big toploader that it came in, so please excuse all the smudges and scratches.

Look how pretty that is! It's very Guillermo del Toro-ish, don't you think? Well, it is to me. I looked at all of the other box toppers from this set back when I got this, and the rest seemed rather dull compared to this one, so I don't know what the deal is, I'm just glad that they made it. Someday I hope to make a little frame for it, it'd look really good hanging over my desk.

As an aside, a lot of bloggers are showing off their COMC good from this year, but that won't be me anytime soon, I probably won't request my shipment until the spring. In the meantime though, I actually do have a number of scan folders with cards from the shipment that I got right before last Christmas in them. Apparently I've only gotten to a couple of them so far this year (where has the time gone!), so you can expect to probably see some more posts of old COMC stuff sprinkled in throughout the next couple of months -- it took a lot of time to scan them, so you better believe I'm going to show them.

Thanks for taking a moment to look at my page.