Season 23, Episode 10: The NV Invitational
“Some delicacies are not to be savored, save by the callous” —Baron Sengir
Just in time for the Thanksgiving holiday, we invite you to a sumptuous feast of MTG nostalgia.
If you possessed an Alpha starter deck, what would you do with it? Would you keep it locked safe in a vault, preserving its possibilities for future generations? Would you auction it to the highest bidder, turning musty old cardboard into $100,000 or more of cold hard cash? Or maybe, just maybe, would you open it?
In this episode of Faithless Brewing, our guest is choosing option D — not just opening an Alpha starter deck, but organizing a blowout sealed deck event, where pack fresh Alpha cards will go head to head with old packs through Revised in matches played for ante. Cards that have remained sealed for more than 30 years will finally see the light of day and meet one another in glorious battle.
The NV Invitational is a one-of-a-kind celebration, part tournament, part birthday bash, part Last Supper. In an era when Magic’s future looks cloudier than ever, we return to the game’s earliest days, when each new booster multiplied possibilities and cards were unequivocally meant to be played.
Oh, and did we mention that every card will be stamped? If you’ve ever wanted to take possession of a pack fresh, stamped and signed Alpha Black Lotus, wresting it away from your opponent in a hard fought ante match, this is your chance!
Questions? Comments? Expressions of rage? Hit us up at faithless.brewing@gmail.com or join our Discord on Patreon!
Episode Transcript
Introduction and Special Episode Announcement
[00:00:00] Dan Schriever (@CavedanMTG): Hello and welcome to the Faithless Brewing Podcast. I’m your host, Dan Shriever, also known as Cavedan. And we have a very special, very strange episode for you today. This is a major departure from our usual fare. We are not talking about Pioneer. We’re not talking about Modern. We’re not even talking about Brewing.
Instead, we are talking about Alpha, specifically opening an Alpha starter deck. And I do not mean that as a metaphor or as a euphemism. I mean that in a very real, very legally binding sense. So what is it all about?
Meet Nick: A Longtime Listener and Magic Enthusiast
[00:00:58] Dan Schriever (@CavedanMTG): Well, we have a very special guest. Good friend of mine and long time listener of the podcast.
Please welcome Nick. Nick, hello. Welcome.
[00:01:06] Nick: Hey, Dan. It’s great to be here.
[00:01:08] Dan Schriever (@CavedanMTG): Yeah. Glad to finally get you recording with us on the pod. Got a brand new mic, got everything set up. So Nick, please introduce yourself. Tell us a little bit about what kind of magic player are you?
[00:01:21] Nick: Well started a long time ago and like many of my close friends met you playing magic.
I’d like to believe that I’m a little bit of a brewer, definitely not, uh, net decking anything in any case, so I think that what you do speaks to me. That’s one of the reasons I think we connected so well.
Magic History and First Impressions
[00:01:42] Nick: But beyond brewing, I really have a true appreciation for the history of the game. Uh, been around the game for a long time, probably around the same time you started, I’m guessing.
And, uh, there’s always been a real draw to me for the game. Old elements in the original design of the game.
[00:02:03] Dan Schriever (@CavedanMTG): I had a suspicion that was the case. But I’m thinking back to the first time that you and I met, it must have been at like f and m, right? Just at a local shop. And I remember you were playing like a zombies deck, a foil out a.
blinged out Japanese zombies deck. It was beautiful. It was nowhere near meta. I would generously call that a tier four deck. But it was clear that you loved it and you were crushing people with it.
[00:02:27] Nick: Yes, I do remember that. I actually remember being crushed by you playing, uh, I believe it was, uh, a faithless looting deck and just overrunning me in time.
So, uh, that wasn’t the first, the best first impression, but yet, Somehow we made it past that and, and here we are.
[00:02:48] Dan Schriever (@CavedanMTG): That was right around actually when this podcast started. ’cause I do remember it was almost by chance you said you were going to, um, what would they call it back then? The Star City Games events?
[00:02:57] Nick: Yeah, I don’t, whatever they were called.
[00:03:00] Dan Schriever (@CavedanMTG): It was an open SCG Open There you. Yeah. I remember I like cobbled together at the last minute something with Bedlam Revelers and Traverse the Ulven Walls, Faithless Looting, Jace had just been unbanned, Terror Rising Modern. Those were the days.
[00:03:15] Nick: Those are the good old days when you could, you could try to play a fair deck.
Uh, I don’t know, I guess the definition of fair changes over time and that’s always been my preference, I guess, mostly fair decks, not entirely, but yeah, we’ve had some, some fun bro ing and. And, uh, look forward to additional crazy brews in the future.
[00:03:38] Dan Schriever (@CavedanMTG): Absolutely. You’re definitely a brewer at heart. I mean, I think you, you refuse to play the good list.
I think all of them are prepping for an event to say, you know, Nick, maybe we should swap out some of these kitchen things. Maybe it’s time to let the things retire.
[00:03:53] Nick: Old habits die hard, Dan. They die hard.
[00:03:56] Dan Schriever (@CavedanMTG): Yep.
The Invitation: An Exclusive Event
[00:03:58] Dan Schriever (@CavedanMTG): So, you’re talking about love for the history of the game, and that brings us to the reason we’re talking today.
Let’s get into it. The story of this podcast, it begins fairly innocuously. You know, I had recently moved to Virginia, and I think you asked me a few weeks back, oh, what’s your mailing address? I said, okay, sure, yeah, here’s my new address. Looking forward to a holiday card. A couple weeks later, the holiday card arrives in the mail.
Open it up, excited to see, you know, whatever your news of the year is, and I’m greeted instead by this shocking image, right? I slide this gorgeous card out of the envelope, and the first thing I see is a row of five beautiful booster packs. I see a booster pack of Antiquities, Arabian Nights, Legends, The Dark, and what looks like Revised.
Is this on your dining table, is that what I’m looking at here?
[00:04:52] Nick: That is indeed my dining room table, and if you look a little closer, it is definitely not a Revised booster.
[00:04:59] Dan Schriever (@CavedanMTG): Oh my gosh, okay. Well, how would I know if it’s a revised booster? I think I’ve literally never seen one of these before.
[00:05:06] Nick: Yeah, well, uh, revised boosters clearly state revised on the front of the booster.
If you look a little closer, I know the picture’s not giant there, you will notice no revised Uh, it is not beta, that is an alpha booster, so, uh, representative of, of what I want to bring to this event.
[00:05:33] Dan Schriever (@CavedanMTG): Okay, so there are five gorgeous booster packs laid out like a sumptuous feast. That’s not even half of it, right, because above the booster packs, like, what am I looking at here?
It looks like I see a booster box, I see our good friend, the Herlion Minotaur, I see a picture of a fireball, I see Crusade, I may have to bleep that out, I don’t know if I’m allowed to say that anymore, but it’s all here. Is this a box of revised?
[00:05:57] Nick: Uh, the, the box on the top there is actually the Herlion Minotaur.
an alpha or beta booster box, uh, there’s no way to tell the difference, uh, and I did get that second handed, so it was not sealed, it was not full when I purchased it, so it’s either an alpha or beta booster box.
[00:06:18] Dan Schriever (@CavedanMTG): I think some part of me knows that deep down, but I can’t bring myself to say anything other than rise.
It just sounds such a preposterous statement. Okay, so you’ve got Arranged on your table.
Unveiling the Alpha Starter Deck
[00:06:29] Dan Schriever (@CavedanMTG): An alpha or beta booster box, and then what’s this in the middle here, the one that’s sealed?
[00:06:33] Nick: Well, housed in the middle and surrounded by all of its friends is a sealed alpha brick, and there will be many out there that will tell you there is no way to tell alpha from beta, and um, there are probably very, very few of these left in existence.
And, as the owner of one, I could tell you there is a way to tell without doing whatever fancy CT scans and whatnot there are nowadays, which is a crime against humanity, in my opinion.
[00:07:09] Dan Schriever (@CavedanMTG): So, just to be clear, when you say a sealed alpha brick, what does that mean? What is a sealed alpha brick?
[00:07:17] Nick: A brick refers to a sealed box of starters back in the Early Days of Magic, you can get a starter deck. This consisted of 60 cards. You had 2 rares, 13 uncommons, and then 45 commons. And that consisted of your sealed deck, uh, back then, and a brick is ten of those enclosed in one.
[00:07:48] Dan Schriever (@CavedanMTG): Oh my god, I’m having a moment here again.
[00:07:53] Nick: It is a true piece of magic history, for sure.
[00:07:56] Dan Schriever (@CavedanMTG): I mean, the brick is a piece of magic history, this postcard is just Artwork is just beautiful. So we’ve got the five booster packs, the opened box of boosters, the sealed pristine alpha brick. On the right, I see something that says Magically Gathering Pocket Players Guide.
And on the left, I see, like, it looks like an ivory box that I’ve seen you take to tournaments. What is that?
[00:08:18] Nick: Yeah, again, we had to, we had to protect the, uh, the alpha brick in the center, so we needed to give it some, some friends along the side. So, the Pocket Players Guide. was something released by Wizards in 1994, and it was like a glorified rulebook, and there’s a glossary of terms, what does continuous mean, and, and all of these things that could help you become a better player.
Now I can’t say ever. Read this in great depth or anything, but it’s again a little piece of magic history, not rare by any chance, but cool that, that Wizards put something out back in 1994 to try to give players a little better idea of what the hell is going on out there, because if you just read the, the rulebook, holy cow, you could, you could really find yourself interpreting a lot of what’s going on in the game.
[00:09:08] Dan Schriever (@CavedanMTG): So this is not the Bible, this is the Apocryphal Texts, something like that? Yeah,
[00:09:12] Nick: basically. So, little, little light reading. And then on the other side, that box is the first deck box. It was a Wizards of the Coast product. And it’s heavy. I don’t even know what it’s made of. Seemed like heavy plastic or plaster or something.
You can only fit, you can’t even fit a deck with a sideboard in it. Nevermind sleeves. So you could fit the cards in it. And, uh, I actually have never tested whether it’s 40 or 60 cards, but you certainly can’t fit sleeves, and there’s no way you’d be able to fit a 75 card deck, uh, including your sideboard there.
[00:09:56] Dan Schriever (@CavedanMTG): It never even occurred to me that that thing was intended for cards, I just assumed you put dice in there or something like that.
[00:10:01] Nick: It looks like a coffin, basically, and it weighs a lot. It’s got heft, which I appreciate. Yeah. Yeah.
[00:10:11] Dan Schriever (@CavedanMTG): Okay, so this is what is this a Christmas card, right? These are your children.
Um, you sent me their updates. So beta boosters starting kindergarten. Um, legends made the soccer team. Now, what is this? Well, I flipped the card over on the back. I see. You are summoned to an exclusive event. Visit the shores of imagination at the first annual Envy Invitational. Untap, December 6th, draft.
Main phase, December 7th, sealed alpha to revised. End step, December 8th, cube. Okay, now you have my attention. What in the world are you up to, Nick? What, what is going on here?
[00:10:53] Nick: Well, I wanted to evoke. The origin of the game, right, Visit the Shores of Imagination, that’s hearkening back to what you would find on original Magic packs, and really what I’m looking to do is bring together a close game.
Event Structure and Rules
[00:11:07] Nick: Group of friends to play in a pretty special event. It will be a several day event, but the main event will be Saturday. So basically Friday, a little, a little light primer, right? Let’s do some, some rough drafting, not of the old stuff necessarily, but let’s get together. Let’s think about what Saturday’s gonna be and get ready.
As we get into Saturday, the main phase That’s going to be where we’re opening alpha through revised, and then we’re going to include some of the other four horsemen sets, right? So we have Arabian Nights. Antiquities, Legends, and the Dark. So, as an old school player myself, uh, you mentioned I’m a brewer, uh, I refuse to play Fallen Empires in old school.
I’ll only play, I’ll only play through the dark. They’re just something about, uh, about Fallen Empires being part of that Block. It doesn’t make sense to me. Not necessarily block, but format. So, uh, yeah, those are the, these are the sets that we’re including in this event.
[00:12:12] Dan Schriever (@CavedanMTG): So I’m not up on all the lore of Old School.
Is this a schism in the community? Like, whether you include Fallen Empires or not?
[00:12:19] Nick: Yeah, Old School is, uh, another, other term for it is 9394. So any sets that were released in 1993 and 1994, And, uh, as I mentioned, Fallen Empires, unfortunately, falls into the very end of that block, but so, it’s a format for players to appreciate the old cards, to not get blown out by the most modern, whatever the current modern Horizon set is That overpowers almost everything, and a way for you to appreciate what the game once was.
[00:12:56] Dan Schriever (@CavedanMTG): Oh boy. Okay, so the main phase is Seal Deck Alpha to Revised. Is that actually what it sounds like? Are you actually going to open Alpha and play games with it?
[00:13:07] Nick: Uh, it sounds pretty crazy, but yeah, that’s definitely what we’re doing here. So for the attendees, I’ve given them the option of what they can choose to bring to the event.
And I would imagine Many are going to bring certain starters, but I myself will be opening an alpha starter. Oh
[00:13:29] Dan Schriever (@CavedanMTG): my god.
All right, so you’re actually going to do it. You’re not bluffing. I’m going to hold you to this. You’re actually opening the alpha starter?
[00:13:40] Nick: 100%. Absolutely. Yep.
[00:13:43] Dan Schriever (@CavedanMTG): An alpha starter that has been sealed, that you’ve held for what, 30 years? 31 years? What is it?
[00:13:50] Nick: Uh, well, actually, I have, I have several of them, but this, the one that I’m going to open was acquired not quite 30 years ago, probably only about 12, 12 ish, maybe 15 years ago from, uh, someone that has some pretty significant connections to the origins of, of magic.
So.
[00:14:13] Dan Schriever (@CavedanMTG): Okay. So little clues are snapping into place here. So this is not the only Alpha Star attack is what I’m hearing. So we’re not dipping into the brick.
[00:14:22] Nick: No, the brick is, uh, is not going to be cracked for this event, we’ll say.
[00:14:29] Dan Schriever (@CavedanMTG): I have many questions, Nick. I have many, many questions, um, because everything you’re telling me so far sounds crazy, but I feel like we haven’t even gotten to the core of it yet.
Okay, so you’re going to open alpha. I, for my part, will be opening Revised, my beloved Revised, that’s, was the set that was on the shelves when I first started playing. I think that’s true for many of like, people who identify as old timers. Yeah, we just vividly remember Revised. You know, 7. 95, you get, you know, head down to the source at Snelling and Larpenter, hand over your allowance money, you get a beautiful pack of Revised.
Um, that’s what I’ll be playing. What are we going to do once we open this?
[00:15:07] Nick: So we are truly doing Sealed. Now, my first tournament experience was Sealed, Shuffle, and Play. You didn’t even look at your cards in the first game. Sealed, Shuffle, and Play. That has always meant something to me moving forward, right?
It’s, it’s not necessarily about, about your skill. It’s not how good you build the deck. Uh, it was playing and we’re not going to quite go that deep, but we’re going to take the 60 cards that we open in our Starter, and we’re going to make the best 40 card deck. Now even with that, the decks are going to be fairly underpowered and you are going to be restricted by the lands you open in your deck.
This is very important to understand. You can’t just go to the land station and add whatever land you want. You’re playing with the lands you have opened.
[00:16:06] Dan Schriever (@CavedanMTG): So if memory serves In a Reviah starter deck, I would get maybe four of each land, maybe five of a couple lands.
[00:16:14] Nick: Yeah, you will have a good breakdown of lands.
It’s not evenly distributed, but yes, there are many, many basics in, uh, in a starter, including a potential of islands in the Alpha Starter.
[00:16:33] Dan Schriever (@CavedanMTG): So you could potentially open a rare island where there were two islands on the Alpha Rare Sheet, famously.
[00:16:40] Nick: Well, close. There are two, two art styles, but there are actually five islands on the Alpha Rare Sheet.
So it’s 121 cards. And there are no documented pictures of an alpha sheet, only beta sheets, and those have four islands on them, but remember, Volcanic Island was not printed in alpha.
The Rarity and Significance of Alpha
[00:17:05] Nick: So, that would be an additional island, so you would have five islands in your, uh, on the alpha rare sheet, which is roughly a, you have about four percent chance of opening a rare, uh, excuse me, an island rare.
[00:17:22] Dan Schriever (@CavedanMTG): So, five out of 121 alpha rares are islands, and you get two rares in an alpha stardeck. Right. Okay. So I gotta ask, I mean, how would you feel if you opened one of those? Cause on the one hand, it’s not an exciting card, but on the other hand, that’s one of the more playable rares you can open, is the island.
It’s probably one of the more helpful cards you could open for your deck.
[00:17:42] Nick: Absolutely. If you want to play blue, it’s not the worst, it’s not the worst rare you can open. It’s probably better than many of the blue rares. Yes.
[00:17:54] Dan Schriever (@CavedanMTG): Alright, so we’re gonna have our starters, we’re gonna do our best. to assemble a deck and we can talk a little bit more later about what those games will actually be like, but, um, tell me a little bit more. So what’s the shape of the event?
[00:18:06] Nick: All right, so we’re gonna, we’re gonna play a quick three rounds with our 40 card decks keeping record, okay?
[00:18:13] Speaker 3: And
[00:18:14] Nick: um, after three rounds, we’re going to have a little bit of fun. Everyone must submit a 1990s playlist of music, and I’m gonna crack a Legends starter, and we’re gonna Rochester. That pack based on your musical preference. So you better, you better bring your A game with your, with your nineties music.
If you want a really crappy legends rare, right? So that legends pack will be Rochester. So. Everyone will get, there’s going to be about 15 people in the event. Everyone should get a pick, and probably none or maybe one or two of them will be playable and applicable for your deck. You can add that to your deck moving forward.
We’re also, to sweeten the, sweeten the desire to win those first three rounds, I’m going to offer an Arabian Nights booster pack after the first three rounds, again to be Rochester’d. So here, you only get a pick if you’re in the top eight there, literally, because Arabian Nights booster packs only had eight cards in them.
So, if you’re, uh, if you’re Ninth place, similar to, uh, to a Pro Tour or, uh, an SCG Open, you’re on the outside looking in.
[00:19:43] Dan Schriever (@CavedanMTG): Ninth on breakers. Yes, ninth on breakers. If you have to provide a sealed
[00:19:48] Nick: deck event. So, uh, this is, so that will be the intermission right there. And then we’re going to all get a booster pack.
of, of either alpha through revised, again, your choice of what you want to, what you want to bring and you can add that pack to your pool also. Now, critical here will be the basic lands that you’re opening. Uh, that’s roughly 25 to 30 percent basic lands in those packs. So, uh, you will be very happy to open those.
At that point, they had fixed the island rare. Problem, so you, you will not open an island rare unless you’re opening alpha or beta. Um, potentially unlimited. Can’t remember what that sheet looks like. But most will be open and revised, I’m sure, so you won’t get an island rare.
[00:20:41] Dan Schriever (@CavedanMTG): Yeah, I kind of think you’re going to be at a severe disadvantage playing with alpha.
Great. Because revised had But it had three rares per starter deck, is that correct?
[00:20:52] Nick: Uh, no, I believe that revised starters have two rares, yes. Oh. Yes. Okay. I think once they moved to fourth edition, they upped it to a little more value for that 7. 95.
[00:21:05] Dan Schriever (@CavedanMTG): Gotcha. Okay, but you’ll have to contend with heavy hitters like Eye for an Eye or something coming out of the revised pack.
[00:21:12] Nick: Yeah, I guess, uh, out of the revised pack, you know, I won’t be happy to be, to be staring down a Serendib Afreet for sure, but that’s, that’s all right. My cards will look prettier.
[00:21:25] Dan Schriever (@CavedanMTG): So we’ve got our starter decks, we’ve. Stripped it down for parts, tried to assemble 40 playable cards. Hopefully we’ve added a card from Legends, maybe a card from Arabian Nights, and now we’re adding this booster pack.
You know, I always wondered, Nick, do you know the answer to this? Like, is, is the idea of the 15 card sideboard, is that meant to be modeled on this idea that you would start with just one pack and then you would buy a booster pack?
[00:21:49] Nick: That’s an interesting question. I don’t, I don’t know that it was ever framed in that capacity.
Uh, But that, that’s interesting. Never thought about that before.
[00:21:59] Dan Schriever (@CavedanMTG): Well, 60 and 15, they just feel like sacred numbers in Magic’s history, but I just wonder if they go back to the very beginning by accident, or just by Well, remember,
[00:22:07] Nick: in Alpha, you only had to play 40 cards, so the original rules of the game were 40 card minimum decks.
So, I don’t know that 60 and 15 had any relevance, uh, maybe as tournament play started, but the original, the original deck’s really only 40 cards.
[00:22:27] Dan Schriever (@CavedanMTG): If you have the foresight to take cards out of your deck, but if you just shuffle and play like you’re saying, you start with 60 and you add 15.
[00:22:35] Nick: Right, right. I think it’s an interesting coincidence, but I’d be shocked if wizards had the foresight to, uh, to look that far ahead.
[00:22:44] Dan Schriever (@CavedanMTG): So, our decks are rapidly powering up, and then what happens?
[00:22:49] Nick: All right, so We’re battling it out,
[00:22:50] Dan Schriever (@CavedanMTG): what happens
[00:22:51] Nick: next? So we’ve added the alt the might of a additional booster to our pool, and we’ll still be playing very underwhelming decks, enjoying them thoroughly. So we’ll play four rounds there, and at the end, so we’ll have played seven rounds for the day, uh, based on your total record, then I will be Rochestering another pack.
We’re going to Rochester a beta booster. So, there’s some real incentive to win and go 7 0, or 6 1, or whatever it’s gonna take. You want that first pick, right? And The wise person will not necessarily pick the rare. It might be the land that you want more than the rare.
[00:23:36] Dan Schriever (@CavedanMTG): Well, the tournament’s over at that point, right?
So it’s just, you take whatever card you want for your collection and go home, or is that not the case?
[00:23:43] Nick: The tournament is over for the day, but who knows about the future?
[00:23:47] Dan Schriever (@CavedanMTG): Ah, okay, alright. So I do notice here on the invitation, it says the first annual Envy Invitational. So the seeds are being planted. This may be just the first time we’re having this conversation, so you’re envisioning we will save these decks.
Bring it back next year.
[00:24:03] Nick: That is my intention. Uh, I think it’s great to be able to get together, to have something for old friends to look forward to once a year and, uh, would ideally like to see this happen about once a year. Yes. I
[00:24:17] Dan Schriever (@CavedanMTG): mean, it sounds fantastic. Um, it sounds more than a little bit crazy. Uh, there was a question that I think you, you wisely raised about security.
If we are going to do this in future years, what’s to stop me from going and buying all the top revised rares from my favorite marketplace and coming back with a juice deck next year. And you had a solution that’s, I don’t know if you’re still thinking this, but it was a shocking solution.
[00:24:42] Nick: Yeah. I think that the card pool needs to stay intact.
And how do we do that? Right, how do we ensure that someone doesn’t go and juice up their deck in between events? Well, taking a little inspiration from the Pro Tour, we’re gonna stamp every single card so that you know it originated from this event, including the prize cards.
[00:25:08] Dan Schriever (@CavedanMTG): You’re talking about like metaphorical stamps, right?
Like writing on a sleeve with a sharpie.
[00:25:13] Nick: Certainly not. No. Certainly not. These are going to be stamped with permanent ink, and that’s how you’re going to know they originated from the Envy Invitational.
[00:25:26] Dan Schriever (@CavedanMTG): Including the Alpha Certer?
[00:25:27] Nick: All 60 of them.
[00:25:34] Dan Schriever (@CavedanMTG): Stamped with what? I mean, I have to ask, because, so you say inspiration comes from Grand Prix, right? Where this is a security measure that you would take if you ever, ever make it to the second day of a Grand Prix or a Pro Tour. The judge staff has very kindly, like, taken these little children’s stamps and, like, stamped a star or a smiley face onto all the cards.
Is that what we’re looking at? Like a smiley face, Black Lotus?
[00:25:56] Nick: Uh, not quite, it’s a custom stamp that I’ve had made and I’ll let each individual stamp their own card. They can put it wherever they want, they can cover the artwork, whatever they choose to do with it. But yeah, it’ll be a custom stamp that will indicate where the card’s origin was.
And I’ll say, I took a little inspiration not only from Pro Tours and from Grand Prix’s but, uh, I think there’s something about Provenance and I can remember being at a Grand Prix once and looking at these alpha cards, and they had, they had numbers written on them in pen, not even nicely, numbers. And apparently there was a collector years and years and years ago, and he had numbered all of his alpha cards.
Just one through whatever. And that was a way for him to identify that they were his. And today, those cards are actually sought after, and people try to acquire those and put those into their deck, because there’s a story behind it.
[00:27:01] Dan Schriever (@CavedanMTG): What’s the name of that series, just out of curiosity? Oh, jeez, I’m sure it
[00:27:05] Nick: has some name, but I couldn’t tell you what it is.
[00:27:10] Dan Schriever (@CavedanMTG): Well, I have to ask, Nick, like, why aren’t we just doing this? I mean, we’ve got Sharpies. Sharpies are cheap. Yeah. You could just number all the cards.
[00:27:16] Nick: Don’t tempt me, Dan. Don’t tempt me. I think the stamp is more, more easily, uh, It would be hard to replicate the stamp, let’s put it that way.
[00:27:27] Dan Schriever (@CavedanMTG): Okay. So, I did know about this, I must confess, and actually, I reached out on our Faithless Brain Discord for a little help.
Judge Rob, if you’re listening, uh, thank you for the advice on which ink to use. I did not explain what it was for, but Judge Rob is just a pillar of the Magic community in general, and we’re lucky enough to have him as a listener on the pod. But yeah, he’s been involved in the stamping of many, many cards.
He had some advice. He said, it’s going to take longer than you think to let the ink dry. Right. So I guess when they’re preparing for a grand pre day tour, a pro tour, you know, they lay out several packs at once, kind of go down the row with stamp, stamp, stamp, stamp, stamp, stamp, stamp, stamp. And you don’t touch them, right.
At least not until you finish the row. Like, step away for a couple minutes, let them dry. Don’t go immediately trying to shuffle those up. But I don’t know, man, when you said that, I got a little nervous, Nick. I was thinking, you know, what if this was just, like, the Smudge Invitational?
[00:28:20] Nick: Ah, there might be a couple Smudges here or there, but I think we’ll, we’ll be respectful to let them dry the best we can.
[00:28:28] Dan Schriever (@CavedanMTG): Oh my gosh. Okay. So I have many questions and this whole thing, this whole concept just sounds both exciting and absurd. I want to ask you about the why. I think many people want to ask you about the why, but before we get to that, maybe we can say a little more about the what and just get some of the basic facts out there.
Let’s talk a little bit about Alphanet. You were explaining a little bit about what a starter deck is, but it’s kind of sad to think that we actually haven’t seen starters in many years.
The Origins of Magic: Alpha to Revised
[00:28:57] Dan Schriever (@CavedanMTG): But for those who are like not as familiar with Alpha, Beta, Unlimited, Revised, and what you refer to as the Four Horsemen sets, like what exactly are we talking about here?
What is Alpha?
[00:29:07] Nick: Yeah, so Alpha is where the game began, right? That’s Richard Garfield’s original design, and that was the first set. So Alpha is where it all It has some of the most powerful cards ever created, some of maybe the weakest cards ever created, and a little bit in between. And when the game originated, you could buy a starter, which is where you accumulated a larger amount of cards, or your booster to supplement that.
And, uh, that’s how the game started. That’s, uh, I would look back fondly at that.
[00:29:46] Dan Schriever (@CavedanMTG): So, the lore, as I understand it, is that Alpha, the very first printing of the game, was debuted at Gen Con in 1993, does that sound right? Yeah,
[00:29:55] Nick: back in 1993. Yep, exactly. Sold out immediately. You just couldn’t even get your hands on it.
[00:30:01] Dan Schriever (@CavedanMTG): So there really wasn’t ever a chance to buy Alpha from the store.
[00:30:05] Nick: No, you would have had to really have, um, been very lucky because the game was a wild success right away. So we often hear, if I was around back then, right, I would do this or that or the other thing. But, um, You and I both started playing around Revised, so I wasn’t even around during Alpha or Beta, which is only a matter of a couple of months, but even when you and I started playing in Revised, it was uncommon to find Revised packs around.
So nevermind Alpha, beta and Unlimited, which were a fraction of what the revised set was. The same was true for the, uh, for Arabians Antiquities legends, and maybe a little bit of the dark that that set was, was not as well received. But you couldn’t just walk into a gaming store and say, I’ll take a box of, of Alpha.
I’ll take a box of revised. They were very, very hard to come by, even back then.
[00:31:05] Dan Schriever (@CavedanMTG): I do distinctly remember the first time that magic cards, like, showed up at the lunchroom at school. I think it must have been in fifth grade, something like that, not to date myself. But yeah, white boarded cards, nobody had anything before Revised, and what was so fascinating as I was immediately drawn into this game was discovering that there was already this lore around.
these first sets, right? People were whispering about Alpha, Beta, um, the Power Nine, cards that you’ve never actually seen. Looking back at it now, that wasn’t that long ago. It all happened within the span of a year, is that right? Alpha to Revised?
[00:31:39] Nick: Yeah, so Alpha was released in the summer of A 1993, and Beta was a couple of months after, Unlimited a couple months after that, and Revised was released in April of 1994, so you’re talking less than one year from Alpha all the way to the release of Revised.
Pretty short span. The game was just so popular that people were consuming it as quickly as it would come out.
[00:32:11] Dan Schriever (@CavedanMTG): And Revised included reprints from Antiquities and Arabian Nights. So, four expansion sets had already come out in that year.
[00:32:20] Nick: Uh, yes. I can’t remember when, when Legends came out. It might have been slightly after Revised, after April, but it was Around that time, yes.
Uh, and then, excuse me, Legends and The Dark, it was all around the same time.
[00:32:39] Dan Schriever (@CavedanMTG): Okay, so, if we’re talking about an Alpha Starter Deck, which you are going to gleefully consume at this event, we’re talking about something that was basically never for sale, right? So, I guess my question is, how rare are these? I mean, if I wanted to replicates this experience.
Could I even find one out in the wild?
[00:32:59] Nick: Well, to give you an idea, Peter Atkinson, the founder of Wizards of the Coast back in March of 2021, put out the actual quantities of each starter and booster. So for Alpha, there were 26, 000 starters created. That’s total. And there were 70, 000 boosters That makes a total print run of 2.
6 million cards. But if you think of 26, 000 starters, it might sound like a lot, but
[00:33:37] Dan Schriever (@CavedanMTG): it really doesn’t sound like a lot.
[00:33:39] Nick: Imagine how many starters would be consumed on a pre release date nowadays, right? It would be millions. So, there are very, very few alpha starters left. No one knows how many there truly are.
I’m sure you could source them, uh, if you were to, to, to really look, right? Sometimes your pocketbook defines, uh, your ability to do what your, your desires are, but, uh, they are very rare at the, at the very least.
[00:34:10] Dan Schriever (@CavedanMTG): I think I’ve never seen one. Like, I’ve never seen one, I’ve never heard of anyone, um, besides you even talking about these as a thing that you could hold in your hand, much less open.
[00:34:19] Nick: Yeah, most people I would say that own them probably own one as a collector, which I truly appreciate. There are definitely far few, fewer that will have several. I think that would, that would be fairly uncommon.
[00:34:36] Dan Schriever (@CavedanMTG): Okay, so you dropped in briefly that this is not your first rodeo with opening alpha. So it sounds like you’ve tasted this galaxy before.
You’ve opened alpha starters before.
[00:34:46] Nick: I have, I have. So, um. Again, when I started during Revise, you mentioned that you would see white border cards and every once in a while, you would hear of a card that existed, but you had never seen it, right? And okay, that’s not, that card can’t really exist. And then once in a while, you would see an Arabian night card pop into a deck somewhere.
Uh, for me it was Guardian Beast. That card, I’d heard stories of it, I’d heard people building decks around it, and that’s a card where if it’s in play, Your artifacts cannot be basically targeted, destroyed, etc. And so people would play like Neveneril’s Disc and try to create a primitive combo, so
[00:35:34] Dan Schriever (@CavedanMTG): Guardian Beast, famously powerful because it only costs one black mana.
If you’ve never seen Arabian Nights before, you don’t know to look very carefully to see that that three is kind of faded there. Juz Amjin just calls Black Black. I was convinced of that for like a year.
[00:35:47] Nick: Yeah, the Arabian, Arabian Night print run had some, uh, printing anomalies where if you don’t look closely enough, you’ll pay a lot less to cast a card.
Nostalgic Magic: Sealed Event Memories
[00:35:57] Nick: Um, but in any case, so, so there were, there were cards that you thought existed or your friend might’ve told you they existed and they saw one. And, uh, that was always something special and it’s fun to crack them in. Let them into the world.
[00:36:16] Dan Schriever (@CavedanMTG): So I gotta ask, I mean, what is it like? Walk me through it. All
[00:36:20] Nick: right.
So, uh, so as I mentioned, I, I heard of these cards, saw these cards for many years. And then back around, uh, the year 2000, I finally, uh, finally mustered up a couple of alpha starters and an unlimited starter and some unlimited boosters and did A sealed event like this with my brother and my oldest magic friend, who I’ve now been playing magic with for close to 30 years.
And I’ll tell you, I was hooked at that moment. I was, um, opening those packs and we did exactly what my first tournament experience was, shuffle and play. So we just cracked them. We did sleeve them, we’re not heathens, and we just shuffled and played a three player game the same way you would have played Magic in 1993.
[00:37:17] Dan Schriever (@CavedanMTG): I mean, you say you would sleeve them, what evidence do I have that you would sleeve them? You’re talking about stamping the cards.
[00:37:24] Nick: Well, those decks, those decks I did keep intact, and they exist in the same sleeves that I cracked. Years ago, around 2000, maybe 2001. And uh, they are just left in their deck and I very, very rarely will correct them out and we’ll just play them with some, some old friends and get the feel of what the game once was.
[00:37:47] Dan Schriever (@CavedanMTG): So if you did that in 2001, it is now 2024 . Like that is insane. So when you did that nostalgia event, the game was what? Seven years old?
[00:37:58] Nick: Yeah, it was, and it’s still, even at that point, it had amazing nostalgia, just hair standing up on your arm, opening a pack, and this is, this is 7 or 8 years into the game and it already felt like this.
So now we’re 30 years plus in. And, uh, very much looking forward to what December 7th brings in that feeling.
[00:38:25] Dan Schriever (@CavedanMTG): Uh, I can’t wait, but part of me is wondering, will I be disappointed? Because as you’re describing shuffling up and playing with these decks, I mean, I remember some of those cards, they were not very playable.
I’m not actually expecting high quality gameplay out of this, like, what should I expect? You’ve done this before, like what will actually happen in these games?
[00:38:45] Nick: It’s a slow paced, a slow paced game and, uh, you will not be able to cast many of your spells, uh, for quite some time. So enjoy the scenery, tell stories of what the game was when you, when you played long ago, and winning a game of Magic, whether it was 1993 or 2024 feels the same.
It feels so good. And when you get to. So, to finally finish that last point of life, it doesn’t matter which card did it, it still feels great.
[00:39:21] Dan Schriever (@CavedanMTG): And then you wait until the end of the phase, because they don’t actually die until the phase is over. Exactly,
[00:39:25] Nick: exactly. We will be playing with Mana Burn, absolutely.
[00:39:29] Dan Schriever (@CavedanMTG): Oh, okay.
[00:39:30] Nick: Yeah.
[00:39:31] Dan Schriever (@CavedanMTG): All right, yeah, we need to get into some of the legal details of like, what these cards actually do, but that’s another conversation. All right, so, I think I’ve got a pretty good sense of the what of the event.
The Why Behind Opening Alpha Packs
[00:39:44] Dan Schriever (@CavedanMTG): Now, can I ask you about the why, because I got so many questions, Nick.
[00:39:47] Nick: Fire away.
[00:39:50] Dan Schriever (@CavedanMTG): All right. Where to begin? All right, it’s 2024, and these alpha packs are from 1993. You’ve been keeping this product for three decades now, or someone has, and you’ve been the current steward of it. You understand how rare and precious this is. Why are you opening it? Why now? After all these years?
[00:40:11] Nick: Well, I had once thought that this stuff would be passed down to my son, but he’s really not too interested in magic.
So, I consider my close playgroup family, and I would like to share that experience with them. It does happen to coincide with my 50th birthday, so, um, a true way to celebrate a birthday for sure. But again, it’s, um, it’s about trying to pass the experience to Those that I care about and give them the feeling that I once had for sure.
[00:40:48] Dan Schriever (@CavedanMTG): Amazing. So happy birthday in advance. This is gonna be quite the party. It is. It
[00:40:54] Speaker 3: is.
[00:40:56] Dan Schriever (@CavedanMTG): And it’s encouraging to know that some part of me is replacing your son. So that means a lot. All right, so that’s the why now, but maybe the bigger question is just like, why, Nick, why?
Financial Implications and Value of Alpha Packs
[00:41:09] Dan Schriever (@CavedanMTG): Let’s talk financials for just a second here.
I tried to find some record of when the last time an Alpha Starduct changed hands was. There’s not much records of it, but it seems like a few years back one was sold for north of 100, 000. Does that sound right? All right.
[00:41:25] Nick: Yeah, you could probably find one right now in that range, I would imagine. Yeah, absolutely.
[00:41:31] Dan Schriever (@CavedanMTG): Sealed. 100, 000 sealed. Now, once you open it, it’s just the cards inside.
[00:41:38] Nick: Oh, you are incinerating value. Incinerating.
[00:41:42] Dan Schriever (@CavedanMTG): So you’re looking at incinerating about 100, 000 by opening this? Is that fair to say?
[00:41:49] Nick: Well, that depends on the metric you’re looking at this. If you were simply looking to sell the cards, yes, I am a firm believer that life is about experiences, right?
The name of the game is Magic the Gathering. This is going to bring together friends of mine from across the country, west coast, down south, north, east, middle, from everywhere. So, there’s A difficult, there’s no easy way to put money to that.
[00:42:21] Dan Schriever (@CavedanMTG): I mean, don’t get me wrong, I love hanging out with the guys, we’re going to have a good time, but for 100, 000, Nick, you could have a lot of experiences, buy some drugs, you know, go to a concert, take a trip, there’s lots of things you could do with this.
I mean, this is, this is crazy. You acknowledge this is crazy.
[00:42:37] Nick: Those are all easily replicated experiences, right? Opening an alpha starter and then potentially losing an alpha black lotus to your opponent is something you cannot easily replicate.
Playing for Ante: High Stakes Magic
[00:42:54] Dan Schriever (@CavedanMTG): Now hang on, okay, you’re gonna play this for ante? You’re gonna play your alpha deck against revised decks for ante?
[00:42:59] Nick: We are playing as the game was designed. We’re playing for ante. Every single match is being played for ante.
[00:43:13] Dan Schriever (@CavedanMTG): Ah, okay. So, so this is gonna be like a, like a bounty on your head. Getting paired up with Nick is an exciting event. Is it one ante card per game or one per match?
[00:43:24] Nick: We’re gonna do one per match. One per game would relegate losers to not being able to have decks, uh, pretty quickly if you lose. More than one land per match, you would just be out of, there’d be no way to play.
So we’re gonna do a match, and, uh, it’s gonna be a blind ante, so you shuffle your deck, present it to your opponent, and they’re gonna cut it if they wish, and top card is your ante card. Actually, I believe the original rules might have been your eighth card was the ante. In any case, we’re gonna follow with the So,
[00:44:05] Dan Schriever (@CavedanMTG): one anti card per match, a card like Contract from Below, which is one of the more broken cards ever printed, black for a sorcery, draw 7, the 8th card goes to your anti, it gets a little like slightly more interesting if you’re anti ing another card for the match.
Like, you might win that game, but you might lose the match.
[00:44:25] Nick: Yeah, the anti cards are gonna be, gonna be played. They’re not many of them, so the chances of opening one are pretty minimal, but that would be quite a card. One black, draw seven? Yeah, I’ll take that.
[00:44:41] Dan Schriever (@CavedanMTG): Okay, so if I’m hearing you right, uh, you’re not expecting any kind of return on this, just the experience, just the memories. It’s not just that you’re opening this product, you’re also contributing from your supply.
[00:44:52] Nick: Yeah. Uh, so, they’re They’re coming from my personal collection. I don’t plan to sell these, plan to use them, uh, this hopefully will not be a one time event moving forward, and uh, no need to keep them pristine if you don’t plan on selling them.
[00:45:12] Dan Schriever (@CavedanMTG): Well, that anticipates my next question, right? Let’s, let’s talk about the stamping. Let’s have a serious sit down slash intervention about the stamping. How can you stamp alpha, like seriously, how can you do that?
[00:45:25] Nick: I’ve made up my mind, and I want this to be something that we do moving forward. I want to keep the integrity of the decks, and, uh, you know, we’re not talking about stamping The One Ring.
Any card that we open, there are multiples of out in the world. We’re not ruining anything there.
[00:45:46] Dan Schriever (@CavedanMTG): Well, if you write the number one in a sharpie on this, that’s that’s the one of one from the Invitational event. Okay, so you don’t consider this to be defacing the cards or destroying their value?
[00:46:00] Nick: No. Maybe
[00:46:01] Dan Schriever (@CavedanMTG): you do.
I mean,
[00:46:02] Nick: yeah, it’s gonna destroy their value, but What does something have? What worth is something if you don’t plan on selling it? So, so I’m not, not too worried about that. We can get into another way to, to destroy cards in my eyes, but that might, that might affect others opinions in the community.
[00:46:22] Dan Schriever (@CavedanMTG): Now is the perfect timing.
Let’s get into it. So I think we understand now what the event is and kind of what your mindset is.
Magic’s Evolution and Universes Beyond
[00:46:30] Dan Schriever (@CavedanMTG): Let’s step back, like, bigger picture. Nothing is happening in a vacuum. Like, for you, is happening an important moment in your life, milestone birthday, a chance to gather friends from all across the world.
We’re really excited for it, but within the lifespan of the game, right? Magic is now in its 31st year. Is that right?
[00:46:48] Nick: Yeah. 1993.
[00:46:51] Dan Schriever (@CavedanMTG): We’re at a bit of a crossroads. This is something we’ve talked about in this podcast. Everyone’s talking about it. Recent weeks, they’ve talked about the future of Magic will be crossovers.
The future will be universes beyond. Half the sets will be Marvel or Final Fantasy or SpongeBob or whatever it is. And like that, that’s Magic going forward. Yeah. For me, I think for many people, it’s prompted a lot of soul searching about what magic should be or could be or what it was. So it’s timely. I know you didn’t intend this way.
I think you’ve been planning this event for a while, but it just so happens to coincide with this crisis moment where I’m struggling to figure out like what magic means to me. So is that part of your mindset here? Like, is this intended to be a return to the essence of magic?
[00:47:36] Nick: It’s a hundred percent to return to the essence of what the game was.
When opening a pack meant something to your deck. You could actually improve your deck by opening a pack. And that’s not set anymore. Now you can go online and find what the best 60 cards are in a deck, and just purchase them through whatever site you want. And that was not the way the game started. You opened a pack and had a legitimate chance of a card in your pack significantly improving your deck.
And that’s a feeling that, that most Magic players probably don’t even remember at this point. They, they might have from their early days of playing. There’s a purity to that, in my opinion.
[00:48:25] Dan Schriever (@CavedanMTG): What do you think about Universes Beyond and the direction Magic is going?
[00:48:30] Nick: Well, it’s leaving behind Old guys like me.
But Magic really is about the gathering. It is about the gathering. It’s fortunate they never changed the name there. And I guess if it brings in additional players that develop friendships with people that they might not have connected with otherwise, I can get behind that. Am I interested in, in Marvel cards and, and SpongeBob and this and that and the other thing?
Not necessarily. I can remember being at an event with you recently and I saw a Transformers card and I said, what the hell is this? Now, I grew up in the prime of Transformers. I loved Transformers as a kid. It doesn’t speak to me when it comes to magic. Um, it doesn’t make any sense to me, but I probably was not.
Why that set was designed, right? It was designed to draw in players, people that were not playing, that were Transformers fans, and said, what’s this magic thing?
[00:49:35] Dan Schriever (@CavedanMTG): That’s a very diplomatic answer, Nick. I mean, I think this is still a live question. As you just mentioned, we were recently at an event, we were playing, the current format.
You’re playing Modern, which in a few months from now will include Marvel. So it’s not like we’ve sworn off the current formats, but it’s just going to hit different, I think. It’s definitely just going to hit different.
[00:49:55] Nick: Yeah. Magic’s a drug, right? Can’t swear it off that easily for sure. But, um, is it a direction that, that I’m excited for?
Uh, that Wizards is taking, no, definitely not. Am I gonna stop playing because of it? Probably not, but not something that is appealing to me in any way. There’s something about the characters of Magic being their own that was appealing to me. Dominaria was amazing, and it feels tainted now.
[00:50:29] Dan Schriever (@CavedanMTG): I’m so glad you said that.
So I don’t have to. So I feel that way too. And it’s so interesting, right? Like I was listening to an episode of The Wristleavables about Alpha, which you highly recommend to me. Fantastic episode. Shout out to Patrick and Cedric. And they were talking about what is the flavor of Alpha, right? It sounded like they were saying the idea to even assign names to the cards, like instead of just Dragon from like the D& D manual, to call it a Shivan Dragon.
Or to call it Sarah Angel instead of just Angel. Kind of came late in the process, but somehow it just like set this trajectory. Like for me, I didn’t know that. I just assumed that there was this rich lore behind Benalia or what is a Sen’jir? Well, go to Homelands, you’ll find out all about the Baron Sen’jir and his family.
That to me felt like a story that I didn’t know the whole story, but I felt. Like, it had gravitas, it had meaning, and I just have just been clinging to that for so long that it feels like I’m being personally wounded when Wizards is kind of just throwing all that away.
[00:51:32] Nick: I’m with you. I am with you, man.
It’s, uh, I don’t know, the universe beyond feels like a cheap knockoff to me. And, uh, it stains a little bit of the original intent of the game.
[00:51:49] Dan Schriever (@CavedanMTG): So, talking about Wizards of the Coast, I think at a few different points they have tried to celebrate the game’s history. Sometimes they’ve succeeded, and sometimes they’ve flopped spectacularly. I’m thinking of the 1, 000 booster packs that we were invited to buy, was that last year, two years ago? I don’t know.
Before that, I think for Magic’s 25th anniversary, they had a very cool series of events that reminds me a lot of what you’re trying to do here. They had the beta draft, right, where you could actually do a proper Rochester draft, which is a form of booster draft where you lay out the whole pack face up so everyone could see it.
A proper beta draft using 24 packs of beta and ordinary planeswalkers could qualify for this, right? There were a bunch of massive tournaments. It was hard to even get a slot on those. If you won, you would get a seat at that table. I believe if you won that top eight, you would get an alpha starter deck.
Does that sound right?
[00:52:43] Nick: Yeah, that was the prize. Yes.
[00:52:46] Dan Schriever (@CavedanMTG): And this was a big deal at the time, right? So many notable pros tried and succeeded in qualifying for that. I think Ben Stark was one of the finalists, LSV was in the top eight, the event was won by Tim Rivera, who I believe was also a former pro player.
LSV said at the time, That if he won the event, that he would never open his alpha starter deck, right? He just felt like something like this is so precious that if you ever open an alpha starter deck, he would be sad because there would just be that much less magic in the world. And I think a lot of people Well, we all wish we could be there, but the sentiment made sense that, yeah, it’s almost like reckless and wasteful to open these packs instead of preserving them for all eternity.
What would you say to that?
[00:53:33] Nick: I would agree in most people’s situations, that’s accurate, right? And I’m a collector myself, I love collecting. If I had one alpha starter, I probably wouldn’t be cracking it for this event. But these cards are going to get to see play, which, um, in some ways actually is more special than them just sitting in a sealed deck.
So he says a little, there’s a little less magic in the world. I might argue there’s 60 cards that will get to see the light of day, and potentially, have an impact on a game that sitting in a sealed deck would not. But, uh, I can imagine having one sealed deck wanting to keep it, because that is a piece of history, for sure.
The Essence of Magic: Playing vs. Collecting
[00:54:16] Dan Schriever (@CavedanMTG): So you have the opinion that magic is meant to be played, that a card is fulfilling its destiny when it’s out there on the battlefield, like getting shuffled up?
[00:54:24] Nick: Oh, you’re gonna trigger me. Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely, I have, uh, magic should be played, for sure. It was designed as a collectible card game, yes, but, uh, watching a card go to a plastic, slabbed graveyard is, uh, it eats at my soul.
And I can understand there are individuals that appreciate the collectability of that, but, um, never gonna be what
[00:54:57] Dan Schriever (@CavedanMTG): All right, so I gotta ask, because I don’t know who’s gonna listen to this, um, I imagine there’s a chance that someone who identifies as part of the magic finance community would come across this. Are you deliberately trying to hurt them? Are you, are you trying to break their hearts with the stamping of the cards, with the opening of the sealed product, with the shuffling, the mashing and riffle shuffling, like bending the elf cards, doing a beautiful arc as we shuffle them?
[00:55:25] Nick: I’m trying to have fun with my friends. Whatever they want to, whatever those magic finance people want to take away from it, that’s fine. They can control their finances and I’ll control mine.
[00:55:35] Dan Schriever (@CavedanMTG): I’m going to use my cousin Brian here as an example. Much love to you, Brian. I apologize in advance for having made you listen to this episode.
So he and I are roughly the same age, but he’s been more on the collector side of magic and he loves going after the gem mints, right? And he can tell me how many quad nines there are of this or that common card. I think he’s horrified. I think he’s heartbroken if he hasn’t thrown his phone down in rage by this point in the podcast.
So what would you say to him, right? Like, there are not very many chances left for people who are trying to collect, you know, gem, mint, land of royals or whatever, to like complete that set. And here you’re going to be stamping it, shuffling it up.
[00:56:16] Nick: We are, and I guess that the collectability of the game maybe in some way ties into different deck building styles, right?
Some people just want to build the best deck, be the most competitive, that’s okay. I’m a brewer, I’m okay playing tier 4, 5 decks. As a collector, you might want to collect decks. The gem meant slab cards or you might wanna collect playable, and I think it’s okay to do either. I’m sure this is going to enrage some people.
The intent is to have fun with friends. And I’m going to enjoy some people getting mad at what we’re doing, too. I
[00:57:02] Dan Schriever (@CavedanMTG): mean, it’s payback in a way, because we’ve had to watch so many openings and so many slabbings over the years. Who’s the voice for the cards, right? You’re trying to free the cards.
[00:57:13] Nick: That’s right.
These cards are free range, right? There’s no antibiotics in these cards, just totally free to roam the world.
[00:57:26] Dan Schriever (@CavedanMTG): Okay, so do you have a message for the finance community? Like, is it fair to say you consider them the enemy?
[00:57:32] Nick: Oh, I don’t know if they’re the enemy. Just not my, just not my taste. Unfortunately, I get to deal with my cards when I see fit.
[00:57:42] Dan Schriever (@CavedanMTG): A good diplomatic answer. What about Wizards of the Coast? If someone from Wizards were listening, do you have a message for them?
[00:57:50] Nick: Well, I think we talked a little bit about Um, Universe Beyond, and, and that ship has sailed, that’s never turning around, but I would say I recently saw a commercial or a release for Foundations, and it spoke to me very much, it was about a kid You know, getting a magic pack and then there’s a bunch of flashbacks and kid buying a pack and his sister saying, oh, come play with me.
I think they correctly identified there’s a ton of nostalgia to be had with this, and maybe they’re trying to get back an older player base or have that player base bring it to the future. But, uh, I was impressed with that, with that release. And that’s what, The Envy Invitational is about, it’s about nostalgia.
So there’s a similarity between these.
[00:58:44] Dan Schriever (@CavedanMTG): Nostalgia and maybe just a hint of envy. That’s okay.
[00:58:48] Nick: We’ll take that, too.
[00:58:51] Dan Schriever (@CavedanMTG): So something that David and I have talked about on the podcast in recent episodes is that unfortunately, Nostalgia, it means strong feelings, love even. That’s something that wizards can’t monetize, they have tried to monetize.
If you remember the collector’s, what was it called? Collector’s boosters? Oh yeah, yep. What was that? 30th edition thousand dollar booster packs of these hideous looking cards, which, you know, they, they declared it a roaring success. It’s sold out, quote unquote. So now everyone like made their money.
[00:59:26] Nick: Trash. Trash. Not a single player that has love for the, the history of the game could respect that set. Now, if they wanted to release it in large scale and, and show what the cards were to people, but to have their, in their words, the limited equality, limited quantity, total trash, cannot get behind what was done there in any way.
And I am a true lover of the old cards. They look horrific, there’s just something about them. No. Nope, nope, nope.
[01:00:01] Dan Schriever (@CavedanMTG): They looked gross. It just made my skin crawl.
[01:00:05] Nick: Yeah.
[01:00:07] Dan Schriever (@CavedanMTG): On the financial side of it, I haven’t added this all up. Maybe you have, maybe you haven’t. Like, how much is being incinerated at this festival, if we’re going to call it that, in terms of like, value, quote unquote.
Could we think of that as in some way, like a protest against this idea that everything has to be monetized?
[01:00:26] Nick: I have a hard time trying to equate it that way. I really, I want it to be about the gathering, and this is, this is what it is to me. It’s not necessarily a protest. Am I crazy about all of the things that, that Wizards does nowadays?
No, I understand they’re a business, they got to do their thing. Please don’t take advantage of the players, but uh, this isn’t necessarily a protest. I’m sure people will be protesting what we’re about to do. And, uh, fortunately they don’t have any say in what’s going to happen.
[01:00:58] Dan Schriever (@CavedanMTG): Well, what do you think their objections will be?
I’m
[01:01:00] Nick: sure there’ll be objections to opening very old packs, definitely to stamping. Forgot to mention, in the anti games, if you lose, you have to sign and date it. So you’re further defacing the card. That is part of Provenance. Yes. That is part of the event going forward. Getting to play with someone else’s card that you’ve won feels so good.
[01:01:28] Dan Schriever (@CavedanMTG): I’m excited for the event. I think the part that I’m still wrestling with is, yeah, this idea that there’s just not much alpha left in the world, right? We could be killing the last unicorn and just devouring it. I’m sure it’s going to be delicious, but I will feel guilty afterward.
[01:01:46] Nick: There might be a little bit of guilt, but it’s not the last one.
I have more product and I hope one day that there’s, there’s a way to share this with, with the community. Uh, hopefully wizards will, will recognize that we need. A museum of some sort. We need something referencing the history. And, uh, and maybe that’s where the rest of the community gets to experience a little bit of this.
[01:02:11] Dan Schriever (@CavedanMTG): I’m so glad you brought that up. Because that is the question, right? Like, is, is this just for you and your buddies? Or is it somehow part of a celebration of the game’s history? Like, basically, why are we having this conversation and recording it and putting it out there? What would you say to the average Magic player?
[01:02:29] Nick: So, there’s two messages here. You asked me earlier about the message and was it a protest to, to finance and wizards and what they’re doing nowadays. So there’s two elements here. One, to the average Magic player, again it goes back to opening a pack and improving your deck. I can remember Being younger when Revised was out, trying to scrape up enough money to buy a booster pack so I could hopefully make my deck slightly better to play against my opponent.
And if you haven’t experienced that, I strongly suggest you to do an event like this in whatever With whatever sets you choose, but there is something special about being able to incrementally improve your deck and feel like it’s getting better versus just going online and purchasing whatever card you need.
So, Use that experience to gather with your friends, to get together, maybe you make some new connections, I don’t know, that would be my message to the average player, and if I had to send a message to wizards on a whole, it is that we need some way to, to reference the past and what the game was, where it came from, where it is now.
I really hope one day there’s a museum of some sort that true fans of the game like you and I can appreciate. Maybe we bring Now our kid’s there, people in the future get to go. It’s over 30 years now, the game has had a massive impact on so many people’s lives that it would be great for us to have something to go to, to reference, and to look back at fondly.
[01:04:21] Dan Schriever (@CavedanMTG): A hundred percent agree. And if in some small way this event can be part of that history Even just making this podcast and talking about it a little bit, that’s a win for me. I’d go further and say, okay, if you do open the Black Lotus, stamp it with a smiley face, sign it over to me when you lose it to me and Auntie, when I take it with my contract from below, my stacked revised starter, we’ll put that Black Lotus in the museum, right?
That’s my promise in that one scenario.
[01:04:49] Nick: That’s a deal. You’ve been recorded. It’s a binding contract.
[01:04:54] Dan Schriever (@CavedanMTG): In very real, legally binding sense.
[01:04:56] Nick: Or the demonic attorney will come after you.
[01:04:59] Dan Schriever (@CavedanMTG): Exactly.
Event Documentation and Future Plans
[01:05:00] Dan Schriever (@CavedanMTG): Um, so speaking of the history, like, do you see this event as being something that you want to share, beyond just talking about it?
Like, are you going to document this? Are you going to film the opening?
[01:05:12] Nick: I think we’re going to document it in some way. We’re not far off from the event right now, so what that looks like, I don’t know, but yeah, that’s, um, that’s something that needs to be done, because that is fun to watch, right? Oh
[01:05:23] Dan Schriever (@CavedanMTG): yeah.
[01:05:23] Nick: People love the, uh, the pack breaks, whatever it is, and, um, you know, watching, watching Junk Rares turned over is just as entertaining as turning over that Lotus, uh, for, for, depending on the crowd that you’re in front of.
[01:05:39] Dan Schriever (@CavedanMTG): Yeah, we’ll figure that out. Um, we gotta get moving on that, Nick. There’s not much time left.
We definitely have to have some visual proof. I feel like, you know, Pixar didn’t happen, right?
[01:05:49] Nick: We’re definitely going to have proof. For sure. Yes. Okay.
[01:05:56] Dan Schriever (@CavedanMTG): Thinking about what you were saying about recommendations for anyone listening who’s like, oh, I would love to do that. I would love to be there. So one thing you can do is, well, hopefully we’ll document it more and you can see what happened, but Absolutely echo Nick’s suggestion, right?
You can try this yourself. If you just want the experience of opening alpha, I mean, there are simulators, you can open it up, um, I think TraphSim lets you do this, and you can see for yourself just how terrible an alpha starter deck is. Maybe you won’t actually want to play with it, but Even what you’re saying about getting some friends together, doing like a progressive sealed league where you add a pack every week, wizard’s nose.
That’s good. I mean that, I think that was part of the original design of magic online, back when it was still called Modo. There were leagues like that, and you could add a booster pack to your seal deck every week. I think for years this was one of the main ways to play magic online. It was fantastic.
[01:06:48] Nick: I can’t speak to that as, I’ve never played a game of magic online, but it sounds like, uh, I missed out on something.
[01:06:55] Dan Schriever (@CavedanMTG): Okay, you’re a purist. All right, Graham. Absolute purist. Let’s get you down to the Alpha Seal. Take him on, Nick.
[01:07:04] Nick: Why do online what you can do in paper?
[01:07:08] Dan Schriever (@CavedanMTG): Oh my gosh. All right, so we’re nearing the end of our time. Let’s wrap up your vision for the future of the event, if you can have everything your way.
[01:07:18] Nick: Yeah, we’re going to continue doing this every single year.
We won’t open, uh, a starter each every single year, but we will bring it back and, and use the sets that I described earlier. We will continue to stamp cards to ensure that they are from the pool that they should have come from. And, uh, we’re going to continue gathering. That’s what we’re going to continue doing.
[01:07:42] Dan Schriever (@CavedanMTG): Love the sound of that. Now you’ve opened Aladdin’s Lamp, or from the R’lyeh Starter Deck, um, you get to make a wish, right? So, you’re peeling off the plastic of your Alpha Starter Deck, pull out that beautiful rulebook with that beautiful Shivan dragon on it, you’re about to see the first card, what one card are you hoping to see?
[01:08:02] Nick: Ah, that’s pretty easy. Anyone that’s known me long enough knows that I’m a green player. It all starts with that. It all started with that for me from the first days of Magic, and there’s a card that speaks to me more than any other. I love the artwork. It is a little bit of what I do in my Non magic world in my profession, but, um, I really want to crack a regrowth.
That’s the card I want to see more than anything else.
[01:08:35] Dan Schriever (@CavedanMTG): I thought you Liege for a second, I was like, no, it’s each their own. I
[01:08:39] Nick: would enjoy turning other people’s lands into forests, that would make me smile very much.
[01:08:47] Dan Schriever (@CavedanMTG): I feel like we can get you a regrowth, I’m going to start manifesting this now. So if you support Nick and his efforts.
Start manifesting that regrowth. I would love that for you.
Final Thoughts and Contact Information
[01:08:59] Dan Schriever (@CavedanMTG): All right, so I think that’s all the time we have for today, but I guess big question, Nick, if people want to holler at you, if they have questions, if they have comments, if they have expressions of rage, self immolations, how can we reach you?
[01:09:13] Nick: I think I’m going to direct that to the Faithless Brewing community, as I don’t have any online presence necessarily, but maybe in this case I’ll have to see what comes of it, and what’s thrown your way.
Sorry, Dan!
[01:09:29] Dan Schriever (@CavedanMTG): This is a service I can provide, so you can hit me up, we are faithless. brewing at gmail. com. Or if you want to come holler at me and chatter at me specifically, you can hop into our Discord server and you can find that on our Patreon. That’s patreon. com slash Faithless Brewing, where we are normally talking about Pioneer, sometimes Modern, brewing with exciting new cards.
But hey, maybe we’ll brew a little bit of Elf, a little bit of Old School in the meantime. Okay. So I think that’s going to do it for us. Uh, Nick, I’m super excited and yeah, can’t wait.
[01:10:00] Nick: Dan, this is going to be, this is going to be a great event. I had a real lot of fun right here. Thanks for inviting me on.
Really appreciate it.
[01:10:07] Dan Schriever (@CavedanMTG): Absolutely. All right. That’s going to do it for us, and we will see you next time.
