It’s surprising what you can be okay with at one o’clock in the afternoon and be haunted by at one o’clock in the morning.

But come! Let us not speak of serious things I swore to not discuss here until they were firmly dealt with. Let us instead talk of the amount of money sunk into this monstrosity:

Baneslayer, in the upper right corner, is worth a median $50 on her own. There are four of her in the deck. Luminarch, my own personal creation I was playing before this, used her and Elspeth with Day of Judgements to make peasants tremble. This tosses in pretty much every other card in standard worth anything.

I’m playing a very different game than when I was 13, that’s for sure. If we work out the median value of the deck as of the exact instant of this writing, counting only cards worth over $1 as a single, we come up with:

• Baneslayer Angel (4): $200
• Emeria Angel (4): $20
• Knight of the Reliquary (4): $36
• Noble Hierarch (4): $56
• Ajani Goldmane (1): $10
• Elspeth, Knight-Errant (3): $99
• Maelstrom Pulse (3): $63
• Martial Coup (3): $15
• Gargoyle Castle (1): $2
• Path to Exile (4): $24
• Marsh Flats (3): $42
• Sunpetal Grove (4): $36
• Verdant Catacombs (4): $68
• Day of Judgment (2): $26
• Luminarch Ascension (3): $12
• Total: $709

Now, thankfully, that’s not the amount I’ve paid to assemble this, as I’ve been very lucky (or skilled, if you want to give me some credit) lately about getting things before they exploded in value, as well as yanking a few things from packs and trading well. I also sold all my Lotus Cobras while they were $30 each because I hate that card and I knew it’d drop like a stone. If you’re extremely foolish and accept those prices as what you’d get for liquidizing your collection, and you add in my winnings from tournaments, I’m actually pretty close to dead even in money spent on Magic vs money gained. A good chunk of that is squarely on Ms. Walletslayer’s back.

Still, I can’t help but wonder what the 12 year old who was so thrilled to have four Serra Angels would think if he knew that he’d be sleeving up a deck perilously close to being worth four digits a decade and a half later.

And now I’m just begging to be mugged. I need to get a rider on my insurance…

I heard Kalya meowing so I opened the door absent-mindedly to feed her, only to find an opossum three times her size sitting at my feet. He seemed rather nonplussed by the whole thing. My back yard is becoming ridiculous.

I take things other people say out of context so often, I might as well do it to myself now and then:

(11:54:01 AM) Graeme Hefner: There are no brown eyes in my fantasy.
(11:54:13 AM) Kenny Knapke: sure
(11:54:17 AM) Kenny Knapke: give all the serving girls brown eyes
(11:54:29 AM) Graeme Hefner: They all have empty eyesockets
(11:54:35 AM) Graeme Hefner: And see with their horror.
(11:54:44 AM) Kenny Knapke: your fantasies are fucked up

So this was a wasted week. I missed three days of work for my first cold since 07 and I hated every minute of it. The only tangible side benefit was that I got to watch a whole lot of baseball. Convenient division series triple headers! It’s too bad they don’t play in months other than October. They should look into that. The six months of practice before the season starts is a bit much.

So about my previous post: Yes, I won the local pre-release for Zendikar 5-0. I’ve also won my last two 8-man drafts. Apparently I’m on something of a limited streak right now. Constructed, not so much: I found out on Friday that I can’t play Magic on cold medicine. Who knew?

Nashville soon. Right now I can’t wait to get back to work, sad as that sounds. Cabin. Fever.

5-0 bitches! More soon.

For the record, we have all survived the Atlanta floods of death. I did have a roof leak, however. A.w.e.s.o.m.e.

So on Friday I beat a guy who had a fifth edition Manabarbs in his sideboard. I asked about it because I had never seen the art before, since fifth edition was in my 13-year hiatus. He said he really preferred the old and the new art better, but he had this one around to use as his fourth, and he’d really like to find a foil of the new art around.

Since I had just beaten him, and being the nice guy I was, I offered to trade him a pack-fresh foil Manabarbs from my binder in exchange for his slightly played ancient white-bordered fifth edition one. Foil Manabarbs is worth like a dollar anyway, so why not make someone’s day in an uneven trade?

When I’m trying to correct the capitalization of something in an ID3 tag, don’t continually try to auto-’correct’ it back to the old, improper version no matter what the hell I do. This makes a process that takes less than a second for a touch typist require actual effort.

Dear Apple Software Team: Fuck you. Seriously? Who the hell thought this was useful?

Yesterday afternoon a vote on our mailing list officially christened our Magic team with the moniker “False Demise.” I’m not sure a more appropriate name, or flavor text, exists.

Also, I’m pretty sure no more Magic features will be coming. I just don’t have the urge to write them. I have the urge to write something again, but I’m not sure what yet. Maybe I’ll finally make my long awaited return to fiction? It’s a curious question.

The other possibility is a weekly ‘column’ on my own blog about my personal thoughts. I need some kind of excuse to put fingers to keyboard.

It’s not secret that I’ve been working on a feature about my return to the world of Magic: the Gathering. The Glorious Hobby calls all of its children home at some point; some of us merely resist longer than others. What has been a secret is how hard it has been to put pen to paper. I don’t usually get writer’s block, but I’ve been stuck at the same point. And with each delay there is so much more to cover.

It all started with that bastard Billy Todd, Attorney At Law. Thirteen long years had passed since my last game of Magic when he, of all people, finally managed to bring me back into the fold. It was slow going at first, but since then, oh so much has happened.

I’ve won a Magic 2010 prerelease tournament, I’ve done well in many drafts and tournaments, I’ve bough booster boxes. A whole slew of people have fallen to the urges again. Our weekly meeting at Super Games for the Friday Night Magic tournament has expanded to where we command our own 8-person table. These are all things I want to tell you about.

But I can’t. For some reason, I can’t write it all out, at least as a narrative. So I’m moving my goalposts. I’m going to write mini-stories, slices of life, from these events. At this point I feel that it’s better to get something out than nothing at all. Much as my life story is told on Jux in various out-of-order snippets, so shall the story of my return to Magic be told, with much the same cast of characters.

We’ll see in a day or two if this is any more successful.