Becoming Spell Struck.

I've always liked Strategy games, and started playing them with one of my Brothers and Cousins and a friend of my Cousin. We would get together about once every six months for an extended weekend of endless gaming, well ok the Pub did feature quite a bit too! We played Strategy board games like Kingmaker, Kings'n'Things, Axis and Allies and The Fall of the Roman Empire, all of which are excellent games, but when members of the group started having kids and others moved to New Zealand it all fizzled out.

I moved back to my hometown of Eastbourne after studying in Kingston-upon-Thames and didn't play any social games for about three years, until I found out about a local games club. So off I went and joined, and met Darren "Oh, no I've created a monster" Walby who taught me to play (with the assistance of his Brother Geoff) Magic.

Wow! , What a game!! It just struck a chord with me straight from the off. Darren gave me some cards to start playing with and we would play for hours with gems like Serra Angel's and Control Magic… not to mention Clone… errrr Broken! Darren told me that a new set of cards had been released called Exodus and that he wanted me to go half's with him on a box of boosters. So I said sure, and we decided to split the cards so that I had all the Blue and White ones and he had all the Red and Black stuff. The Green, Land and Artifacts were shared, as I played White/Blue and he liked Black/Red decks.

Well, by the time Saga came out I had joined the Arena League, which was run by Paul Vine and was totally hooked on the game. Joining Arena was the best move I made as it introduced me to far better players and my first decks were crushed for weeks. But the more I played, the better I became and I can remember one week where I played six different decks against six different people and won all of them… I was well chuffed!! Although I still has SO much to learn !

So time past and Paul left the area so Shane 'Mr.' Mussell and I took over running the Arena League and we also took and passed our Judges exams at Gen-Con. We are now running tournaments too and I am an Area Co-ordinator for "Game-On", the Demo program….. I did say I was hooked!

Well that's basically it….. It's your fault Darren !!

Stuart 'Lonewolf' Haffenden