Date: Thu, 11 Nov 93 13:37:14 -0800 From: wayne halsey Warning: If you're easily offended, only looking for serious commentary, or resemble the two characters in this story too much, please stop reading now and delete this mail from your mailbox. ============ Magic, the Blathering: parodied by Ken Boucher ============ Snoreful heard the annoying whine in her ears; her trading session was being interrupted! "It's someone young.", she thought. "Someone on the Internet.... Tomenil!" It had been a long time since he had challenged her, longer still since he had actually read the rules. Quickly she ended her trading session. She would need all her Moxes and Lotus Leaves for this duel, and more esoteric cards too. The last time Snoreful fought with Tomenil, he had focused on the weak points in the rules on timing. It had been a long drawn out argument; she still saw in her nightmares the questions to Snark that could have been cleared up if either had quit yelling at each other long enough to look up their points in the rules. Since then Snoreful had spent another couple paychecks on decks and noticed, while checking for misprints, that the Fork didn't say anything about duplicating interrupts. Unfortunately, Tomenil could never be persuaded to actually look at the cards in play; she had been forced to make him read it in other, more violent ways. It took awhile, but she was about 50 pounds heavier than him and much stronger, and in time he was forced to admit she was right. Snoreful soon found that gathering enough Lotus Leaves and Moxes was going to be difficult. She needed a second job, and problems with her Internet account was making trading difficult. She needed more rare cards, and the fact that the decks she bought in Colorado didn't help a bit were preventing her from gathering the necessary rare cards. She had too few rare cards in her opinion, so it could take awhile before she managed to get enough Braingeyser cards to be sure of drawing most of her 200 cards on the first turn (note: 2 Lotus Leaves and a Braingeyser gets you 4 cards, 3 LL & 1 Geyser = 7 cards, etc). "Just knowing how to build a killer deck isn't enough ", she thought. "You need gobs of cash too. Well, let's see if I can't trade some uncommon cards to some dupe for things I can actually use. Snoreful had resisted the temptation to invest in first print run cards, in case the rumor that Tomenil had acquired a large number of Demonic Attorneys had any truth. (Note: Yes, this works well with the above deck combination...). Now she began to regret that she had bozofiltered his replies, which might have given her a clue what kind of deck he was building this time. Tomenil quickly brought out a horde of Time Vaults, Twiddles, and Tims. " Common cards.", she thought. "Tomenil! I wouldn't have expected that from you." Tomenil had always enjoyed decks of rare cards, but she had always regarded him an unfair trader. At least, more likely to cheat an inexperienced player than most. What was he doing with common cards? A sudden sense of horror came over Snoreful as she realized he was arguing over how many times Tim could poke someone in a turn and if he could tap his land before his untap phase began. "Found some new ways to bend the rules since we last met, eh?", muttered Snoreful, under her breath. "Well, so have I, dear Tomenil, so have I." It was going to be a long argument. Ken Boucher. With apologies to WOTC, duelists, and people with 2400 baud modems (none of the blame belongs to Wayne Halsey, but send your replies to him for posting this blather...)