Cards 103 to 108: Baby Snacks and annoucing The Cube

Last weekend was the time for Porocon and the Finnish Nationals as its main event. I met Juha Ihonen there, who has had the honour of providing the first practically mint card for my project. Juha was in the deck check team for the main event and I was running a modern side tournament on day two of the convention. Thank you for these practically mint treasures, and for your support during the event.

Ihonen's card salvaging cats share his floors with a miniature version of him, the Ihonen jr., who is at the age where your gums tend to itch and paper and cardboard look very tasty to your eyes. This combined with Ihonen sr. storing commons in an open box have led to various accidents, six of which are pictured above.

All of the cards have been chewed and even those that haven't been bitten into pieces have been so thoroughly soaked in drool that they are completely destroyed. This blog so far hasn't featured any cards from my own collection, but my floors are reigned over by a Little Girl who shares Ihonen jr's taste for cardboard, so if you will ever see any cards that have been destroyed in my care, they will probably look like these.

The approved card pool for Wear 'n' Tear is now well past one hundred and the pile of cards that haven't quite made it is almost as large, so now is a good time to begin building The Cube from these. As cards keep coming, I will add and remove them from Wear 'n' Tear, which for now is a Highlander deck and may turn into a Commander deck in the future, and all cards will have a place in a cube that I will hopefully get to use  once we are up to three hundred or so cards in total.

Cards 61, 62 and 63: Reflexes of Kozilek

These cards were found buried under the collection of Ilkka Siiki, when he was making an inventory of his cards for selling.

This Inquisition of Kozilek was sent by Teemu Luhtamäki, who got it from a friend of his who quit playing Magic.

I was brought a total of seven cards in this week's FNM, but you will have to wait for the last four, until I get better pictures and write a longer rant about the many ways in which those four cards are ruined. In the mean while, you can enjoy these three excellent additions to Wear 'n' Tear. I promise the rant will be salty enough to be worth the wait.

Ilkka was the most active judge in my area when I started playing, but for a long time he has been too busy with work and sports to be able to play or judge in magic tournaments, so he is selling most of his cards. While going trough his collection, he found the Circle of Protection: Artifacts and the Defense of the Heart buried under piles and piles of other cards. The Circle was literally folded across the lines you can see on it. He does not know how exactly they were destroyed, but it is safe to assume they have been crushed in storage.

The Inquisition has a simple story, but one that is certain to resonate with most of my readers. I assume most of you have some experience with the reflex of trying to catch something that falls on your lap by snapping your knees together. That is exactly what happened to this this card as Teemu's friend fumbled with it. Most magic players learn to get rid of that reflex, but for some it takes destroying an expensive card or two until they learn to let things fall.

Card 57: Daggered Cloak

This Cloak of Confusion was given to me during FNM by Topias Paasonen, a local player and one of my neighbours.

This Dark Ritual was mailed to me by Jani Havukainen from Helsinki.

This time I am presenting you a severely malformed Dark Ritual and a slashed Cloak of Confusion. Wear 'n' Tear is starting to have a really high number of black cards in it. We already have one Dark Ritual in the deck, so I am not adding this one to the official counter, which assumes a singleton format. If we include duplicates, the count is at 59 cards, so I am just a few lands short of being able to run a challenge table as a side event at some tournaments.

The damage on the Cloak of Confusion is very interesting. Topias may have explained to me what happened to it, but our friendly local game store was so busy at that moment, that I didn't quite understand what was said. It has some generic scratches and wear and tear but what has properly destroyed the card is the huge slash that has split the card neatly in half. To my trained card coroner's eye it doesn't look like it was cut by scissors, but I am truly at a loss on what else it could have been. People don't toss Magic cards to practice cuts with their swords and knives do they?

Jani got the pictured Dark Ritual as a part of a larger collection he purchased, so he doesn't know what has happened to it. It is bent badly enough that it would stand out as a huge gap in any regular deck, though in Wear 'n' Tear it paradoxically blends in nicely with the other cards that are bulging the pile this way and that. The bending is so heavy I actually felt what kind of contribution was in the envelope when I got my mail. The damage is significant enough to count as destroyed, but I don't know yet which Dark Ritual I have received will make it to any singleton lists I might make from this card pool.

Cards 15, 16, 17 & 18: Monoblack Projectiles

These uniformly damaged black cards were sent by alias Co from mtgsuomi. Thank you!

These Nether Spirit, Pox, Dark ritual and Tombstalker all come from the same deck, and there is an amusing story explaining why they all have their bottom left corner crushed. Once upon a time Co was arranging their cards and toppled a drinking glass on them.

You are probably thinking that this does not look like water damage, and you would be right. It turns out that almost all of the wet cards survived the incident in playable shape, but before noticing this, Co had thrown the deckbox with their old casual deck in it against the wall in rage. Hitting a wall at high speeds did do more permanent damage than the actual accident, which is why these cards ended up in my mailbox.