Learning when to say “No”

Recently I relearned the importance of saying “No”. For whatever reason, I found myself on eBay looking at Magic cards that I neither needed nor wanted and I came across a cool one…

Upon seeing this beautiful card I started to justify it to myself with phrases like“I don’t own any Summer Cards”, “I’m not in love with my current 4th Counterspell” and “I’ve sold a lot of cards recently”. All of these phrases are true, but yet I still didn’t need to buy a Summer Counterspell and ultimately stood strong with that sentiment.

I have nothing against Summer. It’s a cool oddity set and the cards are rare, beautiful, and also expensive. It is the weird expansion set which is Swedish legal just because. I have several friends who collect Summer cards and I think their collections are beautiful, it’s just not really for me.

What I needed to remind myself of is that what I am trying to maximize for with my collection is personal significance. To me this means prioritizing ante winnings and prize cards over cards which are rarer, more expensive, and potentially more aesthetically pleasing. I like how each of my cards tells a story and can immediately be related back to a time and place.

An example of my preferences in action is this Counterspell:

It was originally hastily altered in black sharpie by Mark Poole for me at MagicCon Philly 2023, then touched up by me afterwards, and then recently I decided I would make it into a card which I would bring to Arvika Festival 2025 to get signed by everyone. In the process of adding “Arvika Festival X” to the card, my OCD took the wheel. I decided to redo the alter completely to make it more to my liking which after about two hours of tinkering looks as it does now. In the process of outlining “Arvika Festival X” I managed to smudge the “M” in Mark Poole’s signature which led me to just remove it altogether with a dry erase marker. Now there is more space for player’s signatures which ultimately will make the card more personally significant to me than Mark Poole’s. It also helps that at this point it was me who did the visible alter, not Mark Poole. This Counter is a funny anecdote both about my OCD at work and my aesthetic preferences.

I also recently purchased a Counterspell which does speak to me. As I wrote above, my Counterspells were altered hastily by Mark Poole at MagicCon Philly and from what I have come to understand, it is quite hard to commission Mark for color alters so the best bet is the secondary market. I really wanted one beautiful Poole alter for my collection and eBay delivered one up for me and then some. I was blown away by this alter and felt that it was the kind of card that I couldn’t pass on in good conscience.

Through this process of finding a Counterspell I wanted to purchase, modifying one myself, and turning down the chance to buy a Summer one I learned a bit more about myself. As always, I am on the hunt for ways to upgrade my cards, but I now know that an extremely rare set like Summer doesn’t speak to me in quite the same way that alters do.

I plan to play Old School for a very long time and thus I do not need to be hasty. When you’re playing with Counterspells it pays to be patient rather than to jump at the first opportunity to cast one.