Three weeks ago I posted an ISO on Discord for a Richard Garfield signed Arabian Nights City of Brass. I was inspired by a Garfield signed Italian City which unfortunately doesn’t fit my current aesthetic of Swedish legal Old School cards. I was hopeful, but not overly optimistic as I hadn’t seen any Arabian Cities with Garfield signatures outside of the Garfield cube.
As luck would have it, the patron saint of Garfield signatures, Benoit reached out to me shortly after I posted to tell me that Garfield signed Cities are incredibly hard to find as well as to share a listing for a beautiful first generation Garfield signed City which was likely signed sometime between 1993 and 1995. The starting bid was very high and the card was located in Japan, but the more I thought about it the more I knew I wanted to make it happen.
With the help of my friend Andy who knew of a third party buying service that would receive an item through Yahoo Auctions JP and ship it to the US I put in a bid and crossed my fingers.
A few days later the auction ended and I had won unopposed! I was initially a bit concerned as I had never used Buyee before and didn’t understand that I couldn’t setup shipment from their warehouse to the US until after my package was in their care.
After a few slightly anxious days everything updated and I was able to coordinate shipment to my parents’ house where I receive all of my packages. I chose to go with EMS for my shipping in the hopes that I could bring the City with me to Seattle for the X Files event which Mark Tedin would be attending so I could get him to sign or possibly alter it for me.
A few months ago I was talking alters with friend and fellow alter aficionado, Eureka Shivan after the Storm Crow Cup. He shared a set of Cities that he had which had caught my eye in his deck picture.
The King Kong alter on the far right was a giant hit of nostalgia that transported me back to the late 2000s when one of my favorite pastimes was lurking on the Star City “pimp” thread which contained countless pictures of cool and unique cards. I vividly remember seeing a black ink King Kong alter on a City of Brass and thinking it was the coolest thing ever. This alter captivated me so much that I put up a King Kong poster in my college dorm room.
Back then alters like almost everything else felt completely out of reach. My decks were full of proxies and so all I could afford to do was to dream about someday having alters of my own. Flash forward almost 20 years and I am living my teenage dream in a big way. While planning out my trip to Seattle I couldn’t help but add a King Kong City of Brass to my alter wishlist. Upon purchasing the Garfield City that alter idea moved up significantly in priority.
Now it was just a question of timing in terms of whether the City would arrive in time as well as if I could get my City into the hotly contested Mark Tedin alter queue for the event.
As the event drew closer I started to get nervous about whether my City would arrive in time. Initially I was not worried because Buyee had told me 3 to 5 days for EMS to deliver which had been my experience in the past, but I began to realize that was outdated. A week before I left for Seattle the tracking update told me that my City was en route to the US, but then everything went dark for the next 5 days. 24 hours before my flight took off from PHL I got an update that my package had gone through customs in Jamaica NY.
I spent more time than I would like to admit looking at expected delivery times for Priority Mail Express International and was generally pessimistic that things would line up for me when I went to sleep on Wednesday. I woke up on Thursday to the City first making it to Philadelphia and then a few hours later to my local post office. At 12:42PM it was out for delivery, but I knew that could mean that it would actually be delivered in 15 minutes or in 6 hours. And then, at 2:16PM while I was out getting ice cream with my wife Lucy to celebrate the end of her first school year as a full-time teacher I got an update that my City had arrived!
My parents were out of town, but my sister and brother-in-law live within walking distance of my parents’ house so I was luckily able to get my brother-in-law Tony to check and make sure the City had actually been delivered so I could swing by and pick it up on the way to the airport.
I traveled to Seattle with Will Parshall who strongly dislikes airports and thus is always game for any reason to delay arriving at the airport. As fate would have it, our flight was delayed by 30 minutes so we had extra time to swing by and scoop up the City. With my new City in hand we made it to the airport with plenty of time to spare and before we knew it we were in Seattle.
On Saturday morning we woke up, got breakfast at the Pico Cafe and Bakery which was a stone’s throw from our airbnb. We had a delicious breakfast and enjoyed their lovely courtyard before going back to the house to get ready for the day ahead. Determined to avoid the situation I had experienced last year where I sweated getting an alter done all day by showing up to Mark’s table too late, my plan was to get to the venue as early as possible so I could help Shawn set up and ideally be one of the first people in Mark Tedin’s line for commissions.
The combination of me arriving early and Mark arriving a bit late enabled me to be the first one in the queue for an alter. I will make a separate post about my blue power some other day, but I was extremely grateful to get my Timetwister altered before the first round even began which resulted in Wynne letting me also add my Garfield City into the queue.
I lost round 1 because my head was not in the game. My excitement levels were way too high and I misplayed a complicated game where I had a Library and too many options until my opponent Balanced. Later in the day Mark was able to get to work on my City. Before he started I shared the picture of Eureka Shivan’s King Kong City as a reference which Mark really appreciated. After I saw the finished product I was flabbergasted. Mark’s talent with Poscas is unmatched. Without further ado, here is what he did for me.
Looking at it now I still can’t believe this City is mine. It was an absolute rollercoaster to get to this point. I can only imagine how 16 year old me would’ve reacted had he seen this alter all those years ago. Maybe if I’m lucky this King Kong alter will get someone into alters in much the same way that a King Kong City of Brass hooked me on alters all those years ago.
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