As I get further along on my collecting journey I find that personalization is the thing that wins out for me. Every card has a story and thanks to this blog, I can share them. It will take me a long time to tell the story for each of them, but at this point almost every card in my collection serves as a reminder of a specific moment in time. By playing with them I not only get to enjoy the game I love, but also relive the fond memories which make these cards special.
Last year I went to Illuxcon in Reading for the first time and loved it. My wife Lucy and I went on Saturday, her for the fantasy art and me for an opportunity to get alters done by Rob Alexander. We both left happy and on the drive home made plans to come back the following year.
This year, in addition to Rob Alexander, Mark Poole was announced as attending. Having quite a few alters I want to get done by Mark I decided to take Thursday off in the hopes of beating the weekend crowd to ensure that I could get alters done. As it turned out, Mark ended up not attending, but with the day off already approved I decided to make the trip up on Thursday regardless, hoping to get Rob to do some additions to my alters from last year. Unfortunately, Rob spent most of Thursday setting up his booth and when he was finally set up it was 3:30 and I had only one person in front of me in his line. Hope started to build until the guy pulled out hundreds of cards to sign. He and I had a brief but good conversation in which he told me he was also going to Baltimore on Saturday. I told him I might see him there and packed up and left with the intention of coming back to Illuxcon with Lucy on Saturday or Sunday.
The day was not a total loss though as I got to spend most of the day hanging out with Drew Tucker who in addition to being a talented artist has become a good friend over the years. I got Drew to do a Plateau alter for me and also gave him a Sylvan Library to take home and paint for me.
The Plateau alter he did for me is an homage to the ram’s skull that Drew traded the original art of Plateau for back in the early 90s. That trade and not using a surge protector for the art backups are the reasons that Drew’s artwork for Plateau does not appear in Revised.
I was admittedly pretty frustrated on Thursday as I went home. I had arrived at 11:00 with the expectation that I would be able to get Rob to do alters for me; we had discussed that plan briefly at Lobstercon. Plans of course do not always pan out the way you’d want them to and that’s life.
I had been talking to my friend Andy about going down to SCGCon Baltimore in the hopes of getting alters done by Mark Tedin. At this point I don’t have a ton of cards for Mark to alter, but do have a few. The big one is this Mana Drain which I acquired with Reindeer’s help over the summer. The art box had inexplicably been blacked out, but with the help of a dry erase marker I had made it look more presentable. I felt that it was a prime candidate for an art box alter which would push it over the top.
My only qualm with the plan to go to Baltimore was how early a morning it was going to be; Andy wanted to get there at 8:00 which meant me leaving my apartment at 5:45. In general, I try to avoid early mornings and with a trip to the Netherlands for Uthden Troll Cup the following weekend I was all the more wary of costing myself a good night’s sleep. I told Andy I would pass on the early morning rendezvous and sleep in.
I had a relaxing Friday night and slept in on Saturday. When I got up on Saturday morning I was questioning my choices. I was glad I hadn’t woken up at 5:30, but I regretted having missed my chance to get an alter or two done by Mark. Andy messaged me to say he had arrived at 8:05 and was 7th in line for alters. At 12:15 he told me that there were only two people behind him in line and if I wanted to leave now I could probably get an alter done.
On a whim, I asked Lucy if she was interested in going down to Baltimore for the day. She had just gotten back from a massage and needed to make lunch, but said she was up for it. I helped her make a smoothie and soft boil an egg and within 30 minutes we were on the road to Baltimore. We jammed out to Elton John and before we know it we were parked and walking into the convention center just after 3:00.
In line we got to chat some with Alois who had come over from London for the weekend to get alters done before going to New York for work on Monday. Funnily enough, Alois was also going to be at UTC the following weekend and then was off to Asia for travel immediately afterwards. I hope he can sleep on planes!
Alois and Andy told me that the guy who had gotten into line for Rob ahead of me and had hundreds of cards to sign did the same thing with Mark, but also got 3 alters done because he had multiple friends in line with him.
Lucy and I settled in to wait and read several chapters of The Art Thief which we have been enjoying together. It helped us pass the time and felt especially topical in light of the massive Louvre heist that week. Wynne came around to chat and get a sense of our alter requests. Andy got an awesome Sol Ring alter done around 5:00.
Shortly after Andy got his alter done it was Lucy and my turn. Prior to getting the blacked out Mana Drain I had played with a Drain which had sharks sketched on it. My vision for the new Drain alter was to have a Leviathan eating a shark as a nod to the notion that there’s always a bigger fish. This idea felt especially poignant because in Old School, if you manage to win 4 Giant Sharks you can replace them with a single Leviathan in your sideboard. Mark is an expert craftsmen with a posca pen and got to work on turning my dream into reality.
Thanks to Lucy waiting in line with me I was permitted to get a second alter done. For that alter I had chosen a Jayemdae Tome which was extremely special to me. After winning the 2024 Summer Derby with The Deck, I had stamped a Book and also added a small alter to it commemorating a special moment during that event. Between the Top16 and Top8, my longtime friend was dealing with a serious mental health crisis and Lucy went with me to the psychiatric hospital to fill out paperwork so he could get a psychiatric evaluation. We waited outside the hospital for his Dad to show up for several hours and while we were there a giant dragonfly crash landed on our blanket. I tried to help it to fly away to no avail and ultimately decided to move it to a nearby log because there was nothing that we could do to help and being around it was making us both sad. This dragonfly was emblematic of my friend and helped to show me that I can only do so much to help and sometimes creating distance is necessary to protect one’s mental health.
I decided to get Mark to add a “Ouroboros Sol Ring” to my Summer Derby Book. The Ouroboros has been a recurring theme in my life since meeting Lucy to the point that my wedding ring is a Ouroboros.
After arriving just after 3:00 we left at 7 and were home by 9. Lucy enjoyed having a spontaneous Saturday out in the world and I was thrilled with the way the alters from Mark had turned out.
With two new Mark Tedin alters added to my collection, I felt like I was playing with house money when I returned to Illuxcon on Sunday. Shortly after arriving I found out that on Saturday Rob had a steady stream of signatures in his queue all day. I was lucky that Sunday afternoon was comparatively quiet which meant that Rob was happy to do alters for me.
I started with a Taiga that he’d altered the prior year for me, hoping to get a red dragon a la Smaug added to it. This Taiga was from the Cyrille de Foucaud collection and allegedly played in his Worlds 1994 deck; it felt right to turn it into a final form Taiga.
Next up I got a Savannah altered having just picked one up at Lobstercon. At first I asked for an elephant and Rob made a face so I quickly added, “Or any animal that lives on the Savannah: Lion, giraffe, hippo…” Rob said he would do a Lion which feels perfect given that I will most likely be pairing Savannah with Savannah Lions. I followed up with getting a Dragon added to an Underground Sea Rob had done for me last year which he again nailed. Finally, I asked him to add to another Underground Sea he’d done for me last year. He had done ship wreckage in the foreground and I asked him to add the ship that all the wreckage was from in the background and he delivered in a big way.
With my alter requests satisfied, I stopped by Drew’s booth to shoot the breeze and got to witness a fun moment. Rob stopped by and started a conversation with Drew about markers for signatures and alters. I got a lot of pro tips for different types of markers to get so I can enhance my alter work.
Lucy and I finished our time at Illuxcon by wandering around and looking at different booths. I was on cloud nine after getting all of my alters done and Lucy was also feeling blissful having had an afternoon to enjoy fantasy art.
When we got home I was in awe of the spoils from the weekend. Two amazing Mark Tedin pieces, four killer Rob Alexander alters, and a heater from Drew with another one coming to me shortly. On top of that, I got to spend quality time with Lucy and do something that she loves; everybody wins.
As I finish this article almost a month later I still cannot really believe how well everything panned out that weekend. I am extremely lucky to have had an opportunity like this to turn my dreams into reality.
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