aesthetics – Wheel’s Blog

The Saga of the City

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.

Cyrille’s Bolt

In late June of 2023 I stumbled across a unique Graded Lightning Bolt that my now close friend Jacob was selling. It was a unique card because it had been a part of Cyrille de Foucaud’s legendary collection and was played in his deck for the first Magic World Championship in 1994 where he made it all the way to the Top4 before losing to Bertrand Lestree. The idea of owning a piece of Magic’s history was tantalizing and made it a snap buy for me.

Purchasing this Lightning Bolt from Jacob was the genesis of our friendship which has continued to grow in the time since. Jacob cracked the Bolt for me and sent it along with the tag and an Emerald City Trolls sticker.

Later in the summer of 2023 I negotiated a deal for a set of Richard Garfield altered Blue Power which were also from Cyrille de Foucaud’s collection. I will write a post about them sometime in the future. Throughout this process I enlisted the help of my friend Benoit who is the foremost expert on Garfield cards. Benoit was invaluable in helping me craft my correspondence, negotiate a price, and ultimately execute a deal. Thanks a ton for the help with that one!

After acquiring more cards from Cyrille’s collection I became interested in getting in touch with him to find out more of the backstory on them. With Benoit’s help, I sent Cyrille an email, got one reply back confirming I had the right person, and asking if I had WhatsApp. After I responded saying that I did have WhatsApp and would love to catch up, I never heard back.

With the help of my friend West I dug into the old coverage archives and found a few gems about Cyrille and his past. I was eager to learn more, but didn’t hear back.

Over the past year or so my friend Simon has floated the idea to me that it would be really cool if I could get Cyrille to sign the Lightning Bolt a few times. I wholeheartedly agreed, but aside from the email that he never responded to I was unsure how to get in contact with him. After Simon brought it up at the end of 2024, I shared this problem with Benoit who had an out of the box solution. Cyrille owns a jewelry store in Geneva which is where our mutual acquaintance Francois lives. Maybe they know each other and Francois can assist with getting the signature.

I knew Francois because he and I had played a match at Winc0n in 2023 and then randomly shared a cab to the Gothenburg airport at n00bcon last year. I reached out to him with minimal expectation that it would turn into anything but funnily enough he had bought a watch from Cyrille a few years ago. Francois was happy to facilitate, I just needed to send the Bolt to him and ideally retrieve it at n00bcon this year.

I randomly had the urge this week to reach out to Francois to see if he’d had any luck getting in touch with Cyrille having not exchanged any messages since the end of January. In a strange coincidence, Francois messaged me back a few hours later to say that he had actually been to see Cyrille and get my Bolt signed earlier that day!

In addition to having an aesthetically pleasing signature, Cyrille had shared some fun anecdotes from the past including how a guy at Origins 1994 had proposed to him that he could purchase 20% of the entire Beta print run for $120,000… For those doing math at home that works out to $187 per complete set of Beta…

I cannot wait to see Francois at n00bcon to retrieve my precious Lightning Bolt and hear some more of Cyrille’s tales from the early 1990’s. If I’m lucky I someday might get in direct contact with him, but that will have to wait for a future blog post.

Huge thanks to my friends who have helped me out along the way with this journey. Jacob, Benoit, West, Simon, and Francois all helped me in their own way and without any one of them I think this pipe dream would’ve fallen apart.

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.

My Aesthetic Evolution

With collecting I have mistakenly thought I was “done” many times and now accept that will likely never be the case. Each time I change directions it plays out pretty much the same way. I am getting close to finishing my goal, I push to finish it and then when I do I feel empty. To cope with the emptiness I quickly pivot by setting new and more difficult goals for myself. The piece of advice I give to others is to make your collection goals stretch out as long as possible. The journey is far more enjoyable if you take your time rather than rushing to the destination.

Over time my aesthetic preferences and my collection have changed fairly dramatically. A prime example of this is City of Brass:

Coming from Vintage I had a love for Japanese cards. I had been to Japan in 2016 and over the years had cultivated a collection of every playable card for Vintage Workshops in Japanese over the years. When I started playing City of Brass in Old School in 2018 I used Japanese FBB 4th Edition Cities. Before I played a single game I ordered 4 of just about every inexpensive Japanese card I could find that might be playable in Atog. Throughout 2018 I acquired pretty much all of the playable Japanese Old School legals cards, some format staples not printed in Japanese and 40 Collector’s Edition Duals. At the time I thought I was done, but I wasn’t even close.

In 2019 I found myself with an invite to n00bcon. I was thrilled to have the opportunity to go to Sweden and throw my hat in the ring, but my Old School collection was setup for American rather than Swedish reprints. With n00bcon on the horizon I turned as much of my collection as I could into Swedish legal. Thanks to the generosity of Scott Bradley and Mano I was able to borrow some cards so I could play at n00bcon, but I was hoping to make that a one time thing. Due to solely playing Workshops in Vintage for 10 years I didn’t own Duals, but had Beta Power. In 2018 I picked up a full set of CE duals and they would remain that way for the time being because I couldn’t afford Beta duals, but because I liked the aesthetic of having my whole deck black border everything else transitioned over to English. And so as with many other cards, I found a set of Arabian Nights Cities of Brass and sold my FBB set.

Sometime in the dark age that was 2020 I set a goal of playing at n00bcon on my birthday in 2021 with a deck that was entirely my own and ideally fully black bordered. The circumstances which enabled these fever dream to become reality were unique. I had reacquired my original Unlimited Black Lotus at Eternal Weekend in 2019 which allowed me to essentially trade my Beta Black Lotus for 4 HP Beta Volcanic Islands and also due to COVID I was spending significantly less than before and thus could afford to purchase a Beta Blue Dual every month or so. Before I knew it my collection was fully black bordered and Swedish legal aside from my Black Lotus (which I will write about in a separate post at some point). While COVID pushed n00bcon to be virtual rather than in person, I am happy to say that I did achieve my goal of playing my own cards in n00bcon on my birthday.

Lion Dib circa 2021 (Year of the Dingus)

At this point I was inching closer to the point where I had everything to play all of the tier one decks with Swedish reprints. I eventually got to that spot and quickly realized how much more I enjoyed the journey than the destination. I was at a crossroads collection-wise as I owned 32 Beta Duals, but didn’t see myself ever wanting to play Savannah or Bayou in Sweden and thus wasn’t sure I should push myself to upgrade them to Beta. On one hand, the idea of 40 before 40 was appealing, but on the other I didn’t want to commit so many resources for no reason other than to take a cool picture. No shade at anyone who has 40 Beta Duals, I just decided that was not for me.

In 2021 during one of my late night compulsive Facebook scrolling sessions I stumbled upon a playset of four season altered Arabian Nights Cities of Brass. I thought the price was fair and didn’t hesitate to pull the trigger.

I have always liked signed cards, but these Cities represented a turning point in my collection. From there I went deeper and deeper into the alter rabbit hole. I attend a lot of Old School events and many of them have Magic artists in attendance which gives me a lot of opportunities to get my cards altered. Over the last 3 years I have started to prioritize events with artists over those without when all else is relatively equal.

At the outset, I decided that if possible I would avoid sending cards to artists; instead getting everything done on site. By taking this approach I have made the process much more fulfilling than it would be if I had done it via mail through an intermediary. I get the experience of meeting the artists, can share with them my enthusiasm and passion for the game, hear their feedback on my ideas for alters, and create a lasting association that ties each card to a specific moment in time. The process certainly takes longer than it otherwise would, but for me that is a pro rather than a con because I know it will be that much more satisfying when I eventually arrive at my destination.

After setting out to get my cards altered, I found a new side quest which has captivated me ever since. At n00bcon in 2022 I was the soberest person in the room at 2am and thus asked to be the scorekeeper for the Ante40k World Championship. Similarly to how I became hooked on Old School after spectating at the Eternal Weekend Old School event in 2017, I left n00bcon knowing deep down that I wanted to get into ante. In hindsight I am not sure why it took me 10 months to get an ante deck together, but at Arvika Festival in 2023 I jumped into the pool and haven’t gotten out since.

For the uninitiated, the way that Ante40k works is that you build a Swedish legal deck which must be worth at least 40,000 SEK ($3,764) and then play games of Magic for ante. The ante cards are all restricted except for Jeweled Bird and each player antes the top card of their deck before the game begins. Whoever wins gets the card that the other person anted or in many cases, a Jeweled Bird which saved their ante card. When you lose a card it is customary to alter it to memorialize the occasion. Some of the alters are good and others are bad, but the end result is that you can win Swedish legal cards which have the added benefit of a good story associated to them.

At n00bcon in 2024 I didn’t win a shark, but I had a very productive weekend playing Ante 40k. That weekend I returned to the Ante40k World Championship as a player rather than a scorekeeper. I lost in the finals to a very deserving Jonnie Myrbacka but over the course of the weekend I managed to win a City of Brass, Badlands, Moat, Unlimited Sol Ring, and Su-Chi. The alter that Mike Frantz did on the City of Brass I won from him was cool, but by virtue of his level of inebriation and the fact that we both wanted to get in as many games as possible in the Ante 40k World Championship it was rushed. When I got home I knew I wanted to do something to embellish it and make it my own because there was no way I wasn’t going to be playing that City of Brass in all of my decks going forward.

As of writing this my aesthetic hierarchy for a card that I play looks something like:

Needs to be Swedish legal
Ideally is black bordered
Has an event stamp, alter, or changed ownership in an ante game.

For me, every card should have its own story. I know at this point that I never will be “done”. I may get to stopping points where I am content with not adding anything more to my collection for a long while and eventually the churn will slow down. Each person is on their own individual journey with their own aesthetic preferences and goals. What is right for me is likely not right for you and that’s OK. Enjoy the journey, savor the hunt, and be happy with where you are along the path.