Chaos Orb is a card that has been present in my life since I started going to Roundtable Games in Conshohocken, PA back in 2004. Several of the more notable players at the shop would play games of 5-color 250 and I vividly remember loving the excitement that the card would bring to a game. Unlike modern day Old School, 5-color played with Chaos Orb as written so it could be a one sided Armageddon, or more… or less. I definitely saw some ill-advised flips which did not go very well and remember the legendarily bad moments like when a friend supposedly missed his opponents board altogether and destroyed his own lands, or when someone blew a Chaos Orb off track either with their mouth or a fan. My collection was far too limited for me to really participate in 5-color, but I fed off of the energy.
When I got into Old School in 2017 I was captivated by Chaos Orb like many others. Not only was it a powerful in game card, but it also served as the tiebreaker in the event of a draw. Granted, the Atog deck I played exclusively when I got into the format rarely went to time, but as someone who greatly prefers to be over rather than underprepared, I wanted to make sure I could hit my Chaos Orb flips. I have a vivd recollection of a conversation that I had with Mano on the way back from Eternal Weekend 2017 where he planted the idea of “50 push-ups and 50 Orb flips every night” in my head. For a few weeks I practiced Orb flips almost every night and saw as my accuracy increased by leaps and bounds. After a month of practicing I hit 69 of 70 flips and largely called it a day having sufficiently sharpened my skills.
When I moved out of my parents’ house in 2018 I got a dry erase board which I have kept to this day, serving as a rolling weekly calendar and a reminder for a lot of various things which would get lost in my mind. Early on, I wrote a mantra on my white board which has stuck with me, “Focus on the Orb, not the Target”. From a Chaos Orb flipping perspective the idea is fairly straightforward. I found that if my focus was on the card I was aiming for rather than on the Chaos Orb as it left my hands, I was much more likely to miss. I have also found this mantra to be applicable in life as well. It is far more beneficial to put your focus on the things that are within your control e.g. the Chaos Orb in your hand than to let yourself be distracted by the target you are aiming for. There are a multitude of examples that this mantra can be applied to, but one that jumps to mind is how if you’re trying to win a game of Magic you should focus on making one good play after another rather than distracting yourself by thinking about how it will feel to win the game.
In 2019 I made the trek out to California for the first Quest for Urza’s Chalice. While there I rode an absolutely insane heater in which I won the main event, cracked open a graded Urza’s Chalice with a fire poker, and made an attempt at the Lords of the Pit’s Chaos Orb marksmanship challenge in the hopes of earning a patch. The way the challenge works is that you try to hit 50 Chaos Orb flips in a row. Before starting, you can wager any amount of shots so that you can keep going even if you miss a flip. The downside is that if you complete the challenge you must then take all remaining shots. I decided to wager three shots and then proceeded to hit 50 straight flips, becoming the second person ever to go 50/50 to earn their patch and then took all three shots in celebration of my accomplishment.
Fresh off my win at Urza’s Chalice, I went to Sweden for the first time in 2019 to attend n00bcon. I woke up early the morning of n00bcon and decided for whatever reason to start practicing Chaos Orb flips and hit 300 in a row. All that practice paid off int the event when I was paired up against Brian Weissman in a match where I already had two losses and he had a loss and a draw, so for the sake of having a chance at the Top8 a draw was a loss for both of us. Despite my best efforts, we ran out of time in game 3 and before entering it in as a draw as is custom in Europe, I suggested that we do a Chaos Orb flip off to decide a winner. Brian agreed and so we started flipping. After 20 or so flips Brian’s Chaos Orb hit his target and bounced off, but an onlooker argued that the errata only said it had to hit the card, not land on it. Rather than stopping the proceedings to get an official ruling from MG I told Brian that would count as a hit this time, but going forward it wouldn’t. We went another 15 or so flips and then it happened again and I got the win. I finished the day at 5-2 good for a Top16 finish. Later in the evening I was a part of the US team for the Ryder Cup a Chaos Orb flip off against the Brits where I won my leg of the competition en route to a win for Team USA. Remarkably, the whole time I was over in Sweden I didn’t miss a single Chaos Orb flip going something like 375/375.
In 2023 I began in a new journey of getting my cards personalized having gotten to a point where everything I wanted to play with had been upgraded to Beta. My plan was to commission alters from the artists as I saw them which led me to the Satanic Panic event in Seattle in 2024. In addition to being a top notch Old School event in its own right, the event had a star studded cast of artists on site to do signatures and alters. Relatively uninitiated in the art form that is commissioning alters at the time and almost missed my window. I arrived just as the doors were opening, but spent the first few minutes of the day helping my good friend Drew Tucker get setup rather than jumping into the queue with Mark Tedin so I could get my Chaos Orb altered. I spent much of the day popping over to Wynne and Mark in the hopes of getting my commission into the pile and my persistence eventually paid off. I was elated at the idea of having my Chaos Orb altered and the result was fantastic.
Having gotten my lucky hat etched onto my Chaos Orb I thought I was “done”, but as I’ve written before that is never really the case. At n00bcon in 2025, after losing in the finals the year before I managed to win the Ante 40k World Championship. Jason and I played the final at 4AM and decided to do a Deep Ante card for the occasion. For those unfamiliar with it, Deep Ante is where you each put a card up for ante face down and off to the side which cannot be saved by Jeweled Birds. I promptly forgot about the Deep Ante as it was off to the side and we were also vying for the Mox Crystal proxy I had donated as the prize card for the event. After securing victory I was totally flabbergasted when Jason flipped over the deep ante card and revealed…
Jason expertly turned the Chaos Orb I’d won into the Deep Orb, commemorating the moment perfectly. Winning a Chaos Orb in Deep Ante in the game where I won the Ante 40k World Championship was wild. Having obtained the Deep Orb I decided to sell my altered Beta Orb because it was so hard to justify playing anything other than the Deep Orb and keeping a $2k+ card as a trophy like that felt inadvisable.
As I write this I still can’t believe that the story doesn’t end there. I was quite content to play the Deep Orb until the end of my days, but fate intervened. Over the last few years I have cut out social media almost entirely from my life which has been a godsend. Unfortunately, I haven’t broken my internet addiction yet so instead of doomscrolling FB or Instagram the water flows to the lowest lying point which for me is shopping for Magic cards. Frequently it just leaves me feeling empty and numb because it’s not like I really “need” anything and am just seeking out more obscure and niche cards. Generally these days I’m after stuff that is signed by Richard Garfield, but even then I’m picky about that as if it’s a newer signature, or on a card that does not surpass what I am already playing with, I am typically not interested in it.
With that high bar established, one can see why I am so often fruitless in my pursuit of new cards; there just aren’t very many of these gems floating around. I have been extremely fortunate to land five cards which were not only signed by Richard Garfield, but had the text altered by them as well. These Garfield alters are extremely hard to come by and command a heavy premium as demand far outpaces supply. Finding one is the equivalent of finding a needle in a haystack and many serious collectors hope to obtain one Garfield alter as a crown jewel in their collection.
On Monday of this week I was eating my breakfast and perusing Tales of Adventure’s website. What I like about their site is that they post all of their scanned cards by set and include a part which shows what their most recently added cards are. This feature is nice for my compulsive searching as it tells me quickly whether or not there’s anything new to see on their site. I was excited to see some Old School playable as their latest adds and proceeded to go set by set to see if anything caught my eye, starting with Unlimited. Almost immediately I saw it. It was labeled as a “Double Signed Unlimited Chaos Orb” and when clicking on it I got an error saying their site had too much traffic. I figured that they probably also had cross-posted the Chaos Orb on TCGPlayer so I quickly tabbed over to TCG to see if I was right. When I saw it on TCG I was blown away. Not only was the Chaos Orb signed by Richard Garfield, it was also altered by him… I hurriedly typed a message to the owner of Tales of Adventure, Michael Caffrey and asked him if I could get a slight discount by acquiring the card from him directly by Zelle rather than through TCG. He’s usually amenable to this as it cuts out the middleman and nets him more money because he doesn’t have to pay any fees and gets the money right away. Works for me because he’s a reputable vendor who I’ve known for a long time. Thankfully he responded promptly and I was able to lock in the sale. On Thursday night it arrived.
This Chaos Orb is perfect on multiple levels. For one, it has a lot of play wear which means that it has been flipped a lot over the years. The Richard Garfield signature is ancient and clear, “Oh it’s a gen1 without the shadow of a doubt” per foremost Garfield expert, Benoit. In addition to having a 1994 Garfield signature, the text he added is simple but hilarious. One of the less used house rules in Old School is that you can play with cards which have been errataed by Richard Garfield as written. In this case, that would mean that “When Chaos Orb lands, any cards in play that it touches are ripped up and destroyed, as is Chaos Orb”. Chaos does not come cheap! I would not want to rip up this Chaos Orb, but the idea of it makes me cackle like a super villain. My plan with this Chaos Orb is to get it altered by Mark Tedin this year if possible to get it to its “final form”.
I find it extremely hard to believe that I will find an Orb to surpass my new one in the extremely subjective criteria of “coolness”, but then again I wouldn’t have thought that I would find an Orb which topped the Hat Orb or Deep Orb, so who knows what the future holds. In the meantime, I will enjoy every single time I get to flip a Chaos Orb and focus on the Orb, not the target.
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