“Are you Nick?”
I looked up from my book, and saw the kid. Early 20’s? Something like that. It made him an anomaly in this room of Vintage players at Rip n’ Ship Gaming in June of 2023. It made him an anomaly in most rooms of Vintage players.
“Yeah, how are you doing?”
“Good! My name’s also Nick, but everybody calls me Ramos. Do you want to jam some Vintage?”
You know I did.
I’d been jamming Vintage for a long time now. Magic, but specifically Vintage, had occupied a place close to my heart for basically all of my adult life. Way back in the spring of 2000, I picked up my first Black Lotus from Mark Aronowitz at Mark’s Comics. I remember sitting at the counter, trying to figure out how to work up the last bit of $300 in trade that I needed to pick up that Lotus. I emptied out my binders, then took apart my Standard deck. Morphlings, Gaea’s Cradles, Masticores, they all went out.
Black Lotus came in.
Once you have a Lotus, what do you do with it? It’s a wonderful thing to have, but I didn’t want to just have it sitting in a binder somewhere. I wanted it sleeved up, in a deck, battling.
I built Keeper, then BBS (Blue Bull Shit for the uninitiated, or those not ravaged by time). I slowly picked up a set of Power. I wanted to play more Vintage, especially once Affinity took a wrecking ball to Standard. There were a handful of Vintage players at Mark’s Comics back then, but there were no events.
The only place where you could find Vintage tournaments back then was Neutral Ground, the most mythical game store in the world for us New Yorkers. Taking the train into Manhattan, and jamming Vintage was a special thing. I would test with Dave Kaplan, Christian Grim, and others. I got run over a bunch, but just playing the cards, being able to experience Magic’s (then, early) history, there’s something indescribable about it. There was a youthful innocence and joy to it, where the world was still new, and Magic was magic for that first time.
It took a couple of years, but I wanted more than the games I got with friends, and the only way to do that was to push for events to be run. I asked Mark if he’d be willing to let me run Vintage events at his store. In 2002 we ran the first Vintage event at his store; $20 entry, Alpha Time Walk to first, English Legends Mana Drain to second, and some credit for the top four. Somehow, despite the decades, that English Mana Drain isn’t much more than it was then. The Alpha Time Walk, however…
I loved all of it, and I ran events straight through until 2005. Our little Vintage community grew. Aaron Rubinstein, Corey and Jared Mann (with an honorable mention to Chris Mascioli), and many others all joined our crowd.
I went off to school in upstate New York in January of 2005, and didn’t come back to Long Island until July of 2008. I thoroughly enjoyed playing Magic in upstate New York, but there wasn’t much more than Limited and Standard to be had, and I sorely missed playing Vintage with friends.
I slowly began working my way back in to Vintage, attending events, and testing with friends when I came home in 2008. It was incredible to come back, and recognize what had been absent the last few years.
I came back at an interesting time. The June 2008 Banned and Restricted List announcement was an all-timer, as Brainstorm, Flash, Gush, Merchant Scroll, and Ponder all hit the Restricted List. This was an earthquake that hit the format, and the perfect time to get back in – the meta had completely reset. Everyone was sent back to the starting line.
I played a lot of Vintage as 2008 became 2009. I wanted more and more. But every event was a road trip. Vintage on Long Island had withered, as our community slowly atrophied over time due to the lack of events. Additionally, we lost our anchor, as Neutral Ground, the famed store that was the epicenter of our Magic experience, closed its doors.
When I started running events again in 2009, it was easy enough. Power, along with all the other staples, were affordable. At that point in time, we thought that the prices were high, and given where they’d been just a few years prior, they were. A $500 Unlimited Black Lotus may seem obscenely cheap now, but when your price memory is $100-300, maybe it is. Still, for $40-$50 you could play in an unsanctioned Vintage tournament, and win a piece of Power.
A random aside – I believe every Black Lotus tournament that I ran gave away a Timetwister to second. Can you imagine what those who are unfamiliar with that era would think when reading old tournament reports? “They gave away a Lotus to first, and a Timetwister to second?!?” If they only knew.
Winning always feels good, but winning a piece of Power felt different. It was special in a way that cash prizes just aren’t. I knew many players who would win an event, and immediately remove a proxy from their deck in order to play with their prize. Many others would win credit, slowly build that up, trade in more to the stores/dealers, and pick up the cards that they needed to play.
I don’t know if any of us recognized it at the time, but we were playing in a Golden Age of Vintage. Yeah, we were mostly 20-somethings who didn’t have a great deal of disposable income, but the ratios between the cost of cards, our wages, and the cost of everything else was just about perfect. We’d meet up early on a Saturday morning, drive out to an event (potentially 3-4 hours away), jam Vintage all day long, and have a great time out at dinner with our friends (near and far) until far too late. We’d come home exceptionally late. We were exhausted, but rejuvenated.
I dove headfirst into organizing Vintage tournaments. Pick a month in 2010, and you could play Vintage weekly at Mark’s Comics, bi-monthly at The Comic Book Depot, or monthly at Brothers Grim. Credit, format staples (duals, Libraries, Workshops), Power, they were all on the line, every month. I loved all of it, but by the time 2012 rolled around, I was tired. We had built up the New York Vintage community again, and we had over 100 players in the NYC/Long Island region. I knew I couldn’t keep running events like this, and that I needed to back off to focus on the other areas of my life that had been neglected. That said, I’m a tournament organizer at heart. There are times in my life where I haven’t run Vintage events, but it always felt like something was missing. After about a year of not running any events, the itch was there again.
I couldn’t do what I had done in the past, I didn’t have it in me to run all those events every month. I didn’t want to run a monthly event either – it wasn’t too much work, but it was consistent in a way that I wasn’t crazy about. I wanted to be able to take a break, and not think about running anything for months at a time. So what was left?
The Vintage community announced events, talked strategy, and more on TheManaDrain.com. In 2025 this isn’t a url that I expect everyone to be familiar with due to its age (those of us who remember/used BeyondDominia may be legally dead), but it became the online hub/hangout that connected all of us. Every year the Americans on TMD would jealously see another Bazaar of Moxen tournament announced, and run. I can’t speak for everyone, but I can speak for myself when I say that I deeply wished I could have had that experience in the States. The entry fee was high, but the prize support that was given out was surreal. Power up and down the standings, Beta Power, multiple pieces of Power going to the winner. Multiple Lotuses going out. It defies belief nowadays.
But it was real.
What would a sustainable version of that event look like? I spent a good amount of time thinking about that in early 2013. You could find events in the States that awarded multiple pieces of Power – usually a Lotus to first, and a Timetwister to second. Sometimes you’d find an event where the organizer gave away a couple of Moxen. But they were increasingly rare.
So what about an event that gave away eight pieces of Power, headlined by an Unlimited Black Lotus, to the top eight? It was a start. I started talking about the idea of an event like this with friends. Visna Harris (one of the true gentlemen of Vintage) brought up the idea of a trophy that was worthy of an event with that kind of prize support. I thought about ways to tie the event into my deep love of New York, and thought about how altered Karn, Silver Golems would be a unique giveaway. I wanted more, and started thinking through what giveaways I could hand out on the day. I wanted everything to feel like a callback to what Magic was when we were younger, when we met our first friends through the game, and then embarked on that journey with them one battle at a time.
NYSE Open I fired in June 2013, and was just about everything that I had wanted it to be. The core group of players were Vintage locals, but there were so many others who surprised me by coming out. All the major Vintage hubs in the U.S. were represented at that event.
There are many things that I love about this event, but chief among them was that it represented an opportunity to work with some of my closest and oldest friends. Nick Coss was my dealer for the event at the beginning, later joined by Calvin Hodges. Greg Fenton, another one of my closest friends began producing an incredible image to go with every event. The playmats that Greg produced just further added to the nostalgia.
Visna Harris helped find and make the trophies happen. I truly believe that the NYSE trophy is the best trophy in all of Magic.
Earl Grant De Leon did magnificent work with altered Karns featuring NYC icons.
The giveaways were an opportunity to add to the event, as I spent months looking for Magic nostalgia incarnate. It was a chance to give away cool things from Magic’s past that the players today may not have been familiar with.
NYSE Open IX was another great day, and I’m happy to say that the videos for the event will be available here on Eternal Central.
Vintage is Magic at its purest. It is a chance to celebrate Magic’s history with other fans of the game. I look forward to doing just that at Eternal Weekend North America this year.
So…do you want to jam some Vintage?
Yes, Ramos, I do.
