I started playing back when 8th Edition was still new. I was around 10 or 11 years old. My uncle introduced my cousin, my brother, and me to the game and bought us our first structure decks. He asked what colors we wanted, and I said (my favorite color at the time) having no idea what any of the colors in Magic did or meant. My brother got the deck and my cousin the .

I almost never won.

I remember the deck had a few counters and bounce spells with mostly flying creatures, but it wasn't as fast as my brother's deck or as hard-hitting as my cousin's deck. Really it was a watered-down version of what should be. It may have been this that gave me an aversion to control and in general in the years to come.

When 9th Edition was released, I got the green deck and never looked back. Green as fit me as a color more than the others, and I had always wanted to build an elf deck. My first "good" kitchen table deck was an elf tribal deck that finally had some goodies in it when the Elves vs Goblins duel decks were released. My favorite part was generating the mass amounts of mana with which I could do anything I wanted.

Besides elves I found I really liked fungus cards when I got the structure deck from Time Spiral. Since then I developed a love for playing with counters and tokens that has carried into how I play today.

My favorite color combination is Abzan as you can tell from my name which is a portmanteau of Abzan and Azkaban. I used to be all about with Selesnya's ability to make lots of tokens and counters, but over the years I've starting taking more to .

In recent years I have found that I love the Aristocrats strategy of sacrificing creatures, and it has become my dominant archetype.

I mostly just played kitchen table casual, but my decks usually followed Modern rules. My tastes have turned more toward EDH because of the crazy ridiculous things I like to do in my decks, and only the commander format really supports that kind of whacky interactions. I still have some Modern decks that I'll take to FNM ocassionally, but my focus has shifted to playing with commanders.