Hi, I'm a native of the Netherlands; born in 1980 in a small city near the Dutch west-coast. During my early high-school years, the Unlimited series hit my country by storm. I had read about MTG in a magazine (can't remember what it was called) and the game intrigued me, so I decided to give it a try and buy a starter set and a box of boosters. It took all of my saved-up birthday money, but after what I had read about the game, I figured it would probably be worth the amount of fun-filled hours that would follow. Turned out I was right. Playing MTG proved a great catalyst for making new friends. I remember many fun-filled Friday evenings spent around tables at homes and in pubs with my friends, playing until we were too tired or kicked out of closing establishments. Then, all of a sudden, highschool was done. Many of my friends headed off in different directions to attend college/university and I lost touch with almost all of them for this reason. As a result, my MTG collection (which by now featured many complete sets including Arabian Nights and Legends), landed on the shelf until a time would emerge when I had either found new friends to play the game with or until I had the heart to sell my collection.

Fortunately in 2012, the former happened before I felt forced into the latter. I met my soulmate, who rekindled my interest in the game. She and I mainly explored a format that was new to the both of us: EDH/Commander. We made a few decks featuring cards from my old collection. We were a bit nervous about using these however, even when they were double-sleeved. Some were worth thousands of euros. So we decided to shelve these cards for the time being and start a new collection using more modern cards. To kick-start it, we bought all the EDH/Commander 2013 decks, as well as booster boxes from Theros and Born of the Gods. From this point on we built an entirely new collection and this has been a lot of fun.

In 2014 we got married. Soon after we were expecting the birth of our first child. The appartment we were living in became too small and too impractical and we decided we wanted to buy a house. We used our savings to finance the starting money for the mortgage, but this was not enough to also finance the remodelling we wanted to do. With some pain in my heart, I decided creating the ideal home for our family was much more important than having a vintage MTG collection. I was fortunate enough to find a serious collector within a relatively short timespan. He took almost all of my old cards off my hands, with a few exceptions that I wanted to keep for sentimental reasons.

Unfortunately in the spring of 2021, after having been together for only nine years, my wife contracted Covid-19; before she ever got a chance at being vaccinated. Because of her astma, she was unable to fend off the disease and she died at the age of 36. She enjoyed playing MTG a great deal and most of the decks I have posted here were first created when she was still with me (but I will continue to update them as new cards come in; I feel like she would have wanted me to do this). We thought up new deck ideas together and posting these on tappedout helps me to process the loss our family has suffered from her passing. Also, every time I play this game again, with one of the decks I built with her, I remember her. These memories are currently still very painful but I hope that in time, the feeling of sadness will be replaced by a feeling of joy of having known her to begin with.

NV_1980