How I met my minis

Let me tell you about Mageknight.

It was 2002. Pat and I decided to get into Mageknight. Back in those days, XP still was more of a hobby shop than a PC cafe. Greenhills had not yet been razed, and there were still hobby stores on the fourth floor for card and plastic freaks. Me, Pat and my brother would go to Arena and stare for hours at the shelves full of little plastic minatures. At first, our priority was just to get a playable army as cheaply as possible, so we happily bought anything that was cheaper than 2 pesos per point. This is pretty much the same as deciding to buy cheap Magic cards with high casting costs. It gave the result you would expect: armies full of bad, overcosted figures. But back then, it didn't matter so much to us, as long as we got to play. Most of the time we would just hang out at UP. Between my Quantum Physics and her Instrumentation classes, we'd go behind the CS library for privacy and pit Troll agains Werewolf, Tree Elemental against Steam Golem.

After a while, we did end up playing competitively. I'd spend a lot of my online time on the old MKRealms forums, buying cheap singles. We bought Dragons and Giants. Played 2000 point armies. Pat actually paid for and managed her own collection, playing in tournaments with more cutthroat armies than I did.

Unfortunately, the problem with Mageknight were obvious even then. Ranged units were priced only slightly higher than melee units, even if in practice, the melee units would get shredded before they ever got close. Turtling was superior strategy; it was not uncommon in tournament games for time to be called without a single attack. Internal playtesting was a joke. It seems that Wizkid's solution to the dominance of long range was to make even longer ranges. Bigger, and bigger, and bigger.

It all came to a head when they released a new base set, named simply Mage Knight, known colloquially as 2.0. We were given a choice: Play a better game, but know that all of your old figures are obsolete, dead plastic. Or, quit, take your figures home, and never buy new product again.

We quit.