I started playing around the time Fourth Edition came out and then stopped just before Homelands came out, I think. I'm pretty sure the store where I got my cards didn't get them in release order, so I'm not really sure. Also, I wouldn't really call it "playing Magic" so much as playing something similar that used Magic cards.

I actually started playing Magic with Onslaught, and played regularly through Fifth Dawn.

This shatters my entire universe.

Yeah...

It turns out that referring to yourself in the plural doesn't fly when sending emails to university professors, so I had to stop doing that.

NOOOOOOOOOOO! I miss that quirky side of you...

~SE++

Well perkily plural or otherwise, its great to have ave back.

my brothers played magic for as long as i can remember and i was born in 1994 so my earliest memories are around 2000. I half played with the cards that were constantly lying around my house since i was a kid but never really learned how to play remotely properly until a lot later. When my older brother quit he gave me and my younger one two of his decks and they were mostly cards from mirrodin and kamigawa, and i mostly learned the game by playing with them.

I didn't learn about fancy things like priority or the stack until after i started hanging around the WotC forums though, which was in 2006 i think. I've also never played anyone outside my family in meatspace.

some of the blunders we had as kids were:

1) misreading bookburning man that card is op
2) we had an older copy of frozen shade without the "until end of turn" at the end, which was also op.
3) one of the big arguments we always had was "are you allowed to play the jitte's equip cost to unequip it in response to the creature it's equipped to dying. the common opinion was that it was probably too strong to be allowed."

Also i remember we had a video tape that was a tutorial to magic and it is one guy teaching two people how to play and one of the players is raging at the person teaching him how to play and the teacher says "it can swoop down and POUNCE the ogre" he did not think it was fair that flying creatures could block non-flying ones.

I love old cards like that. I think the old Regenerations said ": Regenerate target creature." I may or may not have exploited that.

~SE++

I bought Fallen Empires back before I knew Magic was a game. I thought it was kind of like Mavel Masterpieces type cards & they were like $0.50 a pack at this gift store.

Fast forward to '98, I was trying to make a few bucks selling duplicates of FE stuff I had to a couple of friends & one of them had apparently quit the year before. He asked if I played. I said no & he asked if I wanted to learn. A week or so later, we had a free period & he brought a box full of cards. He told me & 2-3 other friends to grab a handful &, after flipping through to make sure we had mana sources, taught us the basics. After the game, he told us to track down a starter deck/precon to build up from.

Out of the original group I learned to play with, I'm the only one who stuck with it. Everyone else, including the one who taught us, ended up quitting before we left high school.

I was kinda the same way, my buddy who taught me stopped playing, then wound up in jail.

~SE++

See, kids? See what happens if you don't play Magic?