I'm not pulling out of my driveway. We all know what that means. It's time for the drive-to-work, coronavirus edition.

So I've been having a lot of fun guests and I have another one today. So it is Cedric Phillips.

Hello, hello everyone. Mark, thank you for having me. I'm looking forward to sort of kind of driving to work or driving to my desk at least.

You were driving to my desk. So, yeah, it is true.

The pandemic has done strange things to us.

But I have a lot of fun interviews, and I expect you will be another one.

So let me start where I've been starting all my interviews, which is, how did you start

playing magic?

A story I am more than happy to tell.

So when I grew up in Strong Soul, Ohio, a suburb of Cleveland,

I had a friend named John Cross, who I met on the school bus because he could beat Mega Man

X and I couldn't. And so we became friends based off solely that video game. And over time,

you know, we would play video games and one day we were on the bus coming home from school

and he showed me a polar cracking. And he said, this card is a card from Magic of the Gathering.

And I'm like, I don't even know what that is, but the artwork in this card looks really cool.

So that night, you know, as I did most nights in elementary school, I went over his house to play

video games. And then we played, he showed me in some capacity how to play magic and how to cast

the polar crack and what was going on with that. And I was like, this looks fun and different.

And then we started playing like some free for all of the games in his basement with some

friends. And then all of a sudden I was hooked and I was going to the local card store and

buying booster packs occasionally when I could. Then I found about tournaments and now 20 odd years later, here I am on a podcast with you.

So that's, I guess, how it all started was Polar Cracken.

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