Mike Long is the most notorious Magic player to ever touch the game and not for good reasons.
Mike was a professional player, a genuine face and star of the Pro Tour in the early 90s and drew crowds to his matches for his technical play, ingenuity as a deck designer and most of all his barrage of chatter throughout any given game of Magic.
But Mike was also caught with a combo piece in his lap at a US Nationals tournament an incident that is sadly one of many similar reports.
Despite his reputation, Mike Long was also a genuinely good Magic player who loved to get into the heads of his opponents.
So in the finals of Pro Tour Paris in 1997 when he's facing off against another star of the era in Mike Justice with his same infamous combo deck...well it's a match that you'll have to see to believe.
But I believe it contains the greatest bluff in Pro Tour history.
And from what I can tell, at least in this final Mike is clean.
This is a story about the two bad boys of Magic. How the quirky old rules of the time made one of the earliest combo decks incidentally stronger, how players figured out that Cadaverous Bloom could be utilized as a fearsome combo engine and how even the mulligan rules changing had an effect on the outcome of one of the Pro Tour's most famous matches featuring some pretty infamous players.
It's also the story of how a single Drain Life changed the course of MTG history.
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Credits:
Editor: Jonathan Choi | (https://x.com/heresasianjon)
- End slate (Daze by Richard Wright) is courtesy of Geoffrey Palmer aka @livingcardsmtg816 | (https://x.com/livingcardsmtg)
- This video features the songs, 'Title', 'Ambience', 'Ambience 2', 'Ambience 3', 'Not All Is As It Seems', 'Breaking Through' and 'Conjuring the Elements' from the game 'Orb of Creation', used with permission. Thanks Marple for being awesome.
You can check out Orb of Creation here: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1910680/Orb_of_Creation/
- Magic coverage footage used is presumably owned by the WOTC and the PlayMTG channels. Everything was used with the intention of being both transformative and additive while sharing the great stories of competitive Magic. Credit is attributed as best I can.