I wasn’t there in 1993, during those insane early days...
As I’ve written previously, this summer some friends and I started a “Magic: The Gathering” league, where we each buy the same number of boosters on a monthly basis and add them to our pool of cards. We then meet on a regular basis to run the decks against each other, and we play a lot on the side as well. The league is now in its third month, and has actually started to grow and become a bigger deal than I anticipated. So far official league play has consisted of two meetups where everyone plays everyone else, a booster draft, and various meetups where we just play casually. What started as a four-player league has grown to six or seven depending on the night, and that’s with one guy needing to drop out because he moved away.