I competitively played 'Magic: The Gathering' from 1994 to 1996. I also went to several European gaming conventions (a.o. the former UK version of Gen Con in Rye and Loughborough), which was a lot of fun. In 1996 (on May 18), I finally made it into the Belgian finals (ending somewhere in the middle), after having obtained 12th place (on 180) in the Flanders qualification tournament (on April 6). After that event, I gave up the game, because it was becoming too expensive (relative to the inferior card quality/power of the post-Revised expansion sets). As a matter of fact, the game's highly commercial approach still happens to be one of its major controversial aspects.
I only kept my complete Ice Age collection, mainly because of the nice card artwork.