So you're one of those people that know the meaning of "Deckmaster" without looking it up?
Not as such, no. I had to look it up, because I forgot all about the "Deckmaster" logo. It was just part of the card back, and we didn't pay any attention to it. We played Jyhad, and I knew of people who played Netrunner, but I never got into it.
I got into MtG at the end of Arabian Nights, so if there were any major discussions about the demise of the original Deckmaster plan, I wasn't part of it. Besides, my Magic community was isolated from the rest of the world. On my favorite BBS, it was discussed in the Role Playing Games forum, so it got drowned out at first until it gained enough steam to spawn a Magic forum of its own. Considering that the BBS was hard-coded to have a maximum of 200 forums, it was a big deal to create any new forum. And yeah, as you already know, Magic was that big of a deal.
So there may have been discussion of what Deckmaster meant, but I wasn't part of it (or, quite possibly, forgotten it as it wasn't as important and remembering the mana cost of a Braingeyser). We didn't care; we just wanted to play games. Not having a consistent gaming store in town, I would sometimes go home on weekends and buy up boosters for trade and ante fodder.
We didn't even adhere to tournament rules for a while because we weren't playing tournaments. Of course, it takes a degenerate deck to show us how useful tournament rules were, so we adopted that standard. I still managed to follow through on my goal of building a Black Vice deck. It was nasty and was really only beaten by a Lightning Bolt deck. The Plague Rat deck was pretty close, but it wasn't fast enough.
