It was the summer of 2002. I had a small playgroup back then, but floated around playing with friends who were more involved in other playgroups, some of them more focused on tournament gameplay, while others were strictly casual. In one of these meetups, I saw two of people playing a game, and something strange was going on. One player had a deck with these ostentatious bright-orange sleeves. They were like traffic cone sleeves. While this wouldn't be at all uncommon today, back then most of us played unsleeved decks or used clear "penny sleeves." I did have some black sleeves, enough for a few decks, and a couple of my friends had red or blue sleeves, but even those were not typical. I remember seeing my friends mix black and red sleeves together for playtesting a deck because they didn't have enough of either color, and even though it was only an informal playtesting session to guide deckbuilding, I was irritated at this and protested it, because apparently I had nothing better to concern myself with. I might have seen some more exotic colors before this point, but never traffic-cone orange!
The strange sleeves were what first drew my attention, but what piqued my interest was that the game looked odd even from across the room. The guy with the orange deck had most of his deck in his graveyard. Usually, that meant that the game had run on for a long time or that someone being milled out, but the other player's graveyard was small and orange-sleeves guy (his name was John, but I'd barely met him at the time, and "orange-sleeves guy" sounds cooler for my purposes here) was in the process of drawing clumps of cards, looking at them, dumping them into his graveyard, and drawing more cards. So I knew that something interesting must be going on! And of course that meant I had to investigate it...
Figuring out what was going on with the orange deck didn't take long.
Urza's Saga was one of my favorite sets, and while I must have recognized Fluctuator as a card, I had essentially forgotten about it, and certainly not thought of building a deck that consisted almost entirely of cycling cards. So playing this deck, one paid mana to cycle cards until Fluctuator was in-hand, then cast Fluctuator and cycle cards for free, running through the whole deck to find a combo finish. That first version of a Fluctuator deck I saw back in 2002 had four copies of Fluctuator, one each of all the cycling lands at the time (Blasted Landscape, Drifting Meadow, Remote Isle, Polluted Mire, Smoldering Crater, Slippery Karst), one copy of Songs of the Damned, one copy of Drain Life, one copy of Haunting Misery, one copy of Overmaster, and 27 cycling creatures. That turned out not to be ideal, although being able to win a three-player game off a big Songs of the Damned by hitting one opponent with Drain Life and the other opponent with Haunting Misery was a neat trick, and one I emulated when I first built my own version of the deck. Overmaster, besides being a "new" card that I wasn't willing to use back then, was rather bad in the deck anyway, needing a red mana open to avoid being a dead card and even then not providing all that much protection. One could Overmaster to force through Songs of the Damned, use Drain Life and, if it was countered, finish the opponent off with Haunting Misery (which was John's idea in the first place), but it wasn't worth the risk of slowing the deck down with a dead draw. After I'd already added a single copy of Swamp to my version for a better chance at a third-turn kill (with a card that would be dead less often than Overmaster), John did the same. But it was the addition of Lotus Petal that gave the deck a potential second-turn kill. At some point, I took out Songs of the Damned and Drain Life for Dark Ritual and Lotus Petal, making the deck just a little bit more consistently fast, making second-turn kills possible, but going all-in on Haunting Misery. But for most of high school, I was piloting the Songs of the Damned version. Actually a few of us were. At least four people I knew, in addition to myself, had this sort of Fluctuator deck. It was very cheap to build and very fast. A glass cannon combo deck, and that sort of thing has its uses.