Games You Should Like (as much as I do): Magic The Gathering

I was a lonely kid.

I'm sure that is a shock given the title of the article.

My parents both worked. During the summers I would often go days between seeing anyone else. I had free reign to go just about anywhere I could reach on my bike, but I didn't really have much of anywhere to go, or any money to spend to do anything.

As a result most of my time was spent at the library. On the way to the library though was the house of one of my few friends from school. I don't know how many times I rode past his house on a monday morning, calculating in my head if it was too early to go up and knock, or if it had been long enough since my last visit. The truth was, if I'd thought he'd be ok with it I would have spent every day there.

It was on one of the days I'd been able to muster up the courage (or simply when the need for human contact had gotten to be too much) that he and I went to the local comic store and bought a starter deck each of the fourth edition of Magic: The Gathering.

That first day we cracked open those starter decks and just played with what we had. I remember I had some good black cards, but considering our complete lack of understanding of the rules, it's hard to say. I definitely got a Murk Dwellers, but I mostly only remember that by it's absolutely terrible artwork.

Like this, but Zombie.

The fact this was fourth edition gave the impression that it had a long history, but of course it had only come out two years before. We just barely missed having Black Lotus' in our closets. It was not long after they released Ice Age. Everyone was still talking about how bad Fallen Empires had been. This was 1995. I was 14. We were going to be freshmen. I bought two or three booster packs that summer and then stopped buying them at all. I didn't really have the money and honestly found the two-player nature of the game a bit boring. I was way more interested in the combos than just figuring out how to more efficiently do damage.

Besides, by that point my friend had betrayed me.

We were both in band, and we'd kinda gotten a reputation for being the same person, mostly because I was so painfully shy I stuck to him like glue in any social situation.

Like this but dudes. Also we didn't look alike at all. Also I don't recall us ever standing in an infinite white void or being semi-transparent though that might just be nostalgia goggles,

I was clear, even to me, that this was becoming an issue for him. Although I saw him struggling to become his own complete actualized person and carve out his own niche I also saw that I didn't care about that and did everything I could to sabotage it. Anytime he went to make a new friend, I was there being as abrasive as possible to leave a bad impression of the both of us.

But a weird thing happened. A lot of the other band members played magic too, and so we slowly fell into playing with them. I would never have tried to connect any of them on my own, but with my friend trying to outreach constantly I was forced too. Slowly and surely I came to connect with these people, and it was mostly through Magic.

Now this was not one on one magic. This was what we called Chaos magic. It was as many players as we could cram into a game. It gave you time to build up your corner of the world and made it ultimately more of a political game than anything.

Look at Unsplash! Delivering on the magic and politics.

Playing magic with more than one other person is no longer about how best to smash the other guy in the face. Most of the time it's about convincing people to attack each other by making yourself less of a threat. It can mean sometimes even helping one opponent to take down a bigger threat.

One of my favorite cards in the game in fact was the Crown of the Ages.

I came here looking for a crown though. Well, who am I to argue.

In two player magic the card is very weak. It costs way to much to operate and isn't really even all that powerful. Outside of some specific combos it was not really worth it.

In chaos magic though, it was amazing. It let you idly flit benefits around to anyone you wanted and to take them away just as easily. It basically let you select a champion to go out and do your bidding.

I have since moved on to other games. Diplomacy and Game of Thrones, Resistance and Battlestar Galactica. But playing magic with those guys in a basement was the first time I experienced the joy of convincing someone to act in my interest.

I never see those guys anymore. We're friends on facebook but I'm home so rarely and with a kid...it's just not possible. But I often think back to those days and the first time I ever really actively tried to make friends.