GoldbergBlog

Magic: The Wasted Youth

For all the parents out there, let me give you some advice: if your kid ever gets into a collectible card game, STOP THEM.  Of course, you can’t do this directly or else it will only further their obsession.  Get into it yourself and hopefully that will make it uncool.

I wasted some prime years of my life with a collectible card game called “Magic: The Gathering”.  When I say “prime years”, I’m talking the ages 11 through 14.  It’s that harsh middle school time when you’re first learning the basic steps of social interaction, especially with the opposite sex.  Instead of braving this playing field, I went to one of mana, tapping, and a game where I was never going to excel.  Sadly, no one slapped me on the back of the head and said “DON’T DO IT.”

I got into the game as I spent summers at Paideia summer camp.  It was THE game to play and rather than doing outdoor activities (which I’ve never been much for anyway), I would stay inside and play “Magic”.  Of course, the obsession carried over past summer camp and into a year-round activity.

It wasn’t the first time I had collected cards.  In fact, I’ve always been a bit of a collector, although I have no idea why.  Before “Magic” it was X-Men cards.  There was no gaming aspect but since I was spurred by the 90s “X-Men” TV show (a show which I now realize that despite some lousy voice acting and low-quality animation, was surprisingly faithful to its source material and didn’t shy away from mature content which was foreign to a Saturday morning cartoon show), I went for the collectible cards.  Oddly, the cards didn’t push me into the comic books.  Again, there was no one to slap me on the back of the head and say “Go back to the 80s comics because it’s got The Dark Phoenix Saga and some other good stuff,” and even in my younger days I saw that 90s comics were mostly crap (superhero comics haven’t gotten much better but it’s when you go outside that dominant genre that you find the good stuff like “Y: The Last Man”, “Ex Machina”, “100 Bullets”, “Transmetropolitan”, and “Sandman” among others).

So my collecting obsession went from one set of cards to another but this time there was a gaming element involved and it went all downhill from there.  For starters, I’ve never had much of a mind for strategy.  I can problem solve and tie my own shoe laces (although I won’t admit here how long it took before I figured that out and finally moved on from Velcro), but a key element of strategy is figuring out how your opponent will react and then compensating for that reaction.  There’s also setting traps, subtle manipulation, and timing.  All of these skills have moderately improved with age but as a 12-year-old kid, there was no way I could ever compete with guys in their late teens and early twenties.

The other problem is the way the game itself is set up.  “Magic: The Gathering” is not a finite set of cards.  Rather, it’s a real racket where new cards are constantly released and then other cards are moved to a list of “Restricted” or “Banned” while other cards go out of print entirely allowing for a collectors market where the most powerful cards carry a heavy premium sometime in excess of a hundred dollars (anything over a hundred dollars remains a high-priced item for me today, let alone when I was a kid with a $10 a week allowance).  So not only do you need the right cards to create the right deck, but you need the funds to either buy new packs of cards and hope you get lucky (and I will say, opening a deck of cards and getting a rare one was a great thrill but then again, so is winning the lottery–doesn’t mean it’s a good investment).  Ironically, sometimes the best decks are made out of common and inexpensive cards rather than the rare powerhouses.  Of course, as a dumb kid with absolutely no guidance or ability to craft effective stratagem, I was constantly throwing money away on new cards, trading for cards I thought I really needed, and it was all for nothing because I couldn’t put together a winning deck anyway.

Again, I wish someone had come along and smacked me on the back of the head and told me that if I was going to throw money away on packs of something, it may as well be cigarettes because while they’re even more addictive and bad for your health, at least they have the novelty of making you look cool (of course, procuring cigarettes in your pre-teens is a whole different problem, especially when you have no mind for strategy).   Of course, this is all the burden of being the oldest child: you have no experienced and trusted voice informing you of what to do and you basically have to figure it all out as you go along.  On the plus side, no one sticks a plunger on your face or ties you up, feeds you dog biscuits, and forces you to watch the Spanish Channel (my younger brother had it a little rough).

Even better advice is if someone had handed me a deck of playing cards and taught me “Texas Hold ‘Em” because there could actually be profit in it and I would never need to waste money on expansion packs or learn new rules or any of that nonsense.  Instead, (and be warned that this is probably the saddest thing you’ve ever read of mine) I spent almost every Friday night at home by myself organizing my cards.  I would dump out all of them, scramble them around, and then find a new way to organize them into boxes while I watched the “TGIF” line-up of “Family Matters”, “Step-by-Step” and other programming that was also a waste of time.  It’s true that I was going through a tough time since my parents had recently divorced and my dad had moved away and I guess in retrospect, it was therapeutic to be able to control something, even if it was something as silly as a organizing a bunch of collectible cards.

I mention all this because I’ve recently come back to “Magic: The Gathering” because they released an online version of it via XBox Live (I was also, and remain heavily into, videogames but they don’t really feel like wasted time because it was a more social activity and furthermore, it allows for a shared nostalgia today even though I didn’t know that the nostalgia would happen at the time; then again, I did have a sticker on my PSone that read “Girls Are No Substitute for a PlayStation”).  The nostalgia came flooding back when I played the demo and I eventually shelled out the $12 for the full version.  And coming at it with experienced eyes, I learned a few things.

For starters, the computer plays smart.  It knows how to play lands, when to play certain cards, when to attack, when to block, and what spells to play.  As far as AI goes, the designers really did a bang-up job.  And since I have a more functional brain, I’ve learned how to become a better player as opposed to when I was kid and thought that my defeats were really just the product of having inferior cards or that my opponent was simply way smarter than me.  Granted, it was probably a mixture of both but I didn’t even understand basic strategy although in my defense, “Magic” is a ridiculously complicated game.  The “Starter Pack” comes with a 60-page rule book which outlines the many facets of the game.  I remember trying to teach those unfamiliar with the game and failing at it every time.  I’m sure I got brownie points for just being able to understand it at my age but kids have a capacity for comprehending games that’s widely underestimated.

The game removes a lot of the headache I found with the real-world version.  To begin, that twelve bucks is it.  Almost all of the cards are available from the start and all you have to do to earn new cards for a deck is win a match against an online opponent using that deck.  They may release online expansion packs in the future, but I imagine those packs will still be a set amount of cards rather than a random collection that’s nothing but luck of the draw.  With a set number of cards, the online play comes down to pure strategy and composition.  Sadly, there’s no option to make a deck all your own although you can add and remove the additional cards you’ve won from matches.  But since the game has pre-constructed the deck, it’s kind of a relief because in a weird way, that’s the tremendous burden of the game: you have thousands of cards to choose from and you have to make a deck out of them.  The deck has to be at least sixty cards (maybe it’s forty; I forget) but if you make it too large, you reduce the odds of getting the cards you need.  And you need those cards to interact in just the right way and it still may not help because it may be the wrong way to defeat your opponent (which basically kills the strategy element).  Because all the decks the game offers are pre-constructed, you can better predict what cards they may hold and how you should respond.

But that leads to another of the game’s key flaws: too much depends on luck.  Sure, there’s luck involved in poker but the best players know how to rely on skill.  I suppose the same could be said of “Magic” except the game is too complicated and has too many variables.  You could have a fantastically constructed deck but if you’re drawing not enough mana or you’re drawing too much, you’re shit out of luck.

The online version also reveals how the game has changed over time and I would argue it’s not for the better.  In an effort to keep the game fresh, its designers have added new abilities which have made for overpowered spells and creatures.  In the decade since I’ve played the game, creatures now possess abilities like “Deathtouch”, “Double Strike”, “Fear”, “Haste”, and even the ability to not be the target of spells or the ability to not be blocked by opposing creatures.  I don’t know if these cards are rare or not but the fact that these abilities exist in the first place is disconcerting and I can’t help but wonder how many have been turned off from the game by these new additions.

I’m not exactly sure how I grew out of the game.  Maybe it was just part of growing up although I think I started to put more of my energies into videogames, especially RPGs.  I also realized that even if I took up the collector’s side of the equation (focusing not on the gaming but on the pricing and trading of cards), I was still gonna get fleeced by professionals who knew that a shy kid like me wasn’t going to haggle over price.  I still have most of my cards and even though some may have accrued in value and may be worth selling, I can’t really part with them because they were a significant part of my past, despite how nerdy and time-wasting it was.

Today, my collection is mostly DVDs although I’ve even cut back on that as I’ve slowly realized that despite my massive collection, I rarely return to the discs and don’t really have the time to delve into special features.  Also, as film distribution shifts to a digital medium, I’ m not really jumping at the chance to own more of a physical copy that, when added to the hundreds of DVDs I own, makes for a frustrating trial of storage and transportation.  Still, those movies have added to my cinematic knowledge and made me a better film journalist.  They also allow me to share my love of cinema with friends and I’m happy to loan out my films (although I certainly need to do a better job of tracking who’s borrowing what).

What I find a little funny is that among nerdy obsessions, mine was kind of at the bottom of the nerd hierarchy.  In the geek culture, there’s more love for collecting comic books or playing Dungeons & Dragons.  I suppose I could have joined those groups but no one was around to smack me on the back of the head and hand me a d20.

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