This may sound mean, but I always thought Magic: The Gathering was a little too weird for my taste. And I am a person who likes JRPGs, professional wrestling, and magical girls. But never in a million years would I get caught collecting cardboard and learning the rules of a decades-old card game.
But it turns out I was an idiot, and it was only a matter of time before I got hooked on an MTG game and suddenly realized what all the fuss was about. A hobby that has long felt like an impregnable fortress is actually pretty accessible if a close friend is patient enough to sit you down and teach you the rules. So at a party where everyone was drinking a lot and doing drugs, we were talking about how land and mana work.
Magic: The Gathering isn't as complicated as you might think.
With MTG's popularity growing tremendously with each new expansion and Universes Beyond released, I have to imagine that there are many people like me who have been paying attention to MTG with curiosity from the sidelines in recent years. It's hard not to get excited when beautiful Final Fantasy and Hatsune Miku cards appear on your screen just begging you to buy them. As a cultural critic, I'm used to editing all the articles about these releases and seeing the images ahead of them, but I've never once pulled the trigger myself and convinced myself that it was going to be a colossal waste.
Not only because of the financial investment, but because of this irrational fear, you may not be able to play the game or be smart enough to understand it. For those unfamiliar with card games, card games are understandably a daunting prospect. All I needed was for a friend to hand me a crushing Commander deck and take me on a satisfying journey.
This deck in particular was all about overpowering dragons that took a while to summon, considering how many lands they required. Even then, though, thanks to the flying state, you can still deal double damage while avoiding most attacks. All the hardcore magicians will probably read this and laugh at me for just learning something so obvious. But that discovery is the beauty of a new hobby like this.
Every turn I took felt like an isolated lesson in understanding the flow of Commander and the decisions you must make to survive as well as succeed. I made mistakes and asked stupid questions, but that's not the case in an environment where the goal is to learn how the game works for the first time. By the end of this game, I had killed two of my opponents on the field, and a barbaric card played by a friend sitting next to me had killed every creature on the field. My dragons were no more and I was vulnerable. All it took was a few hits to get me down to 40 health points.
The Commander deck played against me was also a valuable lesson. Because you've seen armies of zombies return to their deaths as they drain other people's points, or you've watched dinosaurs grow so powerful that there seems to be no way to kill them without untouchable counters. There was a lot to read and I needed to learn some terminology. Although I can't think of the last time a weird hobby captured my imagination like this, I'll probably be Googling it countless times in the future.
The biggest barrier right now is cost.
But with a few Final Fantasy Commander decks and all the appropriate trimmings in the basket, it's become clear that the biggest obstacle when getting into MTG is how much this nefarious hobby is going to cost. I haven't seen massive participation in Secret Lair. Not yet, anyway. And who knows what expansion pack or crossover might really tickle my fancy? But even now, I've already invested over $200 in buying everything I want to get started.
But as someone who has become increasingly disillusioned with playing games in my free time due to a job that involves writing about games all day, feeling even a little passion for MTG is enough to get me excited, as if the internet is telling me to kill myself because of it. It's been so much fun learning to play and chatting with old friends, and I want to recapture that magic from beginner to amateur and beyond.
And to select every Final Fantasy card, you only needed a very small selection of exclusive cards. I'll report back on how this experiment goes and how long it lasts.
- franchise
-
Magic: The Gathering
- original release date
-
August 5, 1993
- designer
-
richard garfield
