It seems like lots of you have things to say about Magic; The Gathering!
If you haven't already, check out Gary Buckman's article on MTG here.
Tell us what you think of it. Love it? Hate it? Why/why not?
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Magic The Gathering; Or How I Learned To Stop Playing And Get A Life
Submitted by: Gary Buckman
Disclaimer: I don’t mean to offend anyone with this article, but if you’ve committed your life to magic; the gathering, you’re probably going to be offended.
This is not a review of the game magic itself; this is a comment on the social demographic of magic players, their pack mentality and behaviours. I want to write this so that the only thing you NEED to know about magic is that it’s made by Wizards Of The Coast, it’s generally played 1v1, it’s a collectable card game, it's fuckin everywhere, and there are events where you go and play a tournament structure.
The entire premise of magic the gathering, is that you are a “planeswalker” in real life. You go around travelling to different regions of the multiverse finding new cool things to use to fight other people (the metaphor extends to whenever you buy a booster pack filled with 15 new cards, you’re exploring new land and finding new cool things, another example of how wizards of the coast is trying to strengthen the fantasy within your mind) and whenever you come across another planeswalker you don’t like, you fight them (play a game of magic the gathering). The ones that you do like, you train with and swap stories and items (play magic and trade and borrow cards and shit) and just have an overall good time.
Wizards of the Coast push for flavour depth and character development in their cards to encourage people to gain an emotional attachment to them. They do this by writing a fantasy novel about every new set of cards they release, depicting the characters on the cards doing cool shit like wearing cool armour and getting the bad guy. Then these characters seemingly come to life when you see their face on cardboard and you can play them! There are also a few women characters every set. While the women characters are the vast minority of characters, they are often the show ponies of the set, making it on the banners and posters for promotionial magic products and they are over represented in legendary creatures (which means that they are harder to come by and play a more significant role in the story line). So there aren’t many female characters but when there are, they are ALWAYS sexy, powerful, all knowing, untouchable beings to be looked up to. Interestingly, the novels very rarely depict romance between the male and female leads. In my opinion this is because it would trigger a cascade of insecurity throughout the readers and potentially make them feel isolated, as it is an area they don’t understand AT ALL! It’s quite funny to hypothesise that people’s suspended disbelief will allow talking trees and mischievous faeries but not the existence of intimacy. The effect magic has on courtship and finding a potential mate is HUGELY detrimental and is something I will cover later.
So people play the game for different motives now - some play to win, some play for the social aspect, and some people play to win THEIR way. They seek the challenge of winning with their favourite card (which is usually the one with the cool artwork, funny flavour text, or one that they have the most fond memories of) which brings them great satisfaction. Others like particular cards because it suits their style of play. In this way magic can be a form of self-expression. People can put their heart and soul into a deck that can best define them and what they want and how they want to play. They can then take this deck to a big tournament and even do really well! Oh happy days!
One of the most interesting things I learned while playing magic is that the way that people approach the game is often the way that people approach the rest of their life. A lot can be read from the way someone builds their deck as it gives a lot of information away about them. For example it’s instantly obvious whether or not someone is an idiot by looking at their deck. When simple things like mana curve, suite of removal spells and a way to actually win the game are disregarded, its easy to conclude that they are not only an inferior planeswalker, but also retarded. And often you can see this lower level thinking being echoed throughout many aspects of the players’ lives. Its not hard to point to the 50 year old, uneducated virgins in a magic the gathering crowd - and these people, while being bad at life, are also bad at magic. Often the most successful magic players are educated, healthy and have a very active social life outside of magic with women and other non-magic friends.
But because magic has such a heavy focus on “escaping reality” it draws a very low calibre of people to play. This is true with many games as games are designed to be easier then life, so when life gets hard, you can take your mind of things and play a game. And winning a game of magic is much easier then having a win in the real world. The real world is a hard place and it’s often unclear as to whether or not you winning is actually you winning, but in magic there is always one winner and this game it could be you! So naturally the prospect of winning and satisfying your instant gratification instinct attracts many sub-par people that never have and never will accomplish anything. These are not bad people, just failures.
Magic has a strong emphasis on social aspects as well. If you are socially awkward, don’t have many friends, just moved to a new city and want to meet new people then magic can be a great tool to expand your number of friends. A cool thing about magic is that if you have a friend that plays magic, you will always have something to talk about. The conversation will never end and it can be very fun discussing the pros and cons of particular card choices. These discussions can help with problem solving skills and logic. Magic forces you to think and in that way can help you to become a smarter person if you’re willing to learn.
In order to become good at magic you sort of need to have friends that also play the game (which are not hard to acquire) so you can test out decks and lend cards to each other and learn from each other’s mistakes. The problem with the social aspect of magic is the aforementioned low calibre of people. The kind of people that are drawn to magic are socially awkward, dumb people that don’t have anything else major going on in their lives (if they did its most likely they wouldn't waste their time with magic). They live and breathe for the fixes that come from winning games because they are unaware of anything that makes them happier. Magic tournaments are an environment where nerds and geeks and unhealthy social outcasts can go and instantly find a crowd that will accept them and make them feel good. And in this way it can definitely improve the quality of life for lots of individuals. But on the flipside it’s very easy to become consumed by the game, lifestyle and self-destructive thinking of the addicted gamer. To live and breathe magic is unhealthy mentally, physically and financially.
Some of the destructive behaviours of these gamers become obvious when you get into the game in a deep way. The most shocking thing I found was the high level of gossip and bitchiness amongst gamers! Its very clear who hates who, who is a lucky noob and who doesn’t deserve to win certain matches based on deck choices. A high level of animosity develops quickly between gamers over something as trivial as a game of magic. While this may seem unusual it actually makes a lot of sense. This is because before someone actually gets to a high level tournament, they’ve spent countless hours discussing deck choices, modifying sideboards, spending thousands of dollars on the best decks in the format, playtesting each one with each of their own variations - then they wake up early Sunday morning, get public transport to the venue where they pay 40 dollars to compete in a state level tournament and lose the first 2 rounds out of manascrew. Who are they going to blame? Definitely not themselves. They become angry and frustrated at other people who might have told them to build their deck a certain way, or their opponent who played a silly way but ended up beating them anyway. Magic is a huge financial and time commitment and people can often become so emotionally attached to their deck or the way they play that they can end up judging themselves (or other people) on how well they perform which is unhealthy, to say the least.
I found that magic also has a detrimental effect on your life in terms of women. There are a few reasons for this. First off if you don’t have a girlfriend then there is no way in hell that playing magic is going to help that. Magic is a game where 20467980435782940% of the players are single men and unless you’re into that, you're never going to find a partner there. Associating with these men who themselves have difficulty talking to and meeting women also has terrible effects on your love life. These guys will never introduce you to girls and are themselves afraid of girls, as girls are one of the things that magic allows escaping from. This fear of women has become so deep seated that it becomes a bad business move for a firm to use a woman as a sales rep. At a large tournament I played at, my friend’s mother (40 something year old woman, attractive for her age) was behind the counter selling cards in a city where no-one knew her, business went down because people did not feel comfortable approaching her to buy cards, they had to get her to do some other job and have an obese white man take her place.
On top of this magic is extremely time consuming and costs insane amounts of money. So if you do have a girlfriend its easy to see how this could get in the way. As good as magic is for social life, and instant gratification and shit, it’s not going to suck your dick. I don’t think that anyone I know that plays magic would disagree with me saying that a healthy relationship with a woman is more appealing then magic. It’s also kind of hard to create a relationship with a girl if she knows you play magic. It’s just not as cool as collecting cars or working out or sport.
Magic also has serious health drawbacks. A standard Friday night magic event goes for at least 4 hours, a big tournament goes for at least 8, and magic benders don’t exist because playtesting with friends for 6 to 10 hours is common. If a big tournament is in another city, then going and renting a place for a weekend in that city, playtesting like crazy, going to 2 big magic tournaments then coming home are all activities where you remain absolutely motionless. To make matters worse, the food you decide to eat is often chosen on convenience, as you have little time in between rounds to go out searching for healthy food, it’s usually the nearest McDonald’s, Oporto or snickers bar that becomes most appealing. Getting seriously involved in magic means that the chances of you putting on weight and becoming less healthy skyrockets which further decreases your chance of finding a partner and escaping to find a healthy social life outside of magic.
Finally, the financial effects of magic - by far the most popular format of magic is a format called standard. Standard includes playing with the last core set and the 2 most recent extention blocks. So whenever a new block is introduced this means the oldest legal block becomes obsolete. This means that the majority of the cards you owned from that block becomes worthless, as they are now not legal to use in the most played format of magic. This means that your once-worth-$400 deck is now, if your lucky, worth $100. So let me explain. A deck consists of 60 cards, no more than 4 of each card and the most valuable cards in the format are the most used cards. Also the most powerful cards in the format are rarer then all the other cards in the format. So obviously, supply and demand applies. Some cards are needed much more then others and these cards are much more expensive. At any one point in time there are many single cards that are worth upwards of 40 dollars. So in order to get a playset of these cards (4) you need to dish out at least 160 dollars. Then you've got the rest of your deck to build. With the majority of playable cards costing upwards of 8 dollars a card it’s easy to see how one deck can cost anywhere from 200 to 500 dollars. And if you want to take the game seriously you need more then one deck in order to playtest. So the result is that people during the time frame of one format cycle can spend thousands of dollars on a bunch of decks that then become worthless when the set rotates out! This is a huge amount of money when you continually play the game for many years (one of my friends claims that his group of friends had collectively spent $50,000 over the past 4 years between 5 people for a collection of cards worth less than $3000. That was 4 years ago and I’d say it was a conservative estimate).
As well as the cards there are also tournament entry costs. Depending on where you go, a standard Friday night magic can cost between 6 and 10 dollars, a local draft is usually 15 – 18 dollars, any locally run sealed event is usually 40 dollars, and any big event that you need to travel to such as a GP, pro tour qualifier or state event is also 40 dollars. The worst example of someone spending money on tournaments was when I was in Canberra for some huge tournament. A man I befriended (not the most intelligent man I’d ever met) spent 40 dollars to go into the main event, lost the first 2 rounds, paid 30 dollars to go into the side event, lost the first round and dropped so he could go on the sealed event that ran alongside it costing 40 dollars, lost the 2 rounds then dropped to play an 8 man draft of an old set (since it was an old set it cost 30 dollars as the set was not in print anymore) played all 4 rounds, lost all of them, placed 8th and got no additional prizes. He wasted 10 hours of his time and 140 dollars on just tournament entry. He probably had lots of fun though.
In order to play and win magic you need the most expensive cards, and when you do win, your prize is more cards that you obviously don’t need since you used all the best cards to win the tournament.
All this being said, I played magic for many years and it was an extremely enjoyable experience. Magic helped me through some hard times as it was an escape, and it taught me a lot through the people I met. I advise that you don’t get deeply involved in the game though, as it is becomes a burden to bear and an overall negative on your life in just about every aspect.
