Magic: The Blathering

Have you ever taken a tinkle and then immediately thereafter had something to drink? Did you think,"What did I really just accomplish here"? Fine, just, forget I asked.

This weekend I found myself at a Magic Card tournament held in a local hobby shop. I'm a veteran of many Magic Tournaments, dating back to middle school, but this one was unique in my experience. Mainly it differed by being the least miserable. Somehow I never really enjoyed myself at card tourneys, excepting the rare occasions that I won of course. Yet every Tuesday evening there I was, nervously shuffling my Magic cards, in the food court of the mall. Truly the fondest memories I have of those tournaments are all the times I had enough money to get Sbarro's pizza. That was really great pizza. Eventually I stopped attending, driven away by the twenty-something losers who had nothing better to do in their moms' basements than spend all of their money on Magic cards in order to smash little kids at the local mall, and the little kids with decks completely funded by their rich but rarely present parents. I was continually improving, improvising, devising, reducing, trimming, slimming and testing my deck. I would spend all week on it, craft it to perfection, and then somehow draw the most inoperable, unlucky series of cards in all my real games at the tournament. This caused humiliating, and truly unjust, defeat.

I still play Magic with my buddies, we sit around and drink beer, smoke, make jokes at one another's expense, and throw down on the field of nerdy, fantasy battle. Last time we played they told me about this tournament, it was going to be a sealed deck style tournament, which piqued my interest. At a sealed deck tourney everyone receives a modicum of random cards. Essentially the entry fee is used to buy these packs of cards, one hundred and five at this shop, so you're not really out anything if you lose. All the players sit around for an hour and build the best forty card decks they can with the limited resources available to them. Once this has been accomplished the players are squared off in one on one matches. Each player competes in three matches and accrues points therein. The main draw of this format, to me, is the emphasis on strategy. I don't have to spend five hundred dollars a month on new cards to win this kind of tournament. It's all about working with what you've got. At the end of the tournament the highest ranked players are awarded new packs of cards and everyone gets a special promo card, which is generally worth a great deal of money before that moment, afterward it is extremely deflated.

To attend one of these tournaments one must be DCI certified. This entails filling out a small application sheet and receiving your DCI card. After you've done this you are officially a card carrying nerd. I got a DCI card last summer when I went to a tournament. Since then I have lost the card and totally stopped caring that I have done so. When I entered the sealed deck this weekend I had to fill out a new card. I impishly decided to put dudekazoo as my name both on the card itself and application. Somewhat concerned that it would be rejected if I used a single name (I'm no Cher or Madonna) I hastily tacked on the first last name I could conjure up. My friend Brandon asked me if I was related to Morgan. When it came time for the owner of the store, doubling as judge, to match players up he called out," Josh! You'll be playing...uh...Mr. Freeman over here." When he paired me up for my second match he called me dudekazoo but couldn't quite pull it off without a hesitancy in his voice. Every time he said it he seemed to gain new confidence though, so by the end when he handed me my prize money (i.e. magic cards) he shortened it familiarly to "dude". Aside from playing under a false identity the tournament was enjoyable for other reasons. The shop didn't reek of adolescent losers with poor self-esteem and poorer personal hygiene. It was a clean, professional store, but not altogether formal. It was casual without the usual squalor. The players were the least objectionable group of Magic aficionados I ever laid eyes on. I didn't hate any of them. None of them made my skin crawl. Usually there are at least a few of those poor excuses for humanity that one imagines must play Vampire: The Eternal Struggle and subsist entirely on Hot Pockets, but not this time. There were a couple guys who were a little too into the game but they didn't earn my animosity because they earnestly loved Magic and weren't being obnoxious pricks. I can't abide jerk offs, but I'm fine with dorks. In the end I took Fifth place, which earned me two booster packs. It may not sound like much but I felt good about it.

So, now you know, I'm a big nerd.