Magic

Magic: The Gathering a trading card game that I have been playing for about 3 years now. Despite that, I can't seem to win the majority of commander games I play. For those who don't know, commander is a casual format of Magic usually played by groups of four people. I recently started playing commander a lot more often on Tabletop Simulator, which makes it easier for people new to the game to play, since you can use any card on TTS; they're virtual, so there's no need to pay the excessive amounts of money required to build a commander deck in real life.

Magic has a toxic relationship with the wallets of those who play the paper version of it. Cards are physically all the same; there is no difference between the rarest Magic card and the newest one except for their age and the number of copies. What actually distinguishes cards in terms of their price is how meta they are. Cards that become incredibly popular because of how powerful they are will increase in price. The pricing of cards in Magic is 90% utility and 10% physical condition.

I mention this because I find it fascinating how we, as players of the game, are willing to pay such high prices for "the real thing." Genuine Magic cards are printed by one company: Wizards of the Coast. But what really makes a card genuine? Is it the shiny stamps the company puts on the rarest cards, the invisible red dot only present in the green circle on the back of every card? Or is it the shared agreement amongst players that these paper (or digital) rectangles bear words that have meaning in the game they are about to play?

When you look at a Magic card, or any trading card for that matter, outside of the game it is meant to be played in, it loses all meaning. It becomes nothing but a piece of paper with interesting visual design and precise printing patterns. The art becomes the card's singular redeeming quality. The words, the information, leave the viewer at a loss as to what kind of purpose the card might serve. It's nothing but a game piece, lacking context and holding information that only one who has played and studied the game could decipher.

These pieces of information are why I love Magic. I love collecting magic cards because they are dense packets of information, a way in which players can express themselves by deliberately choosing which kinds of cards they play. They are expensive, but only because players agree they are expensive. Finding the right cards to place in a deck, whether it's thematically or mechanically, makes me feel like a wizard in a fantasy world studying which spells are needed for my next challenge. Each card, with its attached artistic depiction, feels like taking a page out of a spell book and copying it into my own. The expense of losing money comes secondary to that feeling.

This game has changed in so many ways since its creation in the 1990's. It has an entire history at this point that be the sole subject of a college course. More than anything, though, Magic is a game of the mind. There are so many ways to play this game, so many little nuances that take time and effort to master. It is most certainly a game of skill, not a game of who has the best cards. Only those who know the rules and how to use them to their advantage can win games with magic cards.