The Observor: Confessions of an Aging Gamer

I am getting old. The taste buds on my tongue have started to change. I find myself enjoying foods I used to hate, and disliking things that were once my bread and butter (though not actually bread and butter. That stuff’s delicious). It’s kind of sad to be thinking about 28 as “getting old,” but in the world of competitive gaming, I’m on the downward slope. I remember watching an interview with some Korean Starcraft players once. They were asked what they do with all the money they make. They simply responded, “We save it all. Once we hit 24, we can’t play anymore because our reflexes get so bad.”

Your reflexes… get bad…at 24…

Luckily for me Magic isn’t a game requiring over 9000 actions per minute, or the ability to immediately react to changing situations in any capacity other than mental. It’s not a game of the physical body so much as the mind. Unfortunately for me, mine wasn’t that hot to begin with. My memory is filled with more holes than a sieve. Have you ever looked at someone who was deep in the tank trying to come up with a play? You can usually tell that they’re really thinking hard. You can almost hear the grinding of the gears echoing throughout their skull. Not the case with me. Sure, I look the part. The intense stare, the pursed lips, the darting eyes… I really look like I’m thinking hard. Despite the appearance of clearly thinking hard on my decision, absolutely nothing is going on in my brain. It’s like a wasteland of thought. In fact, more often than not, the only thing I’m thinking about is how strange it is that there aren’t any play considerations going on through my head!

As I’ve gotten older, far more handsome, and more forgetful, my Magic tastes have changed. Back in my younger days, I was still learning the game. I traded for Rock Hydras at school, and used them in my 150-card monstrosity with my friends at home. Sitting at a card table out behind my friend Jack’s place, we battled Magical Cards and trying to not let the wind blow our stuff away. We didn’t understand the rules of the game entirely, no matter how many times we read through the neat little booklet that came with our Unlimited starters. Trade my Tropical Island for your Pirate Ship? Why not? As far as I was concerned, I had two Trops and no Pirate Ships, so it had to be way rarer.

Flash forward a few years. Urza’s Saga was just released. My friend Cory and I bought our first box of Magic and sat eagerly ripping into the boosters at the kitchen table. We were a far cry from the scrubs we used to be. We had found the transformative power of the Road to the 1998 US Nationals video. Wait. You mean there are tournaments for this game? A whole new world was opened to us. Soon, we were scouring whatever resources we could come across to improve our game. We found decklists that we liked and set about mastering their play. I settled on a simple Sligh build, which is really funny considering how bad I am at attacking. We found a local card store that ran tournaments, and we set about cleaning up. Things were going well.

A couple of years later, after a brief hiatus from the game, I started to get interested in trying to qualify for the Pro Tour. I had been participating in Friday Night Magic a bunch, and had developed a pretty good game. Everyone in the group I played with was all a touch older than I and experienced on the next level of play. Prophecy had been released recently and the current PTQ season was Masques Block Constructed. The big deck tearing u0p tournaments at the time was a Black/Green concoction known as Snuff-o-Derm. It used the cheap black removal cards like Vendetta (soon to be making a reappearance in Rise of the Eldrazi) and Snuff Out to protect and clear the way for its incredibly powerful Green creatures, like Blastoderm and Saproling Burst. It also ran Massacre to deal with those pesky Rebels. I decided this was a great time to test out my deckbuilding chops. I came up with a mono White control deck featuring Wave of Reckoning, Blinding Angel, and Mageta the Lion to combat the Black/Green monstrosity. It turned out that the deck ended up being fairly good against the rest of the field, as well, and two of my friends ended up qualifying with it. I kept missing the Top 8, though, and would have to wait for another season to break that barrier. Luckily for me, I wouldn’t have to wait long.

After the generally recognized travesty that was Masques Block came the best Limited block ever created: Invasion, Planeshift, and Apocalypse. This is widely recognized as among the best, if not actually the best, blocks ever made for Limited purposes. It was one of the first blocks to really challenge the conventions of how a draft deck should be built. Gone were the days of strictly two-color decks. Now, with all the prevalent mana fixing and the heavy color-based theme, most decks had splashes of a third color. One of the best decks in the format was the five-color Green deck that everyone who opened a Harrow seemed to try to build. The format was fun, intricate, and very diverse. It also marks the beginning with my true love affair with Magic.

I love drafting. If you didn’t know that: Hello, my name is Nate and welcome to my article series! Invasion was my introduction to the love of my life. I still have fond memories of sitting around the Downtown Comics in Castleton, sharing an order of cheese fries from the Outback next door, while Travis (yes, this Travis) agonized over taking the Blazing Specter or Probe he just opened. We drafted multiple days a week, often multiple times a day. It was the most I had ever spent on Magic, but I didn’t care. I was in love. It turned out that we also got quite good at it. After all, we weren’t bad at Magic, and we were playing infinite, so it naturally followed that we would rise to the top of the game at that time. That Sealed PTQ season was the first time I made Top 8, and I was nervous. I made it to the semis before I got crushed, losing to an on-board trick. I was disappointed that I had lost, but I had found my calling. I eschewed all Constructed formats and just drafted and did Sealed Decks as often as I could. That much has never changed about me.

A couple of years after that, my group of Magic friends came across a new young hotshot from Kokomo, Indiana named Gabe Walls. To this day, Gabe is the best Magic player to ever come out of Indiana. He has made the US National Team, made Top 8 at Worlds, and, even after taking a hiatus of sorts from competitive Magic, has still managed to post strong finishes at Grand Prix and Pro Tours since. He’s pretty sick. After being recognized by the global community as a Magic stud, Gabe started getting visits in Indiana from some of the Pros he had met while playing and traveling. Here I was, a kid who’d never qualified for the Pro Tour drafting alongside Tomoharu Saito, Julien Nuijten, Neil Reeves, and Rich Hoaen. This was kind of surreal for me. Eventually, that feeling passed and I made a fair number of good friends myself. I absolutely adore all of the Dutchies that I met during that time, and still take the time to hang out with Ruud Warmenhoven every time we are at an event together (which is sadly not as often as it used to be). I roomed with Gerry T and Craig Krempels for a couple of years. I started hanging out with Brian Kibler, Gerard Fabiano, and Cedric Phillips at GPs I traveled to. I started to realize that the thing I like the most about the game was the people.

Sadly, my skills never quite reached the point when I could qualify for the Pro Tour. Without the proper Pro Level, traveling to all of the events I wanted proved too costly. Eventually, I managed to find a fix. I worked for a couple of years contracting for Upper Deck covering one of their collectible card games. After leaving them, I stumbled into coverage writer extraordinaire and all-around awesome guy Ted Knutson at GP Dallas a few years back. After scrubbing out of Day one of the GP, I stopped by to offer my assistance. I covered a few matches for him, including the finals. At the end of the day, he came up to me and let me know that he was going to be stopping coverage soon, and Wizards would probably be looking for someone to replace him. He offered to pass my name along if I was interested. Needless to say, I immediately said yes. Within a couple of months, I received an email from my Greg Collins, who I think was the content editor for wizards.com at the time, asking me if I wanted to go cover US Nationals with him in Baltimore. Hmm… I have to think about that. You’re going to fly me to Baltimore, put me up in a hotel, and pay me to watch and write about Magic for a weekend? And I get to hang out and visit all my American Magic-playing friends?! I guess you can twist my arm.

Now we’ve reached the present. I’m still covering for Wizards, though a little less frequently. I still love to draft (that will never change). Beyond that, only one thing has really changed. I have discovered EDH. I’ve always been somewhat of a casual gamer. I played Five Color back before it became Prismatic. I’ve played Momir Vig since it became a format. EDH is my new thing. I have a few decks built of my own, but my absolute favorite thing to do at tournaments is to borrow a deck from someone else and refuse to look through it before playing it. It’s the surprise that I really like. You never know what hidden gems are stashed inside. Sometimes you get an Akromas Memorial in the Multani deck. Sometimes it’s the sick Cloudstone Curio and Equilibrium in the Momir deck. I even had an Unnatural Selection in a Sliver Overlord deck once. That was fun.

I guess the point I wanted to make with all of this is how much a person’s tastes can change as the mature as a gamer. I still love the thrill of competitive Magic. I still love drafting. As I get older and experience more within the game, I’ve fallen away from the hardcore gaming I used to do, instead falling back to casual gaming. Magic is more of an opportunity to enjoy times with friends and enjoy the plethora of ridiculous things that can happen thanks to the massive number of cards that have been printed. As hard as it seems to imagine, Magic is just getting more fun to me over time. Actually, it isn’t that. It’s that the type of fun I’m having has changed over time. I guess that’s to be expected, though. In a game that supports formats from Vintage to Planechase, fun is provided to players of all types, tastes, and levels. So how have your tastes changed as the years have gone by?