Lives Essay: Revised

Love and Magic

In high school, nothing was worse than being normal, yet nothing was harder than accepting who I was. On a Friday night in the fall of my senior year, it happened. Before that fateful night, I was an average high school student, in just about every way imaginable. I earned a B average at a typical suburban public school. Most of my teachers had a hard time remembering my name. I played the trumpet until I realized that I would always be fourth or fifth chair in band class and I didn’t have the “intuition for jazz”. I was simultaneously a nobody and an anybody. But I don’t mean to paint my averageness as pitiable. It was merely average, that is, until one very special Friday night. 

Statistically speaking, at my age, on a Friday night, I should have been experimenting with alcohol or marijuana or sex. I should have been studying, playing video games, or working some minimum wage job. It was a Friday night in the fall of my senior year, so at the very least, I should have been at the high school football game with the other 90 percent of my class. But on the night I came out as an open nerd, I felt no interest in watching my classmates – the ones who were stronger, faster, more talented than average –  as they pummeled one another in the name of “honor” and “glory” and “Jock-dom”. I was tangled up in a different kind of battle. This one didn’t play out on the gridiron; it took place on a folding table in the backroom of a comic book shop. It didn’t hinge upon who could run faster or throw further; it was decided by bursts of supernatural lightning and barrages of imaginary arrows. And it wasn’t about physical domination; it was about magical supremacy. On that fateful Friday night, I found myself and fell in love – with Magic the Gathering.    

   

In 1993, Richard Garfield and a company known as Wizards of the Coast introduced Magic the Gathering to the world. A collectible fantasy card game, Magic simulates combat between players – or wizards – wielding collectable armies of magical creatures and arsenals of powerful spells. One of the first fantasy games of its type, Magic is a beautifully designed and ever-evolving with new editions and sets of cards released every few months. The game is almost paradoxical. Gameplay is extensively customizable yet standardized across the world. It’s heavily nuanced yet easy to learn. Wizards of the Coast estimates that there are over thirteen million players worldwide. Despite the numbers and the game’s long-running success, as an unbearably average high school senior, the knowledge that there were ten million other nerds around the world spending their Friday nights poring over paper battlefields and talking tactics between elvish archers and zombie legions offered me little comfort. They were just competition, and I was still a speck in the crowd.

To this day, when I reflect on my teenage years, “average” is still the first adjective that comes to mind. Though, in some ways, I had it better than average. I had a healthy and loving relationship with a beautiful girl – she was the opposite of average in my eyes and I’m not quite sure what she saw in me. I also had friends, good friends, some of who I even played Magic with from time to time. In fact, that’s where it all started. At some point during the summer before my senior year I was introduced to Magic in a friend’s basement. I was embarrassed to acknowledge it, but after I won my first battle – with a goblin berserker crashing through my friend’s defenses to deliver a brutal and fatal blow – it was only a matter a weeks before I started to play the game seriously and regularly.

By the fall of my senior year, Magic the Gathering had become more than a game to a dedicated few. An organized system of weekly tournaments had taken shape, raging in scale from sanctioned, neighborhood competitions, all the way to annual, international grand championships. As a result of this new level of organization, a community of “professional” Magic players formed, Wizards of the Coast was making larger profits than ever, and kids like me where falling deeper into obsession as a hobby that had quickly evolved into a recognized competition – one that I was actually good at.

I was eighteen and ostensibly average. It was a beautiful fall Friday night. Yet, when my phone shook with text messages from my friends asking about rides to the game, I ignored them. I was working on modifications to my tournament deck, substituting sorcery and enchantment cards, trying to build the most competitive package. As my phone vibrated with missed calls and text messages, I got into the car and drove in the opposite direction of the football field, toward my own arena in the name of “honor” and “glory” and “Nerd-dom”.  By the time I arrived at The Dragon’s Den Comics and Games, my girlfriend had called. Like the rest of the world, I ignored her.

This was my first officially sanctioned Magic tournament, and nothing else mattered.

Hours later, I called my girlfriend back.

“Where the hell have you been all night!?”

I tried to explain, “I’m sorry. I’ve been at the Dragon’s Den. I’m a little embarrassed to say it, but I really liked it…”

*Click*

She hung up before I could finish my sentence and like that everything changed for me. I learned, weeks later after we broke up, that she thought The Dragon’s Den was a strip club, but I didn’t even care to correct her. It wouldn’t have been any different had she known the truth. I was a different person than the average boy she had known. After that night, I was a nerd and I’ve been one ever since.