I don’t think I could’ve known at the beginning of this week how much the content on StarCityGames.com would change my perspective on
things. Between Ted Knutson
two
part
interview with Mark Rosewater, and my first reading of Abe Sargent
amazing article,
I had a lot to think about. How do I define myself as a writer? What is it I should be writing about? What is my place in the Magic community? And more so even than that, what does Magic community mean?
The internet does this funny thing to most of us. The amount of information in any given subject area is so vast that we can, without meaning to, set it as an overlay to the rest of our lives. Since we’re able to filter what comes in, it’s sometimes hard to remember that other people have their filters set differently. We have friends on AIM, Facebook and Twitter that we talk to about Magic, and at times, it’s hard to imagine that there are people in the world who don’t know the enjoyment of opening a booster. At the same time, there are people that are focused on hot sauce, Fantasy Football, or
My Little Pony,
that feel the same way about their interests. It’s easy to forget that a very small percentage of the world actually knows what Magic is, and to most of them, it’s a children’s card game.
I don’t mention this to belittle Magic and show you how unimportant it is – instead, I want you to think about what it means to be a part of this community. We of the Magic-playing tribe have a lot in common. We have a shared knowledge of mana, and creatures, mulligans, and attacking for two. We know the shared frustration of mana screw, and the joy of a topdeck. We have heroes like Jon Finkel or Luis Scott-Vargas, villains like Mike Long, and cultural icons like Mark Rosewater, Jamie Wakefield, or John Rizzo. We know about the Pro Tour, about World Championships and Magic Online. We play tournament Magic to win money and prizes, but in the end, it’s the people we meet and the experiences that we have that really matter. Packs get cracked, cards sold, the money gets spent, but the relationships we build, and the memories we retain are what really matter to us.
The shared experience of Magic is what’s really important. We have a real culture here, and one that I’ve grown to love. When Craig Jones goes to a coffee shop, the Barista doesn’t hand him his latte and tell him, “That really was quite a Lightning Helix.” He gets that when he goes to a Magic event. Being a Magic World Champion would mean as much to a stranger on the street as being a Bejeweled World Champion would be to me. If I tell someone who doesn’t play Magic that I’ve played in seven Pro Tours, they don’t know what kind of accomplishment that is. For all they know, anyone can play in a Pro Tour, as long as they show up. They don’t understand the years of work it took me to get to that level, what that means, or why I would waste my time on it.
At the same time, I can sit down with almost anyone who has played Magic for a while, especially tournament Magic, and we can instantly bond. Much like the boat scene in Jaws, we share war stories, and talk about the tournament that got away. The time we picked up thirty Tarmogoyfs before everyone else knew it was good, or traded away a Taiga for a Craw Wurm because we already had plenty of Forests and Mountains. Even without ever having met before, we have a shared history and a shared future.
Last weekend I was out of town with my girlfriend, visiting her family. My girlfriend’s grandmother still believes that I’m a magician despite attempts to explain to her what Magic: The Gathering is. Now, this woman isn’t that old, in her late 60s, but she just can’t grasp the idea. She’s attempted to get me to do birthday parties in the past. After all, I’m such a good Magician, that I’ve gone to Japan just to do card tricks. How impressive is that! I can surely do a few simple ones for the neighbor kids. *Sigh*
I had to get my Great Designer Search 2 essay in, and was typing away at 8 p.m. on Sunday, and my girlfriend was apologizing for my lack of involvement in the current conversation. She tried to explain what I was doing, and how it was my goal to get a job working on Magic. Then my girlfriend decided to explain her favorite thing – how a bunch of Magic players retire from the game and go live on an island in the Pacific Ocean and work on setting lines for sports betting.
Her grandmother thought about this for a second and said, “I guess I’ve never thought about how gambling and magic are related… you can probably switch cards!”
I don’t expect everyone to understand Magic, though most of the people in my life who I’m close to have some very cursory knowledge of what it is. My girlfriend doesn’t play Magic, but she understands a few basic concepts. She knows how tournaments work, and that making Top 8 is good. Whenever I’m watching coverage for a Pro Tour, she asks how Waffle-Tacos is doing. She loves Waffle-Tacos. My parents know that some tournaments you can bring your own deck, and in some you use new cards and that if you win one you can go to another country to play. If they call me on a Saturday to find me at a tournament, they’ll ask me the next day how things went. If I say, “Eh, not great,” they inquire as to what went wrong.
They support my love of the game, but they aren’t a part of it. My personal successes and failures at Magic aren’t something they can understand, nor is the excitement that I get over spoiler season, or a great decklist. For all of that, I turn to the Magic community. I have a local network of friends and acquaintances that play, and hundreds of people I talk to on a regular basis online. If I have an idea I want to get out there, I can go to a message board and post it there, and discuss it with people. I can tell my girlfriend my disappointment at getting 2nd at a PTQ, and she’ll tell me ”Oh, I’m sorry,“ but the comments on my Facebook wall mean more because they’re from people who know what that means, and often what that feels like. These people, my friends in the community, are people who I can share success and failure with. And that means something.
If you want to figure out the secret of Magic’s success, it isn’t the sets, or any marketing campaign. It’s the community of players that have come together to promote the game because they love it. They want to read about it and talk about it all of the time, and it has left both a rich record of history for players to look back upon, and the mechanisms in place for someone who wants to know more to be brought into the fold. In marketing terms, it’s about as sticky as a product gets on this side of the law.
Just look at what we as players have accomplished. Magic just so happened to emerge at the very beginnings of the internet age. We started off in
rec.games.trading-cards and built that into five Usenet groups dedicated to Magic, two just for trading. Rumors of
Throat Wolfs
abounded. From there, IRC channels popped up, along with early websites. Even before Wizards of the Coast had an internet presence, there was a wealth of Magic on the internet.
Forget Magic Online; the first time I played a game of Magic over the internet, it was to try out these new Balduvian Hordes with NetMagic, and shortly afterwards with Apprentice. I did drafts of Mirage against Pro Tour players using a bot named Zug on IRC. These were all things the community created because they were so in love with the game. When I first started playing in tournaments, I created a ProsBloom deck that I’d spent hours testing against a guy in Hong Kong who was getting ready for the World Championships. For a 16-year-old kid at the dawn of the internet age, that was a real revelation. This is a global game. I can interact with people all over the world about a common interest.
In his book
The Tipping Point,
Malcolm Gladwell talks about the concept of mavens – people who’re incredibly interested and excited about a subject, and who willingly share their knowledge with the world. Have you ever known (or been) someone who everyone asks for before buying a computer? Maybe an uncle who could tell you anything about cars – and would be the first call for everyone in your family when a repair or a purchase was on the horizon. When one of these people is a huge fan of one product, their friends and family inevitably end up with that product.
Magic is a game that rests firmly on the back of mavens. If you took a number of tournament or casual players who started in the same area around the same time, they’ll all probably point to one or two people as being key to their development as a Magic player. These are the players that took the time to teach new players, to set up game nights, or organize car trips to tournaments. They aren’t always the best, or the most successful, but their love for the game and their enthusiasm created an environment where players had resources and encouragement to grow. They generally aren’t as visible as the players at the top tables of every tournament, but their impact in their local community, and therefore the entire Magic community as a whole, is invaluable.
What concerns me is that there are so many Magic players who don’t care at all about their community. They take for granted what was there when they began playing the game. They didn’t need to build it – it was just there. These players lie, cheat, and steal to get ahead in individual games for basically no reward other than getting a win. They rip off people who don’t know better in trades, only to laugh when the person realizes they’ve traded a $50 card for a dollar-bin rare. I’ve seen them chase new players out of stores by being rude or sometimes just plain mean, because that is how they believe they can raise their own status. They want to be at the top of the pecking order, and don’t care if that is a thousand people or ten.
The same way one player is able to build up a community around themselves, one player can destroy an established community if they’re allowed to, especially at the local level. When you take an action or a series of actions that turn away good, honest players, you’re harming the community as a whole. When you sit by and let another person take these kinds of actions, you are supporting that behavior. You’re telling other people that we don’t want you here.
The problem comes down to the fact that many Magic players view our community as a meritocracy –the idea that people should be rewarded for their skill at the game with the love and admiration from the crowd. They want to show off their DCI rating, or their Pro Players Cub card because it gives them satisfaction. There’s nothing wrong with taking pride in what you do, and feeling a sense of accomplishment when you achieve something. When your actions push another player away from the game, you’re reducing the number of people who care about what you just did by one.
We’re currently living in a huge Magic boom, but we don’t know how long that will last. Don’t take this for granted. Right now, people are coming out of the woodwork to play the game, and sales and tournament attendance reflect that. This has caused a kind of complacency, and a view from many players that the game always increases in size, and that there will always be new players coming in to replace the ones who leave. There are individuals who have gone above and beyond the call of duty to create places for people to play and discuss the game, but they just don’t get the respect they deserve. Frank Kusumoto doesn’t deserve a spot in the Hall of Fame for his work on The Magic Dojo – he deserves sainthood.
I’ve been playing for a long time and have seen Magic booms go bust on more than one occasion. The wait between Fallen Empires and Ice Age took out the majority of the friends in middle school who taught me how to play. The follow-up with Homelands took out the rest. As luck would have it, I found a store to play at, and discovered Magic tournaments early in high school. People seemed to love Mirage and Tempest. Tournament attendance in the area was high, and you could find people all over the place to play with. Then came Urza’s Saga. Although most people playing today remember it fondly, players at the time were very frustrated with opening boosters with banned rares, and a Standard format that made Legacy look sluggish. And then there was another mass extinction.
Any of these could’ve been fatal to Magic in my area, or even as a whole, if not for the efforts of its players to spread word of the game and to keep people playing. At that time, though, there was always a real fear that Magic would up and die at any given second. People worked hard to spread word of the game and to be inclusive because it seemed like to not do so would. Certainly Wizards wasn’t doing a lot back then, which it has thankfully managed to step up in the last decade.
What have you done to make the Magic community a better place this week? Designed a new website? Started your own podcast? Helped a young player get a deck together for FNM? Turned down a new player’s trade offer of their Koth for your Steel Hellkite, and told them what the cards were actually worth? Given someone without a car a ride to a tournament? Stepped in when a ‘known’ player was needlessly berating a ‘scrub’? Even the small things we do now have an impact on the future of Magic. The more good you’re willing to do for the community, the stronger it will be in the future.
When you sit down with a new player, and teach them the ropes, you don’t know what will happen to them. They may play group games with their friends a few times a year, or they may be on the auto-ballot for the 2020 Hall of Fame class. Regardless, though, they’re becoming one of our tribe – one more person who understands where we’re coming from. One more person who’ll be able to keep the game going. I don’t think we’ll ever see Magic in the Olympics, but if we keep vigilant with building up a strong community, it just might outlive us all.