It turns out that when you ‘play the game, see the world’ you get to add quite a lot of airmiles to your account. Happily, it turns out that ‘cover the game, see the world’ works in much the same fashion. And so begins a tale that kicks off in the world-renowned house of fun that is Scunthorpe, North Lincolnshire — current most famous resident actually very possibly me, scarily — and takes in the sights and sounds of Manchester (MAN), Chicago (ORD), Seattle (SEA-TAC), Honolulu (HON), Los Angeles (LAX) and more. In this first part, I’ll be concentrating on the first ten days of the trip, and if that means you’re interested in my thoughts on Grand Prix: Seattle-Tacoma, and you just can’t wait to get there, you’re going to be bitterly disappointed, because most of the good Magic stuff — Grand Prix: Seattle and of course Pro Tour: Honolulu — are coming your way next time around.
The simple truth is that there isn’t a lot about Pro Magic in the first week to tell you about, but that doesn’t mean that there weren’t some entertaining bits and pieces along the way, and some of them — yes, truly! – are indeed Magic-related, in your typical Removed From Game way. Incidentally, while we’re on that subject, I am relieved to be able to announce that most long-time players of the game have decided to continue with the terminology they always have: ‘Kill it’. ‘Get rid of it.’ ‘That, over there.’ Therefore, I have saved the graphic design department of this website a fortune, and decided to retain the utterly splendid column title Removed From Game. Whilst this very accurately describes my status, since I barely turn a card sideways in anger these days, agreeing to becoming Exiled is never a happy outcome, unless you’re the ruthless tyrant despot of some hitherto-little-known corner of the globe looking to cut a deal with the CIA/MI6 before the men in white coats come to take you away. Last time I checked, this didn’t apply to me.
I arrived in Seattle almost a full week before the Grand Prix, with expectations of plenty of good times. What I didn’t expect is to learn such a lot about something I had never really thought about, all before I even landed in the States. The flight out of Manchester was pretty full, and seemed to be taking quite a long time to board. That generally means several old or infirm passengers, some young children travelling alone, families with babies, that kind of thing. Although I’m not tall, I am quite — how shall we say this politely? – wide, and if I’m lucky enough to have an empty seat beside me it’s a nice bonus being able to stretch out the legs. Now, this next sentence is going to surprise a few of you, but I’m not saying it for the comedy, or for the shock value, as I’m actually just telling it to you because it’s true.
I had plenty of leg room on the flight, because the guy next to me didn’t have any. Legs, that is.
It may be a peculiarly British problem, but I confess to being very uncomfortable around disability. Not because I feel undue sympathy for the person concerned, or because I think they are in some way freakish, but because, as a Brit, I like to think I have some semblance of good manners, and to be perfectly frank, working out how to deal with a travelling companion with no legs was something I wasn’t expecting to be taxing the brain that early in the trip. Or indeed at all. Do you offer them help? Is that offensive to them? If you get chatting, do you ignore it utterly? ‘So, Brian, how come you’ve got no legs?’ If someone I’d just met on an airplane said, ‘Hi Rich, so how come you’re fat?’ I’m not sure I’d take it that well. Next time you’re travelling with me, try it and see what happens.
Then you have to factor in the additional information that this was no ‘ordinary’ disabled person either. No indeed. This gentleman, along with seven or eight other travelling companions, was someone pretty special. It all clicked when I remembered seeing a billboard on the way to the airport. All that week, the Paralympic World Cup had been taking place in Manchester, and by sheer luck I found myself in the middle of the silver medal-winning U.S. Men’s Paralympic Wheelchair Basketball Squad. The next couple of hours were amongst the most interesting I have ever spent in the company of strangers.
In much the same way as we all receive many blank looks when we start talking Magic to the uninitiated, wheelchair sport is very much under the radar in most countries, although with the Paralympic movement now synchronised with the ‘able-bodied’ games, London 2012 will see the two sporting disciplines combined as never before. Just like the NBA (National Basketball League) in the States, it’s fair to say that the U.S. are kings of the hoops when it comes to the wheelchair version. So how come they got silver instead of gold? Again, just like the seven-foot tall version of the sport, the U.S. is so dominant that it has a history of not sending its best players to compete, and in this case I was actually talking with the Under-23s, who had been charged with going up against the professionals of nations like Australia and Greece, who are apparently the stiffest competition.
From a Magic perspective, what intrigued me most was to find out about the lifestyle of these athletes. While this may be the first time Gabe Walls and Kazuya Mitamura have been put in the same sentence with ‘gym club membership,’ the fact remains that there is a definite discipline to success in MTG. There’s also a rhythm to the year, with mega-trips of several weeks being followed by a chance to regroup, and test towards the forthcoming events. Then there’s the Summer months, where it’s all about Pro Points at Nationals and qualifying for Worlds, before a gathering run towards the finish, this year in Rome. For the wheelchair athletes, most were still at college, where it turns out there’s a flourishing collegiate league. Now I know how people feel when I try to explain the Pro Tour to them. I guess my mouth must have got wider as my companion told me all about his aspirations to come to Europe after college and embark upon a Pro career. Apparently, in places like Germany and Croatia, there’s a seriously fanatical following for wheelchair basketball, and in much the same way as you can buy Kobe or Shaq replica shirts, the same is true for the sit-down version of the game.
I wonder if there will ever come a time when Magic has that sort of appeal? Whilst I guess that the obvious answer is ‘no,’ you only need to see the way Japan for one has embraced chess as a professional sport to register the possibilities. One thing that struck me about the whole U.S. team was that they left as little to chance as possible. Yes, they were all students, committing to an academic as well as sporting lifestyle, but within those constraints they were all prepared to make a lot of sacrifices to be on the plane to the World Cup in Manchester, and ultimately the Paralympic Games of 2012. I sometimes feel that there are a few players within the Pro ranks of Magic who have been blessed with great talent for the game, but who occasionally confuse ‘right’ and ‘privilege’ when it comes to taking part. Yes, an ability to play cards better than the next guy or girl gives you the ‘right’ to attend, but the fact that these opportunities exist at all is a rare and astonishing privilege. And a privilege is what it was to sit with those fine and talented athletes who stand out just that little bit more than most, with a career doing something they love ahead of them, and looking to bring gold home next time. A privilege.
Now in some ways, I confess I thought my road trip had got off to a pretty weird start, all things considered. I successfully transferred my way across the States, and finally landed in Seattle, home to my good friends Courtney and Toby Maheras, both of whom rather handily work for Wizards of the Coast. This guaranteed good game-playing fun in our limited spare time, featuring a game I incorrectly keep referring to as ‘Iron Spike: Tide of Europe,’ which it turns out Mrs M is a whizz at, and a fabulous etymological trivia game called ‘Bethump’d.’ I can, to your considerable no surprise, confirm that I utterly battered my colonial cousins at a game that I was, all things considered, born to be good at, until my host landed on a ‘move to any vowel square’ and duly trotted off to ‘Y.’ I won’t give you the full text of my 14,000 word legal submission to the United Nations Human Rights Division, but suffice to say that whilst I believe Americans have a right to bear arms guaranteed under their Constitution, no such right to a bonus sixth vowel exists. Given that they consistently cut vowels out of perfectly reasonable words like ‘honour’ and ‘colour’ and ‘humour’, attempting to add one seems like the height of literary conceit. Still, when even my erudite Wizards friends insist the play is valid, who am I — a mere guardian of the Queen’s English — to argue?
Speaking of rights and responsibilities, the weirdness continued on my first full day on U.S. soil. I was pretty stoked, as some of my Pro U.S. friends say, since I would be attending my first ever Memorial Day all-American all-outdoors all-you-can-eat Barbecue, featuring fabulous assortments of dead animal product, of which I am possibly the world’s greatest fan. The fabulous Carrie and Mike were our hosts, with valiant support from their two year old daughter Isabella, and Mike’s Mum and Dad. They were all wonderful company, and my enjoyment of the day could only really have been bettered had it been July 4th, and I could have commiserated with my hosts for the fact that, alas, they had utterly blown it a few years back, and could still have been part of the British Empire, loved and respected around the globe. (Please don’t rise to this bait — my knowledge of Colonial history is extensive and actually pretty balanced).
Then came the weirdness. I went to a very strange school where the Powers That Be thought that a spell in the armed forces cadets were character forming. Well, they were right to an extent, in that my two years as a Royal Air Force cadet threatened to form me very neatly into a homicidal maniac. I loathed it, but at least I got to fly some planes a few times, whilst the army lot just got mud on their trousers. I mention this because I once won the equivalent of $0.50 in a shooting competition on an RAF base firing range. For this, we were given .303 rifles, which were last used in action somewhere around the Second World War.
Until Memorial Day, that was the only time in my life I had held a gun. Mike, a massive hunting fan, changed all that, and although I confess I had some considerable trepidation at the prospect, I couldn’t turn down the chance to learn a little bit more about what seems, from this side of the transatlantic divide, to be a bizarre relationship law-abiding U.S. citizens have with firearms. When this sleek, very not-a-toy gun came out of the safe under the bed, I suspect my eyeballs were popping somewhat.
As the collection grew, and I had the chance to handle each weapon, two things struck me. First, I guess I felt a little like some people do when they first get on the Pro Tour. They’ve spent a large part of their life wondering what it must be like, and hearing all about their heroes in action, and wondering if they’ll get to play Nassif or Finkel in Round 1, and then suddenly they’re actually there, experiencing everything first-hand. For me, this was Hollywood come to life. Every gun from every cop show seemed to be there. I’m going to get these names wrong I dare say, but it was like ‘so here’s a colt .357 magnum,’ ‘this is your standard .44,’ ‘this is a 10-gauge shotgun, this one’s a 12-gauge’… It was almost surprising to find that these guns were actually, you know, real, and not just names rattled off in The Sopranos or The Wire (comprehensively one of the most spectacular pieces of TV ever made).
The second thing that surprised me, and in some way worried me, was how devastatingly fine they all felt in my hand. I come from a country with super-strict gun laws. There is simply no culture of gun ownership here whatever, outside the obvious criminal/drug fraternities in major cities. Violence horrifies me. Killing certainly horrifies me, and I don’t think you could pay me to shoot a deer through the telescopic sniper-style sight bolted onto the astonishing camouflaged rifle Mike had. But these things were beautiful. They felt so balanced, so sleek, so precise, so utterly right, and although it doesn’t quite convey how it felt in the moment, I’m going to say that there was something almost shudderingly seductive about them. Whilst I’m 73 steps to the right of ‘Metrosexual,’ nor do people tend to mistake me for a ‘Man’s Man,’ but I certainly felt like one as I lined up a trashcan in my sniper sights.
And what has this to do with Magic: the Gathering? Only this. It was my years in the game, playing, watching, and commentating, that had made this shattering, strange, exhilarating, wonderful, and terrifying experience possible. It led me to this confrontation with something that I had never imagined could be true — that I could find a lethal weapon on some level attractive. There are thousands – no, tens of thousands – of people who can point to extraordinary and challenging moments in their lives that they could never have experienced without the wonders of the Pro Tour and the global travelling circus of MTG. Long after the wins and losses have been totted up, it’s those profound experiences that are one of the game’s great legacies.
Oh, and one more thing. Careful next time you play me, I might be packing. Just sayin’.
You’ll be delighted to hear that the next day, Tuesday, featured no Earth-shattering revelations for yours truly, although I fulfilled a long-cherished ambition to go behind the scenes at a Major League Baseball park, in this case Safeco Field in Seattle. In addition to some amazing memories — using the Bullpen phone from the Mariners dugout, going into the batting cage, playing catch with my new glove down the third base line, and so on — I heard about the Japanese major shareholder in the club. As Brits go, I know a fair bit about baseball, being a big fan of the New York Mets, a fate I share with BDM. There are clubs who are built To Win, like the Yankees, and the Boston Red Sox. But the Seattle Mariners aren’t like that. Yes, they have Ichiro, a truly stellar name in the game, and of course they ‘want to win,’ but they don’t have the payroll to realistically do it.
So I asked our tour guide, ‘So, if they’re not here To Win, why are they here?’ And this fabulous old guy, who’d clearly been a baseball fan than longer than most of us have been alive, confessed he’d never been asked that before. (Well, asking questions is what I do, after all, right?) And eventually he said, ‘I suppose we’re all about being part of the community, and giving something back to the people of Seattle, and giving them a great way to spend their evenings of their Sunday afternoons.’ This is something I can get behind, a club that brings something to their surroundings, win or not.
In terms of Magic though, at least in the Pro Tour sense, this approach is incomprehensible, and yet I see it time after time. There is no salary cap in Magic. There is no revenue-sharing model amongst all the players like there is in the NFL (National Football League, for American Football, as we would say here in England.) The purpose of the Pro Tour is simply To Win. Yes, I accept there are signposts and triumphs along the way, and I’m not suggesting that Raphael Levy wasn’t Winning when he won his last round at Worlds 2007 to remain at Level 7 for 2008. That’s looking to a goal, and achieving it, and that’s Winning. Yet, as we’ll see when we come next week to the tale of Pro Tour: Honolulu, there were an astonishing number of people who played Jund just because they couldn’t make themselves happy enough with anything else. Almost nobody actually wanted to play that deck, yet many did, and time and time again I heard variations on a theme of, ‘Well, we know it’s good, because it’s been good online, and I probably won’t go 0-5 with it, so I should be live going into the first Draft.’ In terms of being, in a full sense, Professional, this is such a disastrous approach it’s untrue. As I say, more on this next time.
The next couple of days found me in the headquarters of Wizards of the Coast, but unfortunately much of what went on I can’t actually tell you about. Part of that is because naked bingo tramples willy-nilly on several inter-continental laws of taste and decency, and, more pressingly, because I have a legal agreement that doesn’t let me tell you about things. Like Zendikar… And M10… and some stuff from next year… Look, let’s just do exactly what you’d expect, which is to tell you that there are some jaw-dropping ideas, fabulous mechanics, mouth-watering artwork, all coming down the pipeline.
I will allow myself one small concession to indiscretion, however. One of the finest pieces of Magic video I’ve seen is watching BDM and Randy interview Aaron Forsythe when 10th Edition was about to come out. Actually, Randy was doing the interview, and BDM was just reading the Player Guide. He never said a word. He just read the guide, and every so often his eyes would pop, and he’d glance at the camera, and raise his eyebrows, and then go back to looking at the cards. I felt like that looking at the M10 Player Guide. Three words.
So. Much. Fun.
Talking of Randy… When I got to the Grand Prix site on Friday evening, I found Randy sitting and Drafting. Hang on, I thought you weren’t allowed to play? ‘Oh, I just got the other seven to agree to it being Unsanctioned.’ What a gamer.
That brings us neatly to the start of the Magic scene proper, and next week you can expect plenty of fact, analysis of the facts, and assorted opinion mostly based on the facts, when the Magic part of the trip kicks into high gear. Self-indulgent though I undoubtedly am on occasion, I try to limit the size and scope of these more personal articles, because ‘Removed From Game’ shouldn’t in my view take us to the world of crochet, flower-arranging, or guerrilla timetabling too often.
That said, as ever, and perhaps more often than most, thanks for reading.
R.