I’ve made as many friends through playing Magic as there are different colors of hair in my feeble attempt at a beard. That is to say, more than I can count.
The vast majority of us can’t win all the time (if you’re only playing to win and aren’t consistently making cash at GPs/PTs/5Ks/Opens, you may want to reconsider your choice of hobby), so for the most part our enjoyment in Magic comes from the experiences, we have with friends. On an untold number of occasions you’ll vicariously live through them when knocked out of contention, make misplays that get you friendly abuse for weeks, and then there’s all the stuff that happens outside of the tournaments themselves.
Magic is about more than just playing a game. It’s about having a fun, in whatever way we can find and create it. But what ties this all together are the friendships we make. As we play more, we make new friends, who give us new experiences and good times, through which we make even more friends. The cycle continues.
My first sanctioned tournament was the Future Sight Prerelease. I opened six packs of cards, laid them out in a random fashion in front of me, and stared at them for a solid five minutes. I didn’t have a single clue what I was doing.
Fortunately I wasn’t too shy to ask for help, and after a kind stranger built a deck for me, I went 1-2-3, with my win being a bye, my draws a result of timed rounds, and my losses inevitable.
It was over a year after that until my rating got above 1600 again and stayed there, and sixteen months until I won FNM for the first time. This didn’t put me off one bit.
While I was desperate to win more and aspired to be like the pros who seemed so very distant, I was making friends and having fun. More than anything else, this is what keeps a new player interested for long enough for them to learn what it takes to win, by which point they are hooked.
Still not convinced that the PT and winning cash money isn’t what it’s all about? Let’s have some examples of the friendships and good memories Magic has created for me.
Road tripping to events
I started playing Magic in the latter half of my studies at Oxford, and by the time my second local Sunday Prerelease came around, I was already looking for bigger and more prestigious events. I fawned over one of the guys who’d attended the London regional Prerelease the day before, asking a million stupid questions like
“Are Elves good? Are Goblins good? Did only girls play Faeries?”,
and tried to trade most of my
pitiful binder to him for some exciting new dollar rares. Fortunately, he declined to make out like
a bandit
with my cards but convinced me I needed to start travelling to tournaments.
On one of these trips, our driver Kevin had started judging, so we had to stay until the very end of a long day, not leaving until 11 pm. The drive started with everyone recapping their day’s games and trades, but by the time we were out of central London and at the start of an hour of motorway, those in the backseat were out cold, leaving just Kevin and myself in the front of his little car.
We’d already started dueling yawns when it started to rain, and parts of the car were clattering against each other, fighting against Kevin driving at 35 over the speed limit.
“Does it always make that noise?” I asked, beginning to feel uneasy.
“Only when I go over a hundred. Maybe I should get that looked at…” Kevin yawned. “Man, I’m
so
tired.”
“Me too. Say, uhh… have some of this Red Bull?”
“Nah, I’ll be alright.” He yawned again, “Don’t want to be too awake, or I won’t sleep when I get in.”
The rain got worse, sending spray up from the road that near totally obscured our vision. Kevin started haphazardly rubbing the windscreen with a cloth as it began to fog up, giving it far more of his concentration than where the car was headed. My legs were tensed, and my fingernails dug into the dashboard.
We leant forward, squinting so hard our eyes were watering just to see the road fifty feet in front of us. I willed the car around each long curve in the motorway.
“Can you even see where you’re driving?!” I clenched my teeth.
Kevin leant still further forward over the steering wheel. “Umm… Kind of?”
I was trapped. In a small metal box. Travelling very fast. In torrential rain. With a driver on the verge of collapse, who was refusing to take caffeine, and who couldn’t see where he was going.
I was going to die.
I closed my eyes for a second.
I opened them and saw we had stopped outside my flat. Whichever god had been listening to my prayers had answered them. I said thanks, picked up my bag, and ran inside.
(Apparently, Kevin now gives booster prizes to people who survive multiple journeys with him. Which seems pretty appropriate. Not that he’s a bad driver or anything, honestly).
About fourteen months after I started playing, I finished my degree, moved back to my parents in Bedford, and was introduced to some locals who’d started attending Tuesday night FNMs in nearby Milton Keynes. I got lifts and quickly became firm friends with Nicolo, a short, hairy Italian, Paul, an alcoholic who spoke only in sarcasm, and Arun, an impossibly happy Indian chap we nicknamed “Jungle Lion,” after it turned out to be useless facing a lethal Psychatog in cube.
I won FNM for the first time on my second or third week, beating Russ “4th at Nationals, played at Worlds, Dan’s new idol” Davies in the final with my Light from Within Mono-White deck, featuring such Constructed staples as Hearthfire Hobgoblin (yea, you go look that up!). In retrospect, I’m pretty sure he threw the game knowing it would ensure I played there regularly but like to think some play skill on my part was a factor. I got to know Russ and all of the other regulars well, and joined them on many Magical adventures around the country.
On one such tournament voyage, we drove to Oxford’s little pub venue for the annual County Champs, two carloads of us from MK. I’d built a good deck, put on my lucky red plaid shirt (I might be mistaken for a logger or cowboy, but boy do I love me some plaid!), and even straightened my hair. I was ready to kick some ass and win a playmat.
I promptly went 0-2 in the main event, then repeated this feat in side drafts before angrily going X-0 versus beer and calmed down a bit after threatening to quit. Meanwhile, Nicolo won the event with Fae, and Stu Sellers knocked himself out in the quarters by starting his notoriously heavy celebratory drinking when he got the first of two IDs into Top 8. He was absolutely battered by the time the quarters started six pints later and spent most of the time shouting across to me at another table rather than playing his game.
On the way home, we called in at Burger King for food, and the place was practically deserted save the eight of us.
“
Roy-al weed cheese!
” shouted out the Eastern-European chick behind the counter, and seeing as none of the others had ordered one, I naturally assumed it was mine.
Not the case.
“
No for you Redshirt, hans off!
” She snapped, snatching back the tray as I went to take it from the counter, before giving it to an older gentleman who’d appeared from behind a pillar.
Everyone cried laughing.
“No Redshirt!” “Bad Redshirt!” “Redshirt went 0-2
again!”
came their taunts on the drive home, as I cursed the flannel of failure that I was wearing.
(“To redshirt” has since become a popular verb in MK, meaning “to go 0-2 drop.” I still haven’t shaken off the nickname.)
Having fun outside of Magic
Christmas, my family went on holiday, leaving me with a free house for a week. Now having good friends in and out of Magic, I invited a dozen of the MK guys over to cube, and more importantly play Rock Band, and drink. Early in the day, we ran a Ravnica block draft with spare boosters Russ had, a format I hadn’t played. As someone had a laptop with DCI Reporter on them, we paired it on that rather than work them out randomly – only we played under aliases for a laugh. I’m pretty sure it was never submitted, but if it was, apologies to Patrick Chapin/Olivier Ruel (I forget who I picked) for barely scraping a 1-2 performance and destroying your rating. It was a poor impression.
Later, we were finally intoxicated enough to sing in front of one another and annihilated the Rock Band set list. We finally went to bed around 5 am, save Paul who was determined to finish Career mode on guitar singlehandedly. We left him and a half-liter of vodka to it.
It was the bad side of noon when we woke up again, rubbing our heads and our eyes. I seem to remember Nicolo waking me up wearing my sister’s pink dressing gown and a hair band, but that may have been another friend on another occasion. Downstairs, Paul had finished all his vodka and was passed out on the couch with a guitar controller digging into the middle of his back.
Nic shook him awake, and he didn’t stop complaining about his back hurting or wanting bacon and more booze for that night until we grudgingly agreed to pile in my car and get more supplies from Budgen’s (quintessentially British 7-11 equivalent).
He’d had a little stumble on my driveway walking over to the car, but once he’d picked up a crate of lager in-store, it became apparent Paul was about one shot of vodka behind
this guy.
We were torn between not wanting to look like we were with him and having to pay for anything he broke, and not wanting to miss him doing anything funny. He waltzed around the store with the crate, narrowly missing displays of cans and tea bags, before finally letting us pay and put him in the car.
Crisis averted, until he insisted on bringing the £20 box of beer inside himself, then took about thirty agonizing steps backwards down the road away from the front door, cradling it like a baby as he struggled to maintain balance.
Amazingly, he didn’t drop the damn thing. Or stop drinking for three days.
Events abroad
I moved down to London with my first job in February 2009, and fast became one of The Games Club’s inner circle. Now I considered myself a semi-non-tragic Magic player and was earning just about enough money to afford a long weekend away once or twice a year – so quickly joined in on their Easyjet flight + hostelbookers.com room + 200 Euros travel money European GP trips.
My first of these was to GP Prague last summer, staying with Mills (complains when awake, snores when asleep), Nathan (“Na-tan” we call him, a Belgian fluent in four languages – very useful to have with you abroad), and Jake (an Aussie passing through London we’d taken a shine to, who used “smash” as a verb with several hundred meanings). Our hostel was pretty crap but was near the venue in an area of town that was about one-third abandoned buildings and rubble, next to a park full of homeless people. Still, the bar downstairs forgot to charge us for at least two large rounds of drinks, and we were just a few metro stops away from the nightlife.
Nathan quickly moved out of the main room onto the floor of the hall because of Mills’ and my snoring, and Jake spent the majority of the trip jerking it in the bathroom (at least that’s what it sounded like), but we did also play some Magic. I opened a fairly strong M10 pool containing a foil Baneslayer Angel, then amazingly got it back to play with, at approximately 600,000 to 1 odds. I of course built it incorrectly, splashing green for mana-fixing and Cudgel Troll instead of going straight U/W. At 1-1, my buddy Olivier Ruel showed me how I should’ve built it, but by this point I could feel I was fast coming down with something and dropped at 1-3 feeling like crap. I didn’t let it stop me going out for dinner and drinks afterwards mind, though we never did find the midget stripper one of the British staff was so keen on finding…
The venue for Worlds 2009 in Rome was located in an industrial district of the city that contained only office buildings, looked like it had been rebuilt by the Soviets after WW2, and was about a fifty-minute walk from anything you could call “cultural.” Not that we were interested in such sites though, as we had some sweet apartment-hotel rooms directly opposite the tournament and would only leave the 200-yard-straight line between the two to find food and alcohol.
I stayed with a large group of Londoners, including Rob (who had missed the entire trip through a WPN Championship invite and Tom Baker’s generosity), and Warren Vonk. “Wo-Ren” having a thick South-African accent and the film
District 9
having recently been released, the vast majority of the trip was spent winding him up by calling everyone and everything “fecking prawns.” It was much funnier than it sounds, I promise.
I posted a miserable 1-9 record in sanctioned events over the first two days and spent the majority of the rest watching the main event but won a load of packs in EDH games with Ertai, the Corrupted, made twenty Euros odd back on a late-night game of poker while we shared a three Euro bucket of wine, and had my first ever Big Mac at the age of 23, after a 35 minute walk to McDonalds.
I also snorted a pirate die after a dare from Ben
during a truly miserable multi-language historical Sealed event, in which we were expected to play against opponents who spoke no English and were using foreign-language product. It was without question the worst event I’ve ever played in, and I can’t fathom how someone thought it would work.
Making friends online
As I became more involved on Magic forums, and with the #mtg Twitter community, I started to make friends online that I’d eventually meet in real life. While it might be a little awkward starting your first conversation with “
Hey, are you X?”
that doesn’t mean you won’t end up as good friends as those you meet under more conventional circumstances.
Take Phil, who has become such a good friend of mine that my girlfriend now (only half-jokingly) refers to him as my “Magic boyfriend.” I only knew him as “Ragnarok Sonata,” on the GameFAQs.com Magic forum (you won’t get any tech out of there, trust me), until he posted on a Nationals thread saying he’d also be in Brighton, wondering if he could borrow a few cards for his R/W Control deck. He’d give me other cards in collateral, so I couldn’t see why not, and once at the venue, I went looking for the tall guy in a Flatpeak cap to give him some Martial Coups.
We hung out over the next few days, and he was a perfect match for me and the rest of our London group – he didn’t take the game too seriously, drunk a lot, and loved Mystical Teachings (what more can you ask for in a friend?). In the months afterwards, he stayed at my flat before/after London tournaments, introduced me to New Era caps and Lil Wayne, until he finally gave in, and moved down here this summer.
Amongst other notable events on my recent trip to PT Amsterdam, I met up with Belgium’s
@daiches2,
or Kenny as I now know him, for the first time. We also originally met online, though in this case via Twitter, and got to know each other chatting on the side of our “Words with Friends” battles. I knew he was also attending the PT, and he seemed like a cool guy, so I suggested we hang out.
Kenny turned out to be a whole lot cooler than I’d thought, when he immediately handed me the last eighty cards or so I needed to finish off my common/uncommon cube, having seen my list with needs marked on it posted online. I gave him a load of EDH foils in return, and he and his wife joined us for an evening of drafting my new prized possession in our hostel’s bar until the early hours, enjoyed by all.
This was the first of hopefully many meet-ups I’d have with #mtg Twitter friends, and despite him not being able to visit for GP London (his brother is getting married), I’m sure I’ll catch up with Kenny at another European event in 2011.
Drafting my new cube in our hostel. L-R: Me, Nathan, Nick, Kenny
Magic has created so many opportunities for new friendships for me, and I hope it does the same for you too. You may never win a PTQ, but don’t let that stop you getting the most out of Magic. Friends are better than winning and will certainly last longer.
P.S.
Thanks to everyone for reading, commenting (good or bad), and offering advice or suggestions so far – hopefully we can continue this for at least a couple more weeks! Vote for me to stay in, and theme willing, you may hear from me:
– How to get the most out of Twitter as a Magic player.
– The perils of 61 and 74-card maindecks!
– How Magic players are holding the game back from mainstream popularity.
– Why “Pack to Power” quests and the mythic rarity are killing trading.
– A tournament report from the upcoming
Keith Lovey’s Memorial Tournament.
P.P.S.
Misplay analysis of the week from Tim Willoughby: “
You should give the New England Patriots a call, Dan. I hear they need a new kicker, and we all know you can punt pretty hard
.”