“There is no such thing as bad publicity except your own obituary.” — Brandon Behan
They haven’t buried me yet.
“Flirting at Magic Tournaments”
was designed to hit a nerve, and it did, generating plenty of discussion on the forums, as well as constructive and not-so-constructive feedback. I can’t really object to any of it; in the early part of the StarCityGames.com Talent Search, I’d rather have my last article be mildly notorious than go unread.
That said, I don’t want to go through the competition as just a flamethrower or a scold. My main goal is to strengthen the Magic community and
improve how we’re seen by others. Sometimes that means calling people out—with apologies to
Friend Milton Mayer,
I’m not afraid to speak truth to Power Nine owners—but I’m more interested in seeing Magic broaden its reach and watching its players grow into true ambassadors for the game.
The seed of this article comes from when I attended Grand Prix Houston back in April. I posted one of my typically mediocre finishes but enjoyed the artists’ booths and the overall energy in the tournament hall. Between rounds, I fell into conversation with a gentleman whose grandson was playing.
He hadn’t known there were so many Magic players, especially adult Magic players. When talk turned to occupations, I told him I was a writer. He hadn’t expected to meet a writer or the doctor he’d spoken with earlier. At the time, all I could do was shrug and tell him, “You’d be surprised who plays.”
It would be better for us, though, if the world
weren’t
surprised. There are more of us than others think, and there’s more to us than Magic. That’s an angle I haven’t seen in the marketing of Magic as a game, and it’s something we can work on. Eventually, if the game is to continue to expand and thrive, it’s something we’ll have to work on, so why not start now? It’s not like we lack for good examples.
Wizards of the Coast counts Magic players in the millions; I’ve heard six or seven million, depending on the source. The game brings us together by the hundreds at Grand Prix events or StarCityGames.com Opens, by the dozens at PTQs and Friday Night Magic, by twos and threes and fives in homes and libraries around the world. On the smallest scale, Magic brings us together one-to-one, as opponents in a duel or as reader and author. Magic is how you know about me. Magic is how I might know about you.
But there’s more to us than Magic, far more. When the tournament is over or the kitchen table cleared off, we go back to our ever-changing lives. I’ve played Magic as the awkward high school kid who stumbled onto the game at a cafeteria table, the broke college student forever bumming rides and
putting class notes and decklists on the same sheet of paper, and the young man who moved from Indiana to Texas for a job and discovered that
he
was the one who had the accent. At every transition, Magic helped me pull through, not only Magic: The Gathering but Magic: The People.
We’re not just meaningful to other Magic players, either. Whether or not the rest of the world knows it, Magic players have made their lives better.
If a Norwegian family sits down to watch an American or British TV show and Nicolai Herzog translation lets them enjoy it, their lives are
enriched, if just for an evening. When Josh Layne performs in concert, the audience may not know that the
harpist playing the Handel concerto
also made the
semifinals of Grand Prix Portland,
but his quick fingers play both cards and harp strings. Poker railbirds around the world know the names of bracelet winners like David Williams and Eric Froehlich.
Magic players also hold important, if less visible places in society at large, while still playing at a high level. I’m not ignoring the demographics of the professional ranks; in the Grand Prix and Pro Tour Top 8s of 2010, most of the slots are claimed by the professional card players (Magic and otherwise) and students who don’t necessarily have to grapple with the grind of a full-time job in addition to their card-playing. It’s only logical.
Yet there were also Top 8 appearances by people in fields like engineering (Patrick Cox, Ruben Gonzalez Caballero, Takeshi Ozawa), finance (Tobias Gräfensteiner, Tom Martell, Steve Bernstein), software (Nick Lynn, Kenny Öberg, Shaun Rodriguez), and IT management (Tomas Nagy, Charles Lancaster). The discreet ranks of the “company employee” were legion in the Asian Grand Prix listings, including former Magic World Champion Makihito Mihara.
One-off occupations in Grand Prix Top 8s include an attorney (Christopher Gosselin), a doctor (Ryou Tasaki), an auction buyer (Hiroyuki Shimoya), and a Marine reservist (Joby Parrish). Then there’s Ding Yuan Leong, the hairstylist who took down Grand Prix Kuala Lumpur. Not only does he have a Worlds Top 8 and a Grand Prix trophy, but he has better hair than I do. Am I jealous? Just a little.
We’re also more than just a collection of the young. As long as there are new players coming into the game, there will always be youth, and the college-grade misadventures that have made so many tournament reports instantly memorable (and make me glad I graduated before I ever heard of Facebook) will continue until the end.
At the same time, there’s a growing contingent of more mature players competing and succeeding at the highest levels of the game. The Pro Tour Hall of Fame has encouraged this, giving an older-and-wiser Kai Budde his entry to Pro Tour Amsterdam and ensuring there will always be a place at the table for the likes of Brian Kibler and Bram Snepvangers.
Older players (I’ll apply the
Logan’s Run
rule—film version—and put the threshold at thirty) are also making their mark at the Grand Prix level. The recent Grand Prix Bochum Top 8 had no less than three players in their 30s (Geertjan Woltjes, Sok-Yong Lee, Mathias Künzler), and so did the Top 8 in Yokohama (Masashiro Kuroda, Min-Su Kim, Tomoyuki Honnami). Nicolai Herzog and SCG’s own Anton Jonsson were 32 for Gothenburg. Josh Layne was 33 during Portland. Bram Snepvangers was 34 for his semifinals in Lyon, as was Sven Dijt in Madrid.
The year’s standard-bearer for the mature Magic player has to be Charles Lancaster of the Grand Prix Houston Top 8. While he played on the Pro Tour as far back as Los Angeles in 1996, he made his first Grand Prix Top 8 this year at the age of 42. Steve Sadin, writing for Wizards, had a great
slice-of-life in his coverage of
Lancaster’s quarterfinals match
with SCG’s Todd Anderson:
“With their Top 8 finishes, both of these married players picked up their invitations to Pro Tour San Juan this weekend and began discussing the possibility of taking their wives on a trip to Puerto Rico this summer. Charles was planning on going on a trip with his wife and six-month-old daughter to Florida this summer, but it looks like he’s going to have to change their vacation destination.”
Play the game, see the world…
and bring the family. We’re used to young players traveling with parents or guardians, but as Magic demographics expand to include more mature
players, parent Magic players taking their children to Pro Tours will occur far more frequently. Road trips and variations on the
Honolulu Beach House
won’t go away, but I expect to see more Pro Tour trips built into family life.
As an extension to the emergence of more mature Magic players, second-generation Magicians are starting to appear. In 2004, Angela Rae Riley, a Texan who learned the game from her stepfather, followed him onto the Pro Tour by qualifying for San Diego. Then there’s twelve-year-old
StarCityGames.com Open Top 8 competitor Zac Cole, who’s
played Magic for three-quarters of his life.
He may be one of the first in a wave of players who’ve grown up playing Magic with a parent. Family ties like these can only make the Magic community stronger.
For all the increases in the family and mature player bases, I recognize that independent young players (teens and twenties) are the main audience of Magic and will be for years to come. It only makes sense that much of the advertising for the game is aimed at them. But it also makes sense to look at an older audience, not only potential gamers but also the involved parents who look at Magic and wonder if the game is right for their children. For example, my mother freely admits that when she took me to my first Magic tournament, she looked at the crowd and got a little nervous.
Then a man with short green hair and a black Nine Inch Nails sweatshirt came up to her. How was she doing? Did she need anything? Oh, your son is playing? Point him out, and we’ll keep an eye on him. The green-haired man wasn’t the only one, either. Other players, judges, the tournament organizer… all took time out to check on her and make sure she was comfortable. With those simple kindnesses that defied every unfortunate expectation she might have had, she evolved from being a worried parent to proudly proclaiming herself a “Magic mom” the way others call themselves soccer moms.
There are plenty of people out there like my mother, like the grandfather at Grand Prix Houston. We need to let them know who we are, that we are
gamers but not only gamers. We’re the Magic players at
Ziggurat Con.
We are Kali Anderson
winning a StarCityGames.com Open and celebrating with her husband.
We are the
Richie Proffitt Memorial Tournament,
a
celebration
born from one of the moments that
rips your heart out.
Magic is more than any of us, and there is more to any of us than Magic.
Spread the word.
***
I’ll finish with something I’d like to make a regular feature, the
Forum Response of the Week.
The inaugural Forum Response of the Week goes to StarCity’s own Jonathan Medina, who said: “I think I would’ve found [
“Flirting at Magic Tournaments”
] more credible if it started with a picture of this guy at an SCG Open with his arm around a couple chicks.”
My response to the response: I’ll take this as a challenge. The next Dallas/Fort Worth StarCityGames.com Open is scheduled for March; I’m planning to attend, and now I want this picture.
Are there any volunteers?
Thanks for reading, and don’t forget to vote!
— JDB