Card magicians

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Card magicians

On Friday, Feb. 24, I called my friend junior Ryan Elefson and said 10 words that just a few days earlier, I never imagined I would say:

“Will you teach me how to play Magic: The Gathering?”

He laughed nervously, paused, and asked, “Are you sure you want to learn?”

I’d asked myself the same question. Though I’ve had my fair share of garden-variety nerdy experiences (watching all three original Star Wars movies in one day, mastering Mario Kart for Nintendo 64, debating in high school, etc.), I’d never faced geekiness of this magnitude –– and that’s no mistake. I’m horrible at math, haven’t ever made a cohesive strategy about anything, and have the memorization abilities of a goldfish. I don’t play fantasy-themed strategy games, ever.

But Magic: The Gathering is more than a game. It’s an investment, a language, and an addiction. And over the last 12 months, it’s wormed its way into the schedules of a growing number of Hillsdale students and taken over an entire building downtown.

“It is nerdy,” said junior Ian Blodger. “It is very nerdy. I don’t necessarily think that’s a bad thing.”

I met Blodger on Friday at Battlegrounds, a store in downtown Hillsdale devoted to the game. Richard Garfield, a math Ph.D., invented the game in the 90s. Since then, it’s become a worldwide phenomenon. Every Friday night, devotees gather around the world for officially sanctioned Friday Night Magic tournaments, one of which Battlegrounds hosts.

Some of the tournaments have huge prizes. Sheila Fox, the store’s owner, said the best players make a living off their winnings. In Hillsdale, players compete for store credit and more Magic cards.

“It’s like the chess of card games,” said Blodger

The game teaches players about strategy, math, and “everyday life,” he said.

And sometimes, it changes their lives. Harley Lundahl, one of the competitors in the tournament, said coming to Battlegrounds to play Magic helped him turn his life around and find a stable job.

Lundahl moved to Hillsdale about a year ago to live with his parents after losing his job. Because he has agoraphobia, he had trouble keeping steady work and faced crippling anxiety when he left his home. But he loved Magic: The Gathering, and first came to Battlegrounds to play it six months ago. For Lundahl, that changed everything.

“This was the first place I started coming out to, where I could come out and be around people who are a little bit more like me, instead of feeling out of place everywhere else I went,” he said. “So that really helped me out when I moved into town.”

By coming to the weekly tournaments, he made friends and met his current boss. Now Lundahl works as a graphic designer.

“Beforehand, I didn’t go out, I didn’t do anything, just because I couldn’t,” he said. “So it was almost like a savior.”

For others, the game is just a distraction.

Luke Sanders, a senior, said his a friend of his introduced him to Magic.

“I would sometimes get back and have all my work done and it’s before twelve o’clock, and think, thank God, I’m going to go to bed on time,” Sanders said. “My friend would just be sitting here and he would seemingly from nowhere just pull out the deck and start shuffling, and he’d just get this look. And I’d say, okay. And then fast forward five hours, and we played like 10 sets and then just, where’s all the time gone? I’d think, oh God, I got class in four hours.”

On Jan. 28, Sanders set a personal record when he spent seven hours playing in a tournament at Battlegrounds. It began at 11 a.m. and he didn’t get out in time for dinner at Saga. By the time he left, the storefront windows had fogged over completely.

“And I just remember thinking to myself that there are a lot of sweating people in this room,” he said.

For some players, the game becomes a cancer, he said.

“It’s really addictive.”

So I had to learn how to play. After getting back from Battlegrounds, I went to the house Elefson and Sanders share for my first and only lesson. Here’s what I picked up:

Players build their own decks of about 60 cards. Each card is one of five colors (black, white, red, green, and blue) and features a detailed image of the character or land it represents. Different characters have different powers, I think, and gain power by being played in tandem with land, or mana, cards. Each player begins the game with 20 lives, and the game ends when one of the players loses all of his (or, occasionally, her) lives.

But it’s actually a lot more confusing than that, I think.

“You can get a card that’s called a planeswalker,” Elefson said, “and it acts as its own player. So you can play a card and it’s your ally, and it has these different abilities which you can control. Essentially, it’s just a puppet. But it has its own life.”

When he said that, I thought I understood what was going on. In retrospect, though, I have no idea what any of that means.

“It’s complicated,” he said. “I don’t know if you have to worry about that.”

So I decided not to. I doubt I’ll ever understand what the little pictures around the edges of the cards symbolize, or why a seemingly normal guy like Sanders would play this game instead of sleeping, or how a pile of cards on a plastic table in a store downtown can be either a savior or a cancer. But, as Elefson reassured me, I don’t have to.

After all, it’s Magic.

bwoodruff@hillsdale.edu