I Made A Parenting Mistake - I Started Playing Magic: The Gathering Again

Yeah, I'm not the greatest decision maker. First, let's recap my history with the game, then we will break down what led me down the dark path I find myself on.

I've made worse decisions, but I've also made better ones.

My very first experience with the game was in 7th grade, when a friend gave me some cards so we could play. We didn't understand all the rules, and of course the cards we had were bad. We played for a few weeks, then we moved on to whatever other hobby we picked up for a short time.

It wasn't until my junior year of college that I found myself at the gates of the hobby once more. My roommate and his coworkers would play huge 4-6 person multiplayer games at our kitchen table for hours late into the night and into the early mornings. My desire to be included had me at Walmart, buying a Core Set 2013 starter deck in order to play along. Eventually, I ended up working at the same Applebee's as these guys and it became a regular thing. Around this time is when I discovered that there was more to this hobby than just buying some cards at a retailer like Walmart and that some of these cards even had monetary value. I began playing Friday Night Magic at a card store in the next town over until a few months later when a shop opened up in our college town.

The next few years saw me playing weekly, sometimes multiple times a week at the card shops around. Eventually, as I got better at the game, I started hitting tournaments around and, in some cases, driving multiple HOURS to play in these tournaments.

That said, I still wasn't particularly great at the game. I was better than some, worse than a lot of others. Worse still, I was a terribly sore loser.

That sore loser mentality held me back in a lot of ways. It made the tournaments less fun because I wasn't winning and I sunk a lot of money (sometimes that I didn't really have) into trying to get the best cards, to play the best deck.

This pattern continued as we moved to Kansas City, and I played much more sporadically as I worked two jobs. My job at Game Cafe in Independence essentially saw my paychecks go right back into the store as I bought more cards and other board games. I took the game more casually overall, but I still hated losing more than I enjoyed playing. I slowed down a lot, and moved to mostly playing the online version Magic Arena.

As Magic Arena picked up steam, it became a regular part of my Twitch Streaming career. But, after moving to Omaha and the Streaming taking a sideline I stopped playing all together. At this point, it was a combination of things causing me to move away from the hobby. First was that I wasn't a fan the direction of the game design was going. At this point, Magic had been around for 25 years. The designers of the game were pushing boundaries to keep design fresh and interesting, but I didn't like the feel of the game at that time. Additionally, I still hated losing. Spending hundreds of dollars every few months to stay competitive, only to play sub optimally and essentially "waste" the money on cards and tournament entries. I decided to step away as a way to maintain sanity, some semblance of cash in my wallet, and work on my physical health that had gotten away from me during the COVID years.

I spent the next four years playing Magic Arena every once in a while, but overall, didn't touch the game of Magic. That was until about a month before my daughter arrived.

At this point in the story, I think it is important to note the things that made me love the hobby to begin with. Magic: The Gathering is one of the most complex, yet beautifully simple games to ever be made. Any game with cards designed in the last 30 years more than likely pays tribute to Magic in one way or another. So many people who have gone on to design their own games can often point back to Magic as an inspiration. 

I am not a game designer, but I appreciate what function Magic has as a game. It is something that you can spend hours thinking about critically, strategically, and mathematically. It is one of the few things since college that has engaged the parts of my brain that think critically about how to solve a problem, the most efficient path forward, and how to make the best decisions to face a problem. Whether that be what cards to add or remove from a deck, or how to solve the puzzle of how to win the game I can spend endless minutes of my day just thinking about the game. No two games of Magic are identical, and the variance in experience creates entirely new experiences every time you play it.

In February, I decided to sort through my Magic: The Gathering and Pokémon cards to see if I had anything of value lying around to make a few extra bucks. My friend helped me sort through the junk, find the money and get them ready to sell. I kept some that had some emotional connection, things like Promotional cards from events, cards I had signed by artists, and a couple of our casual Commander decks that we had occasionally brought out before our move. Everything else was hauled to a comic shop or sold on Facebook marketplace. 

As I went through the stuff to sell, a flood of nostalgia and memories came back. Mind you, this was not the first time I had sold a large chunk of my collection. Before we moved to Omaha, I sold a ton of my high value cards. Really, I didn't have much of my collection left. I cleared it all out and thought, "Man, I really enjoyed that game. Maybe I could play it casually some time."

That thought brewed inside for a while. Then once we were home with the baby, I found myself bored while she was sleeping. So, I'd put on Commander at Home a YouTube series by Professional Magic: The Gathering player and Hall of Famer Brian Kibler and his partner Olivia Gobert-Hicks. This series highlights the casual format played at home, and I watched almost their entire backlog of episodes, often just playing in the background while we spent time with our baby. I had four weeks off of work, so what else was I going to do?

Commander at Home

Around this time, Wizards of the Coast had just released Tarkir: Dragonstorm, the latest set of cards that harkened back to my fondest memories of Magic. In 2014, Khans of Tarkir was the latest set, and both my wife and I had a blast playing that. That time frame were some of my fondest memories, and solidly designed cards, so I was interested in getting back in for that. At the same time, they were getting ready to release Universes Beyond: Final Fantasy. I love the Final Fantasy games, and it looked like an interesting set of cards, so I was also intrigued by this.

We decided to put a game night together for my wife's birthday. Inviting just a few friends over (since she was still technically recovering from her c-section) we had a low-key Commander night. These friends had also fallen out of the game over the last few years, so they were very much on the same page as us in regards to staying up-to-date with the game. Needless to say, we were all hooked again and have added Magic night as a regular rotation to our schedule about once per month. 

Now, why was this a parenting mistake? Well, you might be surprised to know that newborns don't like sitting quietly for extended periods of time. Fortunately for us, ours kind of does. But, with chill friends we made it work. Once of us usually stops in the night to put the baby to bed, then rejoins the group once she's asleep. Secondly, this hobby costs money, as most hobbies do. You know what else costs money? Babies. Daycare. Medical bills. Lots of things. Now normally, a person could just say "I won't spend too much on my hobby so I can pay my other expenses! Then, once those are taken care of I can enjoy my hobby again!" A person could say that. I'm not that person.

Did I overspend on my hobby several months in a row? Probably. Who's asking? Shut up. Has diving back into the hobby activated a part of my brain that has been dormant for years? Most definitely. I've struggled to write anything for nearly half a decade, yet here I am now, penning a love letter to a game that has brought me equal amounts of joy and misery. The difference now being that my prefrontal cortex has fully developed, and playing competitively doesn't appeal to me as it once did. Before, when I would play tournaments, it was with the hope that winning would get me to a high level tournament with cash prizes and an "escape" from having to work a job I hate if I could be a professional Magic player or Twitch streamer. 

Now, I don't seek that validation or that escape. I'm not looking to drop what I do to play a game professionally or make Youtube videos for a living. Don't get me wrong, if the opportunity presented itself in a big way, I might still consider it. But now I'm not willing to sacrifice my comfort for the hope of achieving these things. Do I still want to some day open my own game store? Sure, but maybe only if that Powerball Ticket comes back a winner.

So maybe calling it a parenting mistake is a bit of a clickbait-y way of saying I probably could have done it more intelligently. I'm just going to hope that letting my daughter pick up and play with cards will slowly indoctrinate her into loving the game.