The following is from Hobart 9, the Games issue.

Hobart #9, Games

Magic: The Essay

There are some basics you need to understand. First, Magic: The Gathering isn’t anything like the Milton Bradley classics you grew up with. There’s no gameboard or spinners or little plastic cars you fill with pink and blue plastic children. No hotels to build and no electrified men on which to operate. Magic is a collectible card game (or CCG) like Yu-Gi-Oh! and Pokémon, which means that all you need to play is a deck of cards and and some discretionary income.

The object of the game is for you to kill the guy across from you by casting spells and creatures onto a field of combat. By “creatures” and “spells” I mean, of course, Magic cards. And by “field of combat” I mean your kitchen table. Or, more accurately, your mother’s kitchen table because if you’re playing, there’s a good chance you live with your parents.

The story goes that you are a planeswalker, a powerful sorcerer bent on controlling the universe. Sorry, multiverse. In Magic, it’s called a multiverse.

This was what Orin, a friend of mine from college who’d just moved in next door, explained to me. I’d just told him I was bored with life.

“I thought you were too busy from med school,” he said.

“It’s not that I don’t have anything to do,” I said. “I just don’t want to do the shit I have.” We’d been sitting around his apartment for the better part of a week, watching Red Dwarf and Next Generation episodes. I don’t know why he had all that free time; for my part, I had a mountain of Anatomy I wasn’t studying. The first year of med school is all memorization and flashcards.

Orin dug around in his closet for a few minutes while I stood there, half-expecting the Magic thing to be a joke and he’d pull out some old Hustlers we could leaf through. But it wasn’t a joke. Orin came up with a series of long cardboard boxes, the kind a little kid might keep his Topps or complete ’88 Upper Deck in. Inside were rows and rows of cards just smaller than playing cards, all decorated with fantasy artwork and a slew of numbers and symbols.

“Magic cards,” he said.

The reverence in that moment would’ve been funny if he wasn’t actually suggesting we play.

I’d seen Magic cards before—in high school, when the burnouts and RPGers would put aside their differences and gather around a table in the far corner of the cafeteria. I wasn’t a member of either group—being more of a science nerd myself—but I peeked in a few times, heard words like goblin and mana being bandied about. That was all I needed to hear to know I had better things to do. Sitting in Orin’s dining room that day was the first time I’d heard about Magic since my school banned it—for promoting gambling, of all things.

“Dude,” I said. “This is fucked up. Are you, like, a level-12 necromancer or something?”

“That’s D&D,” he said. “This is cooler.”

“It’s not cooler,” I assured him.

“Maybe not,” he said. “But I thought you were bored.”

So I listened to him describe the concept, the gameplay, the fact that we’d be powerful wizard guys, and I kept my sarcasm in check. I mean, when you say it out loud, it sounds worse than it is—stupider—but it’s like that for any game. Go ahead. Describe Battleship out loud… you’re a naval admiral? Out to sink his neighbor’s fleet? Really?

But Magic is far more complicated than Battleship. There are sorceries and enchantments, life counters and creature tokens. There is land (a natural resource), which you tap for mana (money or power), which is used to cast spells (weapons against your enemy).

The worst part about all this, the part I cringe to explain and that Orin left out of his initial sales pitch, is that there’s a whole Magic fantasy world—Dominaria—that the game supposedly takes place in. An entire backstory played out in paperback novelizations and in little bits of italicized wording on the cards themselves. Flavor text, it’s called. An example, from a card named Genesis:

First through the riftstone was Genesis,
and the world was lifeless no more.

Shit like that, full of wonder and larger-than-life characters. It’s supposed to get you into the game, wondering what a riftstone is and buying Magic: The Novels to find out.

But I ignored that because I was in need of a distraction. My life had taken some turns, which, while not unexpected, were at least disheartening. I was an M1 (first-year) at Wayne State School of Medicine in Detroit and feeling pretty down about my situation. In college, I’d been good at biology and chemistry, though I never really cared for either. I’d started at Wayne thinking it would become important to me once the science was related to something tangible. Once it was a good-paying job and not just a clump of cells engaging in mitosis. But starting med school hadn’t helped; all I saw were the cells. All I cared about was anything else.