Zen and the Art of Magic

I decided today (or yesterday, I suppose, depending on how you look at it) to go apply for a job at a nearby newspaper that I'd seen advertised. It seemed to be the ideal sort of thing for me: sitting at a desk taking calls from people wanting to buy classified ads. Nice, clean work environment, a steady paycheck, and I'd be working for a publication--being a writer, that's always a bonus.

Unfortunately, when I checked their classifieds today/yesterday (it's almost three in the morning, I'm not being too strange) I found that they were no longer advertising for that position. It makes me worry that it was already taken. I'm going to go there and make sure, of course, but I'm not holding out much hope. Hope has a nasty way of coming back and biting you in situations like this.

I've looked at a few other jobs. None of them appeal to me as much as the newspaper gig, but some of them might be serviceable. I'll just have to see how things turn out.

To deal with the disappointment, and also that I might have an activity while I waited to grow tired enough to go to bed, I took all the new Magic cards I've gotten over the past week or so and constructed a deck. It's blue/white, and its base is the deck that I threw together for last Friday's sealed deck tournament. I took out some of the things that just didn't function well within it and tried to limit it to being decent at only a few tasks. What I wound up with was a goodly number of denial tactics, spells that do unpleasant things to my opponent's creatures, and a small horde of my own creatures (almost all of whom have some manner of evasion ability, like flying).

The weird thing about the whole process is that I got very calm, very focused, and very content while I was sorting through what cards were going to go in and what ones were coming out. There was some serious Zen shit going on, and I have no idea why. I just sort of blocked out everything else, and an hour and a half or so later I had a deck that I think is actually pretty good, considering. It needs deck protectors, of course, because I think there's summat like three or four rare cards and two foil cards in there. While I may not be hardcore like some folk (I don't, for instance, drop $360 to buy four copies of a complete set) but I still like to protect the cards from accidental drink spillage and suchforth.

I don't know when I'm actually going to get to use my new deck. I suppose, like with the job opening, I'll just have to see.

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I don't know if anyone's ever slit their wrists by determined papercutting, but if I have to spend several hours a day stuffing inserts into newspapers I might just be the first.

Friday Night Magic

Well, tonight I played Magic: The Gathering for the first time in about four years. I actually did better than I thought I would, oddly enough. It was a sealed-deck tournament, wherein each participant got a tournament pack (45 spells and 30 basic lands) and two booster packs (15 cards each) and composed a deck on the spot. I wound up playing blue/white, primarily because I had some nasty blue spells and one big white Angel, Twilight Shepherd, that was a 5/5 with flying, didn't need to tap to attack, would come back from the dead one time after she was killed, and had really pretty artwork. She was epic, and I managed to (somehow) bring her out in almost every game I played in. A definite gamewinner, for certain.

The competitors were not a fairly diverse lot, gender-wise. There were nine men, including myself, and one incredibly intrepid (and cute) woman who I think was a few months pregnant and not shy about her decolletage. I expect she got a distraction bonus during gameplay.

See what I did there? That was French. I could've just said "boobs", but I went the classy route.

Anyway, in the first round I was up against Mr. All Business, who had a habit of using as few words as humanly possible to express his thoughts. Take this exchange, for example, which took place after our first game (each round was best of three games):

Mr. AB: "Draw or play first?"
Me: "...I'm sorry?"
Mr. AB: "Draw or play first?"
Me: "I'm not sure if I know what you're asking."
Mr. AB: "Do you want to draw a card first, or play first?"

At that point I managed to divine that he was asking (since I'd lost the previous game) whether I wanted to go first or second, as the first player to go doesn't get to draw a card. It only took three tries. This habit didn't irk me so much as make me feel uncomfortable. It was terribly impersonal. Also, when I won the second game we played, he started picking his cards up before I actually went through the motions of taking my turn and issuing the winning attack and whatnot. It was a little thing, but it was kind of rude.

So anyway, after that I went on to my next opponent, The Rules Lawyer, who was built like a bloody football player. I got my ass handed to me two games in a row by this bloke, who was significantly friendlier than Mr. All Business but also happened to be brutally in command of all the minutiae of the rulebook. An example:

The RL: "So I attack with my 2/2 creature, here."
Me: "Okay. I block with my 2/2. They both die."
The RL: "Nope, see I activate this other creature's ability, which removes my creature from play until the end of the turn, but damage was already dealt, so your creature dies from lethal damage but the damage doesn't affect my creature because it's out of play."
Me: "O...kay. Shit."

He pulled that kind of shit both games. Apparently he'd been on the serious tournament circuit and that's where you pick this stuff up. It was beyond me, though, and my knowledge of the mechanics was so rusty I was in no position to argue. After we were through playing, he asked if he could leaf through my deck just to see what I'd put in it, then he took a look at the other cards I wasn't using. He promptly informed me that here are several cards that I should put in my deck, and also I should have been playing black and something because I had some wicked awesome black spells.

I told him I always went black back whenever I used to play, and that I figured I should try something new. He shrugged and seemed to think I should've gone black/some other color anyway.

My third opponent was The Aging Newbie. He was in his late fifties, looked like, or maybe he was in his early fifties and did a lot of drugs early on. Distinct possibility. Anyway, he only started playing a month or so ago (as had the token woman) and was still a bit sketchy on the rules. I helped him along as best I could in spots, though there was one bit of advice I was going to give him afterward that I forgot to. He was always very nervous about attacking, even when he had six or so creatures and I only had three or four. Sure, he would've lost some of them, but they would've taken a few of my defenders down with them. In any case, he was the nicest of the lot. The rest of them were apparently just in it to win, but The Aging Newbie seemed to want to sit down and play a game, which was refreshing. I won both games I played against him, but I think he took it in stride.

Most of the people there seemed to have lost track of the fact that Magic is, in point of fact, a game. Maybe half of us actually seemed to be having fun, and the rest were crouched vulturelike over their cards with determined grimaces. They were the ones who filled out the top four at the end of the third round and got to continue. The other six of us hung around long enough for the random drawing to determine which two got special foil cards, then sidled on out into the night.

For some perspective, by way of listening I found out that one of the guys what didn't make it to the final four makes a habit of buying complete sets of Magic cards. But he doesn't just buy a single complete copy of a set, oh no: he buys four. So he can be sure to have four copies of each card in the set for deckbuilding purposes. That's insane.

It was an interesting experience, all told. I'm just sort of sorry that it was so gorram competitive. I mean, I went in there knowing it was a tournament, and that practically by definition there would be some manner of prize at the end, but I didn't know anyone would be so bloody dead-set on winning. I guess it was too much to expect a pleasant and sociable game with people I hardly even knew.

In any case, I think I've got Magic out of my system now, at least for the time being. It's one thing playing a game friendly-like, and quite another playing for fame, fortune, and foil cards. I'll take friendly-like anyday, and I even began to feel partway through the tourney that perhaps I should have spent my evening with friends instead of with complete strangers. I think I would have felt somewhat more fulfilled by that.

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Well, ah'll be Gosh Durned. Ain't this a fine how-do-ya-do.

Finals Week Cometh

And I suppose I could make a joke about having to clean up after it, but that would require effort on my part.

In any case, here I am, a mere three days away from being a fully-fledged graduate from a state university--and I'm oddly calm about the whole business. I mean, sure I have two finals that will involve summat like two hours of solid writing each, and I still have to finish my final project for Stage Costume (only three more renderings to go!), but otherwise I'm feeling pretty good about the world.

I spent a chunk of the morning yesterday relearning how to play Magic: The Gathering by watching the videos concerning the topic that Wizards of the Coast has posted on YouTube. The acting is subpar and the humor is eye-rollingly painful, but they weren't a bad primer. If you want to have a chuckle at a guy who loves gesturing more than life itself, you should take a look.

Now, you're probably wondering, "PS, you handsome devil you, didn't you shrug off the old addiction to cardboard crack some years ago? What's got you peering into the depths of the black abyss of collectible card games again?" And that's a perfectly valid question, particularly when phrased in that precise manner. The answer is simple.

I got to reading a book called Gaming as Culture, a more or less scholarly look at tabletop RPGs, computer RPGs, collectible games, and the subculture associated with it all. It was an interesting read, one which I agreed with on some occasions (like when it asserted that there can be as real a sense of community in something like World of Warcraft as there can in meatspace) and disagreed with on other occasions (like when one essayist basically suggested that all roleplaying games are hypermasculinized powertrips engaged in by males who have been desexualized or feminized by society and in which women are at best marginalized and at worst openly degraded), but the articles on collectible games reminded me of something that I had never really gotten around to: Magic tournaments.

I'd never engaged in tournaments because my deck basically took cards from just about every set ever released, except maybe the first two, and tournaments are very picky about what they allow in terms of cards. But I discovered with this book that there are sealed-deck tournaments, in which you show up, pay your entry fee, get a tournament pack and a couple of boosters, and proceed to build your deck on site. So its playability (insofar as being legal) is basically guaranteed. It also means that nobody gets an undue advantage by slinging money around and picking up the best cards to stick in their decks. You get what you get, and that's it. There's a certain bourgeois appeal to the whole business.

So Friday after next, I'm going to attend my first ever Magic: The Gathering tournament. I'm hoping it'll be as fun playing as I remember it being.

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I'm gonna rip yer face off.