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I
In the course of my life, I have ponied up at least $3000 on the trading card game Magic: The Gathering. Possibly much more–the room I grew up in has thousands upon thousands upon thousands of cards, neatly and recently sorted into white boxes designed for the express purpose of card housing. But my financial stake is relatively mild, at least by the standards of serious Magic players (no one calls it by its full name, probably because that “the Gathering” suffix sounds ridiculously cheesy. Or a Juggalo-style cult.) Some men spend more than $3000 in a single year on cards; they play every week after work, compete in every tournament, and discuss the strategic nuances with anyone who will listen. And, to generalize correctly, it is men who do this–it is an intensely male arena designed for a particularly obsessive brand of nerd-masculinity, a place where maleness is so expected that it becomes invisible. We’ll talk more with my friend Molly about that later on. But I’m getting ahead of myself.
Magic: The Gathering is the most popular trading card game in the world, involving a fantastic (and quite theoretical) showdown between two wizards, played out on thin slices of cardboard. Which of course sounds ridiculous, but I have played, on and off, since the 3rd grade, and spent so much time and money on it that the mechanics of the game no longer feel silly in any way, but instead are a part of what the pretentious version of myself wants to call “intellectual muscle memory.”
The game is turn based, but not for the sake of narrative–it is nothing like, say Dungeons and Dragons, except that both share a fantasy milieu. Quite simply, the goal is to kill your opponent. A straight-up wizard vs. wizard cardboard cage match, with no actual bloodletting. Each player starts the game with twenty Life each, and whoever can get his opponent to zero (or lower) wins. For the sake of time, the game also ends if either player runs out of cards to draw from their main deck, but the vast majority of games end with the death of the wizard-player much, much sooner.
Most (Ed.: lengthy explanation of exceptions excised) Magic cards come in one of five colors that determine their affinities, their allegiances, their strengths and weaknesses. Green tends to signify elves and verdant forest relics, big, lumbering beast-hulks, wurms, wolves, gigantic, typically landlocked killing machines. Red, the ideological opposite of green, features fire, mountains, dwarves, goblins, scorched-earth style destruction spells, fast, aggressive cards without much in the way of defense. Black is the color of decay, of necrosis, of disease, of zombies and swamps and ogres and missing limbs, of all that stirs in the dark of night. White is black’s counterpart, with soldiers, surprisingly violent clergy members, griffins, overeager paladin-types, angels, knights and more; white wears its purity on its sleeve. Blue has no direct opposite, featuring the most trickery, wizards, flying beasts of all shapes and sizes, sleight of hand, counterspells; it is often reactionary, tricksy, and evasive.
II
I have seen terrible goatees. I have seen unironic fedoras. I have seen handsome men with neither or both who still look handsome with trading cards in their hands. I have seen pristine binders meticulously organized with cards in special laminated plastic. I have seen friends negotiate trades like my grandfather negotiates used car purchases–that’s well, thank you very much. I have seen bald men in their sixties who come to a game store every Friday. I have seen twelve-year-olds beat middle-aged men who have been coming every week for years. I have seen fathers and sons who come every week. I have seen ill-fated mother-son team-ups–well, okay, just one, but it was memorable. I have seen a vastly male subculture rarely talked about, a safe place for a certain brand of obsession that is probably bizarre to the uninitiated.
I started playing in 3rd grade, a year when one of my best friends to this day and his brother conned me and my brothers into trading away our rare dragons away for pennies on the dollar. (Magic, unlike video games, can be as much about the collecting, the physical aura of the cards, as it is about the gameplay). For a time, my brothers and I would play constantly, and as the oldest and most well-read, I would selectively apply the rules in my favor. I cheated like a maniac, basically. I’m not even sure why. I guess I just wanted to beat my brothers, to win. Winning mattered despite how low the stakes really were.
III
The person who set me straight on the rules is also the best pure Magic player I’ve ever known. Her name is Molly Abbattista. She is wonderful, my oldest friend in the world, someone who I plan to love and be friends with until I die. We met when I was two and a half and she was three.
“I like psychoanalyze myself all the time, and I still don’t know after 12 years why this is true, but I am most comfortable inside my own head, when it’s just me and a group of boys,” said Molly via Skype. “I don’t know why. Which is not to say that I don’t have girlfriends who I really adore and who are really important to me, and who I spend lots and lots of time with. But that sense of being alone, the only girl, or being different was never uncomfortable for me. I do have distinct memories of it being pointed out to me.”
I tried to teach her the game myself when we were in elementary school but basically bungled it in a traditional outburst of longwinded bluster. Molly learned the real rules in middle school, which for her was a distinctly out-of-the-ordinary private school called Alpine Valley School (AVS). The school is open to all ages, kindergarten through 12th grade, and when Molly went there for two years there were 40 kids. Total. The whole idea behind this school is that the most valuable kind of learning is “self-initiated” and as such the school functions as a democracy, where the staff and the kids have basically equal say in determining curriculum. So if all you want to do is play Magic all day, well, no one is gonna stop you.
“We had short fads, like Capture the Flag or like building stuff out of blocks fad (that happened), but the fad for Magic was very long-lasting, and very pervasive,” said Molly. “It was like a bedrock part of the culture of the school that I was going to. All of the boys who were a little bit older than me, were all Magic players, and I wanted to be doing the things they were doing so I could spend time with them, and I also was completely and utterly fascinated by this game, so it was a really good combination of events to lead to an obsession.”
These kids took Magic very seriously. Which Molly loved.
“They would have these really complex rules discussions and really intense debates,” said Molly. “They would call the Magic hotline and figure out the answer. You could like call the hotline and be like, ‘I have this question’ and they’d be like, ‘I’m a level 2 DC judge, I will answer your rules question.’ And then we’d give them the rules question and they would solve it, and that was like an unwritten law, you just had to abide by whatever the Magic hotline said the answer to the rules question was. And we were always looking up the Oracle text. This was a very serious two years of my life. These people who I was playing with, who were like the first people I was really exposed to playing Magic a lot with were taking the rules very seriously, and wanted to understand the very complex mechanics of the game, wanted to really understand them. And so that was very formative for me, I think. My first real experience with Magic was in a group of people who were trying to understand it, and not being very casual about it. From there, it was a very natural transition from there to playing in more formalized settings.”
Molly left AVS after the 7th grade, but her obsession with Magic did not leave with her. The company that makes Magic cards, Wizards of the Coast, helps run regular sessions of play called Friday Night Magic, and Molly at a certain point discovered one of the most popular formats, the Booster Draft. Each player gets three 15 card packs, and they have to build a deck by taking one card from each pack then passing them, until all the cards are gone. (Drafting is the most fun of all the different formats because you don’t have to have the cards beforehand, so simply being rich enough to buy your deck does you no good).
Pretty soon she started going to draft at a game store called The Wizard’s Chest every Friday. She did this consistently from 12 until she was almost 17. To pay for it she would do a deep-clean of her mother’s house once a month, for which she was paid $80, exactly enough to pay for a month of drafting, though after a while of coming every week she would get the employee discount. When I came along, her dad would pick us up, after midnight. It was innocent and exciting.
“The major miracle of this still is that my dad let me do this every week, that my family let me do this every week,” said Molly. “I would bike or bus to Cherry Creek on Fridays, and I would be there all night, and my dad would come pick me up at 1 in the morning. It was always me, and some teenage boys, and a bunch of 40-year-old men. And this was my crowd, these were the people I was hanging out with until 1 am on like every single Friday night. And my dad was like, ‘Uh, whatever.’”
Not only did she have a community of people she loved hanging out with, she was really really good at the game, which is not an easy thing. Her name was on the first page of the online rankings. Needless to say, there were no other women on that first page. She remembers beating some men who got madder at her, she thinks, than they would have if she had been a different gender. Though when she was a kid when she started, the patronizing actually got worse as she matured.
“When I was like twelve and playing, people like thought it was novel and hilarious and thought I was just like a kid, doing a funny kid thing,” said Molly. But when I was like 16, and just didn’t really look, or sound, or act anything like anyone else who was around, people were like, ‘Why are you here?’ And I think sometimes it was patronizing and sometimes it was just like honest curiosity.”
But Molly defends the kind of people who play Magic. She always felt secure, despite occasional mild lechery and patronizing. Truthfully, the “why are you here?” question was an honest question a lot of the time, because Magic is such a male thing. Molly never worried about the stigma behind seriously playing a trading card game, which I always admired.
IV
After a certain point, my love of Magic only made me feel ashamed. I realized that my going out on Friday night to draft Magic cards would be something that I would have to hide. There is a time before self-consciousness in childhood, before one considers how girls might look upon one’s activities, and going past that point was painful for me. In adolescence, I grew defensive about my Magic habits, which, out of context, might be the theme of a young adult novel about a character that eventually learns to harness their innate magical ability and simultaneously grows into themselves or whatever. Somehow I felt like I should be out trying to make something happen, not in a game store surrounded by tweens and older men.
To be candid, I think my whole complex had to do with sex. Almost no one is trying to get laid at a Magic draft. Importantly, there isn’t even an opportunity to fail at getting laid at a Magic draft. It’s a male refuge, of sorts, though describing it as such fails to do justice to how fun those things are.
“Sure, I do nerdy things sometimes,” I would say to anyone who found out, “but I’m not a nerd.” Sure, I loved playing this trading card game, and sure, I loved it enough to spend money and time on it, but I justified it as an intensely fun kind of recreation. It didn’t define me. Right?
Looking back, though, I was defensive because I wanted to preemptively strike back at the stigma upon that kind of intense, nerdy obsession. I wanted to at least prove that I was aware of the stigma. Molly used to distinguish between “Magic players with social skills” and “Magic players without social skills,” always putting us firmly in the former category. I desperately wanted people to know that I wasn’t one of those guys, those impotent man-children, those beta-males, those…losers. Even though I, by any definition, fit right into that group.
I could never own my nerdy habits, like many of my other friends. I could never embrace the vibrant Magic community in an official way, despite the fact that no one really gave a fuck other than myself. The people who play every week get so much out of it that the game alone cannot explain it–a sense of community should not be undervalued, pretty much ever. I don’t have an answer for why men largely play Magic and women don’t, because it’s a question so large and so basic it almost doesn’t seem worth asking. Magic cards are a tiny subset of already male-dominated game activities. Playing Magic seriously revolves around constant discussions of strategic nuances. Pure strategy can feel absolutely transcendent; it is never technical, never mundane. That’s what games are—an intense, immersive experience which lets you forget the mundane and strive for a kind of mental glory.
I have spent many a Friday night in otherwise closed game stores surrounded by adult men in plain t-shirts, feeling adrenaline pump through my system as a win condition appeared to be a turn or two away. And though I have decided to stop spending money on Magic, I am no longer ashamed of when I did. Winning is a rush.
Tags: childhood, friendship, magic: the gathering, nerds, will witwer
1. Will I love your picture so so so much
2. Do you think maybe SOME gay nerds are trying to get laid at these Magic: The Gathering festivals and that maybe someday a charming and adorable romantic comedy will be made about them?
3. Please put the lengthy explanations that Nicole cut here in the comments
I do think that some gay nerds are trying to get laid, and that is a fantastic pitch for a romantic comedy. Like actually. I’ll call some producers.
Here’s the quote about exceptions that was cut for length: “Here’s where it gets tricky: there are almost always exceptions or additions to the rules when it comes to Magic––in addition to the 5 main colors, there is a colorless type known as artifacts, multicolored spells, cards that can be paid for with either one color or another in any combination. I’m trying to not get too bogged down in the details of the gameplay here but the point is, it is not simple. It is that complexity that fuels the subculture, allowing for the kind of all-consuming obsession with a game that people can almost live inside its nuances.”
I don’t know if these lengthy explanations do the game greater justice than the abridged paragraph at the end of section one (I), HOWEVER, I feel strongly compelled to set the record straight w/r/t the colors and symbolism. TO WIT, the five colors of Magic interact far more complexly, according to the pentagram structure on the back of every card (except of course the weird cards in later sets that are like werewolves or something, where one side is a regular human and the other side is a savage lycanthrope), WHICH IS (clockwise from the top) White, Blue, Black, Red, and Green. EACH COLOR has two natural allies and two natural enemies, determined by their unholy locus on the pentagram; SPECIFICALLY, White, which represents “Good”, life, purity, zealotry, religious faith and militarism, &c. is in fact the ideological opposite of BOTH Black AND Red (which represent Death/Evil/Zombies and Fire/Chaos/Nonhuman Monsters, respectively), and the ideologically ALLY of the pentagram-adjacent Blue and Green. Green, being the color of the Earth and Nature, is NOT ACTUALLY the opposite of Red–even though Red symbolizes Fire which sometimes burns down forests and all the little forest animals which is terrible, it ALSO REPRESENTS Chaos, which is what Nature is all about. Controversely, Blue is NOT ONLY the color of Cleverness or whatever, it’s also the color of Water (the mana symbol for Blue is a drop of water, and its land type is an Island) and Order, hence its pentagrammatical opposition to RED (Water puts out Fire, and Order is, like, the complete reverse opposite of Chaos).
Pursuant to point one (1) of Mallory’s comment, I am similarly compelled to remark upon the author’s physical and appellative resemblance to Wil Wheaton, which leads me to suspect that he is actually Mr. Wheaton in disguise.
Completely valid points, and a good clarification of the MTG color ideology. One of the things I’ve always wondered about, though, is the supposed purity of White and the supposed evil of Black. Like, it seems so one-note. But from the mindset of a player, morality doesn’t really exist–it’s more like mythological flavor, kind of like you describe above.
Well, it’s weird, because the Magic players I’ve encountered over the years can have wildly differing perspectives on the game. Like, some are all about the rules and mechanics, and some are just in it to role-play, or care as much about aesthetics of their deck as about its function. For example, someone I used to play with a lot had a deck composed entirely of Cats. (It was actually pretty dangerous to play against.)
So, while I SUSPECT that the cards are given colors based on how they fit into certain categories (leading to bloodthirsty Knight Templars being White, or to Black cards like the Mournful Zombie, which has the power to restore your life a little bit each turn [to anyone wondering: yes, it’s a real card, google it]), often the players themselves will imagine that they’re playing according to some ethos of their own. I dunno.
Of course, SOME of the “Evil” reputation of Black does come from the common mechanic of Black cards to sacrifice friendly creatures or Cast From Lifespan to destroy your opponent, I imagine.
You are definitely correct that White is not “good” and Black is not “evil”. Head Designer of Magic (and former Roseanne writer) Mark Rosewater points to the villain of Watchmen (*spoiler alert* Ozymandias) as an example of a villain who exemplifies the qualities of White in Magic.
I FORGOT TO MENTION: The guy who invented Magic was a Math Professor at Whitman College, which happens to be where I went as well.
It really is amazing how universally male this game this. I know lots of women who play or have played D&D, and there’s certainly been a ton of discussion on how yes, women do play videogames. But I don’t think I know any women who play Magic. Maybe it’s the fact that unlike the group-of-friends setting of D&D, or the anonymous/single-player possibilities of gaming, a lot of serious Magic occurs in traditionally male spaces like comic book stores. And, of course, the fact that it’s explicitly a competitive game. Not to say that women don’t like competition, but it’s terrifying to get thrown into an atmosphere like that and then be asked to prove yourself.
Man, I barely understood the goal of the game up until this piece. So, uh, thank you The Toast, for finally giving me a sense of what people do in Magic: the Gathering!
You make a really great point here, and I have to agree. In fact, I wrote a whole piece about how being a woman playing Magic in this competitive, male-dominated atmosphere forced me to feel like I needed to prove myself, and how it kind of ruined the game for me (you can read it here, if you like).
Agreed. I have played Magic (my HS boyfriend was super-into it), but for me it was a game I played sometimes, usually with borrowed cards, not A Game I Played.
I play MTG, and I am a girl. I’ve even participated in ‘Real Man’ drafts (and have grown to really love the draft system, by the way). Thanks to a good group of guys/friends I play with, I’ve never felt any discrimination despite my being a total idiot at the game. That has nothing to do with my gender and everything to do with the fact that I find draft videos boring, plus I’ve got less experience as a whole. My dad initially got me interested in the game, but my husband is the one who introduced me to drafting and to keeping up with current sets.
I’d be interested to know more about how Will got over his Magic Shame–and what’s up with Molly? Did she play consistently? Some of the past tense describing her Magic victories made me worried that something bad had happened to her. SHE’S STILL PLAYING, RIGHT?
Molly stopped playing all the time when she was 17, coinciding with college applications and the period of her life, since ended, where she wanted to be an actress. She still plays on occasion, but she is actually trying to get into it more now. I mostly got over my Magic Shame (love the caps) but not enough to keep spending boatloads of money on it. The only way I got over it was by realizing that no one actually cared as much as I thought they did. Whenever I tell people about it now they listen with interest, not the derision I thought they would have.
What Will describes here is the reason I never did like TCGs like MtG. If it was more about those two dueling wizards, I would be all over it… but with an aggressive and fast-paced metagame that you /must/ be engaged in if you want to play the game with anyone beyond a small group of friends, I just end up skimming it. Give me pen, paper and dice anyday.
Yes. It’s the meta that keeps discouraging me to continue (I have these phases where I will play quite competitively, then stop for a long time). I don’t want to have to “do homework” to keep up with the game all the time. I just want to play (and be good)!
My only real life experience with Magic: the Gathering was about 12 years ago, when I was in high school. I was with a friend who was Christmas shopping for her brother; there was some special edition book that had just come out and she wanted to get it for him. So we go to our local comic store in our small midwestern town, which I’d never been in, and there was a room off the main store where a Magic competition(?) was being held. The moment she and I were in view, the games stopped and they dudes stared at us. Not in a creepy way, more like when a strange cowboy walks into the saloon, and everyone completely abandons what they’re doing, all wariness and thinly veiled hostility. The clerk at the comic store flat out refused to help my friend find the comic she was looking for, basically stating that she had somehow gotten what her brother wanted wrong(??)
All in all it was the most unwelcome and unwanted I have ever felt, I felt super unsafe, and we left very soon after. It was completely surreal and awful.
this reminds me of going to comic stores with a male friend of mine, when he would jokingly warn me not to make eye contact with any of the guys in there. luckily for me, the comics I was into were available at regular bookstores that were welcoming to both genders! fancy that
Strangely, when I walk into a card shop, all the guys seem to like… avert their eyes? They kind of look away and pretend I’m not there or something, like “if you ignore her she’ll just go away.” Depending on the shop, clerks will sometimes flat-out ignore me, assuming I’m not actually there to make a PURCHASE, until I hunt them down. Sigh.
I used to be very guilty of “averting my eyes”. I was so terrified that a woman would think I was staring at her that I made sure I was looking the other direction. It took me a long time to learn to treat women like I did men, i.e. simply ignore them 🙂
I play regularly at a game shop near my apartment. I started playing this summer because my boyfriend, a former serious player, taught me how and I got hooked immediately. I don’t know if it’s because I’m reasonably nonthreatening or if it’s because I usually show up with a posse of men, but people are typically really welcoming to me. I’m, frankly, not that good; I’m friendly and flirtatious; and I typically banter with my opponents and ask them for advice after round, as opposed to the sometimes serious/non-chatty demeanor of the majority of male players. Also, the person who runs the event (and the uber-knowledgable judge in charge of everything) is a woman so that might have some effect. Anyway, I definitely notice being the only woman-presenting person in the room, but I’ve been pleasantly surprised at how nonthreatening of an environment it has turned out to be. There have been a couple guys who have been madder than I expected when I beat them, and I think it has to do with my gender, but by and large the guys seem happy that I am there.
It definitely helps, showing up with at least one male person. Being attached to my husband (who has become somewhat of a celebrity in our local Magic community) means that people tend to actually acknowledge me and treat me more respectfully most of the time. It’s such a shame that it’s like that, though. Why can’t we just be accepted on our own? 😛
Tentative theories re: the gendering of M:TG:
1) Some combination of the genderedness of the “math person/english person” thing that’s been such a prevalent and pernicious paradigm in American culture + Larry Summers-style “girls do math bad.” M:TG isn’t exactly math-intensive, but it is math-y–the alluded-to rules finagling gets REALLY intense, and makes debugging or following a proof or solving equations look positively simplistic in comparison, and unlike in the relatively lady-friendly world of roleplaying, there’s no GM to figure it out for you, or fudge it if it’s getting too arcane (pun only mildly intended.) (To clarify: it’s not that women are inherently less good at doing this kind of stuff than men are, it’s that they’re frequently and repeatedly told it’s “not for them.” Which is bullshit. See also the genderedness of “indie”/”story” RPGs vs D&D-style rulesfests. Also see also “power gamer”/”munchkin”/”min/maxing”, etc.)
2) The maleness of the spaces involved can’t be overstated. Like: record stores < comic stores < game stores, especially before the recent indie boardgame resurgence. Will mentioned also the escapist asexuality of the spaces, too: there’s a kind of reactionary vitriol that comes from a Nerd’s safe space being invaded by a walking, talking embodiment of his interpersonal failures. (I think this is also a big part of the whole “fake geek girl” bullshit.)
3) The combination of the above leads to not-very-woman-friendly environments. Wanna get some epic mansplanation? Roll into a game store and ask a dude about the difference between permanents and spells.
recent indie boardgame resurgence
I’m really glad you said that, because I was discussing this with my bf recently. He’s really into board games and he has gotten me into them somewhat, but before I met him I certainly didn’t know a lot about the existence of these games – like, not family games, but also not RPGs. Anyway, I was asking him about the history of board games, because I know I see/hear much more about it recently than I ever used to. This is partly because I’m more attuned to it since meeting him, but I could tell that it’s also just around more.
So – why is that?? I wanted to know what sparked the creation of so so so many new games, how it came about, who started it, who funded it, stuff like that. Do you have any good resources on that for me? He was not very helpful, and couldn’t even provide me with good keywords to try and look for something myself.
I honestly have no idea? I’m not as immersed in the culture as I was 12+ years ago. If I had to guess, it’d go something like “something something Settlers of Catan something something.” I know that when I was growing up, your board game options seemed to be like, Life/Monopoly/Scrabble, Risk/Diplomacy, and then like…massively complex D&D-analogues with like a million pages of rules that took a million years to play.
I figured it had something to do with Settlers of Catan, too. Oh well, thought I’d ask. Maybe someone else will have a suggestion.
And yes, agreed about past options. Like you have to be really dedicated to spend that much time reading those rule books, which left you with… Monopoly.
I think so-called “Euro-strategy” games like Catan have been around for a decade or two and are just gaining more and more of a foothold. (Because they are awesome!) Catan was invented nearly 20 years ago. I am really into Catan and a few other Euro-strategy games, and recently went to a huge board game night where the super-gamers were kind of thumbing their nose at the more “mainstream” games like Catan, Dominion, etc.
Yes! My bf did mention this term “Euro strategy” and apparently there are also some that are considered like “Ameritrash” or something??
I have a problem with people who hate on things just for being “mainstream” – I have my hipster qualities too, don’t get me wrong, but there’s no need to judge others! Something for everyone, that’s a good thing. And if you’re into games, you should be glad that they are popular because that just means MORE GAMES.
AMERITRASH IS REAL. (it may be time to disclose that i work in the industry, although i am not a gamer myself.) the difference was once explained to me in depth but i think it refers mostly to chance-based games as opposed to strategy games.
fun fact: board game nerds will talk for days about how garbage Monopoly is. Monopoly! (not just because it’s mainstream but because it is “poorly designed.”)
It is, though! Don’t get me started!
Yeah, the house I live in in Holland has a battered copy of Catan along with “regular” boardgames.
if only i had refreshed the comments page before i posted i could have been like “yes, something something Settlers something seconded” and left it at that. oops.
i think Settlers of Catan is widely considered to have been a turning point for board games in the US, and while i was googling that i found this documentary which sounds like exactly what you’re looking for! Going Cardboard
Yes!!! I’m glad you didn’t refresh the page and said this, because this looks so interesting! I don’t even play that much and yet this mentions a bunch of games that I actually know, too. I have to go look for this – thanks for finding it!
Oh! Christmas present for the bf? I think yes.
my first instinct would be to watch it without him and then lady-splain the history of board games to him, but your idea is nicer. 🙂
I think it has something to do with the people who played Magic & similar as kids growing up and being like, “wait, that was actually fun, maybe it’s not totally shameful & since I’m an adult now with adult resources I can play/create more fun games.” That’s my theory about why we’re seeing kind of an upsurge in popularity/normalizing of other nerd things – we’ve reached kind of a critical mass of people who were into this stuff as kids and don’t see why they should have to give it up now that they’re adults (although as a nerd in a nerd-friendly city, my perception could be skewed a bit).
I know a little bit about this, as an old friend was strongly engaged in this. Fifteen years ago, board games were not very active here in the US, but they were very popular in Germany – it’s a different culture.
One of the basic problems in publishing a board game is that there are high fixed costs. So you need to be able to sell enough copies to distribute those fixed costs over to make it worthwhile. The US market had trouble hitting those fixed costs. My friend, Tom Lehmann, tried and failed as a publisher in the US market under those conditions in the early 90’s.
The Germans, however, had a different culture, and could make it work. They also had the habit of making games where most of the components just used numbers and icons – any text was only in the rules. This is helpful in Europe, even though the focus was on German language.
Jay Tomilson founded Rio Grande games and started doing deals with German game publishers – they would make most of the components have no words on them, just numbers and icons. He would pay to have the rules translated and printed, and they (the german game publishers) would get to make extra print runs, thus reducing costs for everyone. This allowed him to feed a lot of high-quality games into the US at a cost that actually made money, and built the market.
The US market is robust enough that he doesn’t do deals like that now, but that’s how it got started.
Very interesting, thanks for sharing! My bf said something similar, although he did not know as much detail. But he did mention Fresco, which like you said is pretty much word-less except for the instruction packet which is in a bunch of different languages. This is the type of game you mean, right?
I’ve played a little Magic and decided it’s not for me, mostly because it’s too confrontational. I like games where you win by doing better than the other players, and maybe you screw over other people a bit in the process, but I really don’t like directly attacking other players.
A secondary reason is that for more than casual play, it seems to me that a lot of the game is less about the actual play than in putting decks together and agonising over that last card in your sideboard and learning to recognise what deck you’re opponent is playing from his first or second play. I prefer discrete games, that you’re just involved in while you’re playing. But maybe if I enjoyed the play itself more than I would have got into this aspect of it more.
I’m not sure how gendered these reasons are. I think that avoiding confrontation may be more common among women, although I’m towards the extreme end.
After reading your first paragraph, I was going to suggest that if you want to give Magic another try, check out Commander/EDH. It’s a group format, where you basically want to attack ALL the people, not just a specific person, so it makes it less confrontational, in a way.
Then I read your second paragraph and laughed out loud because you are so right. I can’t even tell you how much time my husband and his friends have spent trying to decide which single card should replace this other single card in their sideboard. This is why, when I DO play Magic, I’m more of a… I don’t even know how to put it. Basically, I will play using one of my husband’s decks that is already put together and HE’s spent all the time agonizing over which cards to include. This way, I know it’s a good deck and I can enjoy using it, and I don’t have to worry about all the prep work. 😀
I have played multi player (although not EDH) and it’s not any better, because I will alternate who I attack, or attack whoever currently has the most life, instead of whatever actually makes in-game sense. (I don’t like playing the robber in Catan either (unless I’ve already been Unjustly Persecuted): I’m very averse to Being Mean).
I also have an obsessive-player-husband (thanks, friend who gave us Magic cards as a wedding present), which is how I’ve seen that what he gets out of the game is a lot more than just the actual play. But maybe I’ll borrow one of his decks sometime and give it another go as a casual player.
Another fun thing might be to try out the Duels of the Planeswalkers games on PC or XBOX360. I love those games because I get to play Magic but I don’t have to play against a live opponent (you play against various Planeswalkers — controlled by AI). There is an online option, but I never do it. I like the more casual, less pressure, feeling of just playing against the computer.
That sounds like much more my scene. Thanks for the suggestion!
To your first point — I think you’re onto something here, but I have a slightly different view. I love playing Magic. I love using decks that have a distinct synergy within them. I LOVE when my cards work together flawlessly. What I DON’T enjoy is a deck full of friggin shenanigans. I don’t want to play a game where I have to sit there and use fetch lands, shuffle stuff back into my deck, tap this creature to gain this effect which then activates THIS card that lets me untap the aforementioned creature, letting me tap it again for THIS color mana, allowing me to cast THIS spell, which lets me search my graveyard for a spell put it into my hand, shuffle something back into my deck, etc…
You get the point. It’s not so much about the math, for me, because I’m good at calculating in my head, and I have no problem writing things down. I just don’t want to spend 20 minutes on my turn that is basically going to accomplish NOT MUCH — and it happens EVERY TURN. I have a friend who LOVES this sort of deck, and I hate playing with him because I can basically go make myself an entire dinner — and eat it — before it’s my turn again. Anyway…
Hahaha, I know what you mean–“friggin shenanigans” indeed. There’s very little more irritating than the exponentially-growing Smug levels of someone in the process of pulling off a 25-card combo that you can do literally nothing about. Not to get too essentialist about it, but I think there’s a certain dick-waving aspect to that kind of strategy that attracts The Menz, just like power-gaming/min-maxing in D&D (“If I play an Elf I get a bonus to my Dexterity, which is the Rogue’s primary stat, and if I take these feats and these skills and get this equipment I’ll be able to stab every single monster to death every single time before anyone else in the party even gets to act! Then I’ll get ALL THE XP and level up way faster than everybody else!”)
Totally agree. My friend that loves these decks? He also firmly denies being a nerd of any sort (even though he *custom-built* a briefcase to hold his decks and dice, and he buys at least 2 boxes every time a new set comes out. EYEROLL.).
WHO WANTS TO DISGUISE THEMSELVES AS MEN AND SNEAK INTO A MAGIC COMPETITION WITH ME
Only if we’re going to win.
Consider me already suited up in my Borborgymos costume.
That sounds interesting.![]()
I think this needs to be made into a movie, too.
Just go, idiot.
my fiance taught me (a woman) how to play magic a few months ago and i’m quite taken with it. i don’t think i’d like to play in a competitive environment, though. i don’t like to spend my leisure time in cutthroat activities. i do like the fantasy environment and pondering the strategy, though i’m still not too good at it. i’ve been trying to find some girlfriends who play magic and everyone gets offended if i ask if they play, even among my nerd girlfriends who like BSG and gaming and stuff! magic is weirdly relegated to an ultimate nerd ghetto. maybe because of its association with middle school? who knows. my ideal situation would be to play magic once a month with a bunch of people past their prime period of caring about magic who just want to play for fun and get drunk.
this is kind of amazing–i work with a bunch of grownass men who are hardcore Magic nerds/afficionados/pro-tour players and they can be breathtakingly condescending and un-self-aware when talking about other nerd culture things. like they literally devote their lives to Magic or something but then they’re like, oh i don’t get why people are so into Pokemon because that’s lame.
Dude! I just learned too! My good friend and I play casually in bars and stuff and it’s weird the attention we get. Last week, some guys took pictures of us as like, evidence?
Where do you live? You can come get drunk with us and play with little cut-throatedness!
i live in chicago!
This is my ideal Magic environment, for real. I will never be interested in 1. devoting the necessary resources to be great 2. spend another gotdamn minute in a game shop than i have to (creepy middle school experiences = scarring) 3. playing entirely sober. But I wish it was a thing you could casually do at a pub, you know, sit around with your deck out and someone would be like “let’s have a go!” and then you’d consider it a win if you didn’t spill beer on your cards.
Booster drafts seem to be the easiest way to have a casual game, but that requires entering aforementioned extremely creepy game shops.
I tried at least 5 times to get different guy friends to explain Magic to me, from high school through the end of college. It always started out with them earnestly trying to explain just exactly what to do in each round, and quickly devolved into a tone of mansplaining strategy descriptions.
I think that I would have really liked playing with these friends, but there is just something about Magic that seems to encourage exclusionary explaining to those who are uninitiated.
Now I just associate Magic with that section of geekdom that I won’t ever gain admittance to, and don’t care to go near anymore.
And, I definitely got more explanation of the point of the game from this piece than I ever got when I was younger and cared.
also HMU if you want to start a chill MtG group in Chicago
My husband plays weekly (draft and sometimes Commander) in Chicago at Dice Dojo on Broadway & Bryn Mawr and they seem like a decent (and large) group of people. He took one of his elementary students along with him a few weeks ago and she was welcomed and had a total blast.
Oh gosh. I was a big Magic: The Gathering player in elementary school with a little group of (male) friends, we played constantly until someone stole one of my decks and after I complained to the teacher the game was banned. (I know it was you, Andrew Klein.)
The next year I moved across the country, away from my Magic-and-general-nerdery friends, and didn’t find new players where I moved to. Well, I saw one group playing at my new middle school, but they, like most other people, didn’t talk to me.
I wish I knew where my cards ended up, if only so I could sell them.
I played Magic briefly during college. It was sort of awful, I would get really nervous at the few tournaments i played at, play badly, and be treated not very nicely by the other people there (all dudes, I probably don’t need to clarify.) I thought they would be nice since there was a nerdy lady hanging around who at least kind of knew what she was doing. But they weren’t.
I wandered into a Magic convention once as it was next door to something else I was attending (OK it was a cat show). I hadn’t known how intense the community was. They had a boom camera to shoot the high profile games up onto huge screens where hundreds of people watched.
I can only imagine that in a parallel universe the cats somehow got loose, started invading the Magic convention, and invariably delightful and hilarious hijinks ensued. Mostly the cats jumping into the middle of games, trying to rub their faces on the hands of the M:tG players or, of course, trying to eat the cards.
OK it was a cat show
I just made a sound like BFPTWUUH at my desk. I guess I’d call it a guffaw? Anyway, thank you for attending a cat show and then talking about it in your comment because you just completely made my day.
Oh how I wish there would be a cat show next door to ANY of the Magic events I travel to with my husband all the time! That would be so awesome.
No cat shows, but I’ve tagged along to Magic tournaments in Paris and Ghent for the touristing.
Yes, I got to tag along when my husband went to Dublin for the Pro Tour last month and it was awesome! 🙂
Excuses for holidays for the win! Pro Tour? I am impressed!
No joke, collecting is a huge draw for some people. We have my husband’s M:TG collection specifically listed on our renter’s insurance policy, and when he needed to buy his little brother’s plane ticket for Thanksgiving he sold off a handful of cards to cover the whole (insane) cost. Foil ones (shiny) are often worth more than non-foil and foreign language cards are also hot tickets. The trading/selling economy is interesting to me from a consumption theory perspective because the value is usually a combination of its aesthetic properties and its in-game value (which changes as new sets are released and old cards are retired).
Also, the card names are killer-awesome. I regularly say things like “Is this Blorgon Fourmouth of the Uncanny Valley with Trample dude expensive, or can the baby eat it?”
So uh this is similar (but Magic players would say very different) but I rather aggressively collect and play the Pokemon card game. I started playing because my husband and I were looking for something to do together that wasn’t drinking (ends up that we drink while playing but thats cool) and I specifically said “NO NOT MAGIC, LETS GET THIS CUTE ONE INSTEAD”
I’ve pretty much browbeat most of my friends into playing it with me, but its getting to the point where it isn’t that fun because, well…
ok
I’m so much better than everyone I know. There is no competition. SO I’ve been super on the fence about going to a local game store and playing against someone (probably a small child) who would royally kick my ass but I have several worries
1) only children play pokemon, or so I’ve been told
2) I am a 27 year old woman and I may scare the mothers of some children
3) game stores are only second to comic book stores in the feeling of “VAGUELY NORMAL LOOKING LADY, YOU DO NOT BELONG HERE”
Thanks, Toast, for giving me a place to vent about my very specific hobby I might be taking to the next level
You should do it! While I don’t play, I get the feeling there are people of all ages playing Pokemon–especially competitively, you’ll probably come up against a lot of teens, maybe?
In any case, you might find this relevant to your situation.
Oh man, I wonder where all my Pokemon cards have gotten to. I had a LOT, even though I never knew how to play. I just collected them, back in the late 90s when they were popular.
You might enjoy this: http://www.npr.org/blogs/alltechconsidered/2013/1…
I didn’t even know what TCGs were until I was 20 and got obsessed with Pokemon because my bf and I started playing it with his little brother. I still have a shitload of those cards in my closet!! Go for it, man. 😀
My picture is not showing up because apparently I’m technologically illiterate but I have a very serious question: DOES ANYONE WANT TO BUY MY CARD COLLECTION? It is going sadly unused at the moment.
Sure, I’ll bite! (This is the ehmgeebee’s husband, by the way)
What do you have? Send me a list with anything of note and I’ll make you an offer. You can email me at ddemoss (at) gmail (dot) com.
Thanks for the thoughtful article. I’ve been playing semi-seriously for a couple of years now. The game is a lot of fun, but I think I enjoy the buying/selling/trading more than the game sometimes. The financial side of the game could support its own article- for example, I profit enough on my purchases/sales/trades that I am able to play for free and make a little $ on the side.
I only play lowkey pickup games with friends anymore because of the male-dominatedness. I really do not appreciate being talked down to by a dude who’s been alive less time than I’ve been playing. *end curmudgeoning*
Oh, the patronizing attitude you describe your friend encountering… Being a fan of euro board games and also married to one, I’ve often found myself the only woman in our local board game store. When I am there without my husband, there are usually some looks – or sometimes some very deliberate avoiding of looks – that clearly say, “What are you doing here?” If I come in with my husband, then it’s seemingly okay, because I’m only tagging along so it’s somehow okay, I’m not really infringing on anyone’s territory, I’m just there with someone.
It’s a broader aspect of geek culture that I dislike: men assume women are not “serious,” that they’re just there to… I don’t know, really. I hadn’t thought of it as infringing on a refuge, but I don’t know that that really makes it okay to be unwelcoming or patronizing.
Ugh, so sorry to hear you’re feeling unwelcome at your local game store. It doesn’t have to be that way! Ladies are great gamers, IMO, but much like many geek culture experiences, we need to create our own spaces for it.
I feel so fortunate to be part of a euro board gaming friend group. Still like 60% dudes, but at least we’re at critical mass. It is our version of a regular poker or bridge night, I suppose. We meet monthly, with rotating hosting duties and potluck snacks, and will game on every available surface as people wander in and out of the house from 1pm to 1am or so! Hope you get a chance to recruit/ hang with more lady gamers.
“They’re just here to…” let me finish that sentence for you. They think we’re just there to get attention.
A couple of female co-workers at my first job out of college taught me how to play, and it was a lot of fun! Sometimes we’d rope in a fourth co-worker, so that was four lady Magic players. Sadly, most of my cards are now in a depressing pile in a shoebox.
Pardon my gushing, but I think I’ve been wanting to read this post for at least two years, or maybe it’s been all my life, which, judging from your photograph, is somewhat longer than yours or the lifespan of MtG.
Thanks to you, and to Nicole and Mallory for publishing it. If I were more of a MtG geek, I might come up with a game-related metaphor, but the best I can do is to say you hit the nail on the head.
i played magic on and off for a few years, then quit for good, mainly because of (my particular experience with) the culture, and the fact that it was royally expensive. i know a couple of guys from that time who weren’t complete dickheads, but for the most part everyone was kinda sexist and mean and patronizing and i decided it wasn’t worth it. i still really like the game and the rules smorgasbord though, and i’d really be into playing with someone in a more relaxed setting.
for the record, i’ve seen dudes actually try to get laid (in varying degrees of creepiness) at magic drafts, causing no end of awkwardness and tension and making the other person really uncomfortable. maybe the fact that magic has become so male-dominated has been reinforced by the fact that its very male-dominatedness has turned it into a relatively safe space for male abusers: like you said, maleness is so expected that everyone is absolutely oblivious about the fact that shit can happen, contributing to shitty behavior even without actively allowing it.
this stuff has always been a turn-off for me in geek culture in general, why do beautiful things like games or math or computers have to attract such insufferable assholes WHYYYYY
Wow. Will, this is great. Thanks for writing it.
Now, I might be biased, seeing as I taught Molly to play. In fact, she still has most of my fairly significant collection from one of my own retirements from the game. But you captured little slices of my childhood perfectly, both in relating Molly’s description of the Magic culture at AVS at the time and in talking about some of the interesting points around her relationship to the _maleness_ of it.
So, yeah, thanks, and excellent work – excellent enough that I found out about this article through parts of my social network that have basically nothing to do with Molly, you or AVS.
Thanks Jesse! Molly mentioned you by name several times through our interview. I think I actually have a vague memory of when she inherited the collection you mention–I was in awe. And I really like the multiple “retirements” you mention; it’s a hard game to quit, that one.
For some reason it makes me really happy that you found this article outside of the obvious things that would tie you to it.
Yeah, it was awesome to come across this unexpected by way of an internet-only G+ friend of mine with an interest in gendered geek identity, sexual shaming as a force in our society, and social dynamics of inclusion and exclusion.
The exact line was “I think I’ve been waiting to read this post for two years. Maybe my whole life.” So, with that setting additional context and charge, discovering Molly was featured was quite an experience.
On another note, most if not all of the gaming groups I’ve been a part of are 1/4-1/3 women. This “refuge of the male child” that we’re talking about doesn’t exist everywhere, and it’s really down to where you play and the culture that arose around that specific location. There are some incredibly awesome people and groups out there that are accepting and open to everyone, from Magic to Board Games to Live Action Roleplaying- the difficulty lies in finding them.
I am a formerly closeted magic and warhammer player (fantasy and 40k). Reversing the mental mechanism that equates those sorts of hobbies with shame (read: middle school) is inexplicably difficult- and I think Will captures that nicely here. Awesome article buddy. Bring cards to San Fran. Some kithken gonna get stomped on- underworld dreams style.
This is relevant to my interests. Just two weeks ago my boyfriend pulled his extensive Magic collection out of storage, and is now dead set on teaching me how to play so I can round out the foursome of friends who throw down on Thursday nights. So far I’ve gotten to the point where I remember to tap the things that need tapping. I still can’t remember to check if I’m playing a character or an action, and I do not understand half the instructions, but here I am, lady playing Magic.
Non-dude Magic player here, although at this point I’m more of a collector than an active player. I’m a high school librarian, and a couple years ago I gave a lot of cards (mostly duplicates) to a kid who really liked Magic but didn’t have any cards of his own. They haven’t popped up much so far this year, but I have a group of boys who regularly play in the library after school, and it is weird how palpable my jealousy is when they start to play.
The excellence of the physical experience of collecting these cards cannot be overstated. Reading Will’s description of a booster draft, I immediately found the scent of a new pack in my nostrils, and then I started getting anxious about how I’m kinda short on boxes and some of my cards are just loose in piles and ZOMG NOW ALL I WANT IS A SEALED BOOSTER BOX.
This was fantastic. I’ve loved MtG since my stepbrother taught me to play so he could have someone to practice on in 6th grade, but I have always deliberately stayed away from the tournaments and game stores — I don’t think I’ve ever owned my own deck, and if I did it was a hand-me-down — and only played single-player computer versions for years, because of Acute Nerd Shame (Sex and Gender Type).
Unfortunately, I think for a lot of people who hold themselves back from hobbies they’d enjoy (“This nerdy and no nerdier!”) because of those early shame feelings, and I appreciate you bringing that up, especially with regards to the getting laid question. When geekery became “cool” (not really though), a lot of the murkier feelings associated with nerdstuff got swept under the rug, or back in the closet. So thanks!
I never got into Magic but my wife schools my ass at Netrunner…
I know that it’s a male-dominated game, but 2/3 of the players I know are women, and one of them is good enough to go to tournaments and shit. But she talks about the way she’s treated by dudes that she absolutely SCHOOLS, and damn, lady. You have to love it a lot to put up with that neckbeardy assclown crowd.
Unfortunately, gender really, really creeps into the art of this game. If you look at any card published in, say, the last 12 months that represents a woman, and you’ll notice — well, what fantasy art typically wants you to notice in women. Sure, you’ve occasionally got that female Amazon (wearing a skimpy outfit) gutting a minotaur, but everyone one of those, there’s something like the Nimbus Naiad or the Leafcrown Dryad (they’re nymphs, and they look exactly like magical pin-up girls
So, anyone want to play some Warlords of Ka’a?
Another fun thing might be to try out the Duels of the Planeswalkers games on PC or XBOX360. I love those games because I get to play Magic but I don't have to play against a live opponent (you play against various Planeswalkers — controlled by AI). There is an online option, but I never do it. I like the more casual, less pressure, feeling of just playing against the computer.
Yes, I got to tag along when my husband went to Dublin for the Pro Tour last month and it was awesome! 🙂
The only person I know who plays Pokemon is also (glossing over many complexities) 27 and female, and probably scares the crap out of the mothers of some children. You'll be in good company.
It’s funny reading that Magic is a male thing because my only exposure to it is when my mom used to play it in college. We’d go to her friend’s apartment and they had kids so me and my brother would play outside while my mom and their parents played Magic. So it was like 2 women and one man doing a tournament thing.
BUT I totally understand it. Because lots and lots of nerd things are mostly male environments. Like let’s not even talk about comic book stores and male gatekeepers to comics and GUAOWIEhalsk.