The best thing about collecting Magic : The Gathering cards is that every few months, they’re going to hit you with a whole new set to tear open, organize, accumulate and trade - and truly, these are some the actions that live warmly at the core of every collector. This month, they hit us with a mystical sledgehammer.

See, there’s always been an undercurrent of narrative that runs beneath all of the existing Magic cards; things that seem related, recurring names, similar creatures and abilities, and images that appear across different cards. Most times, these circumstances and coincidences aren’t really addressed, and attributed to the general goings-on around the section of the world that each subsequent Magic set takes place in. With the newest set of cards, ‘Shards of Alara’, Wizards of the Coast has published a kind of traveler’s guidebook to Alara that unifies and explains most of the 249 cards in the set. It’s not so much a Fodor’s Guide, inasmuch as it won’t really tell you where to get a good burger or how to avoid being slain by a rampaging swarm of banewasps, but it’s more of a Froud-‘Faeries’ style journey through the five ‘shards’, or mini-worlds, of Alara, each one centered around one of the five colors of magic, or ‘mana’ - a mainstay element throughout every expansion of Magic that’s now becoming a little more personified by these new narratives. The book explores fiery mountains, death-ravaged swamps, and so forth, as well as the heroes, villains and creatures that dwell within these. And I LOVE monster manuals, from Spiderwick to Dungeons and Dragons.

The Planeswalker’s Guide is an interesting read, adding more solidity to the cards that we all play with, but even more importantly than that, it’s beautiful. Magic employs the best of the best when it comes to dynamic, inventive fantasy artists, which is important in a visual genre that quickly becomes cliché and stale with each inch of needlessly-exposed cleavage. Despite being a jaded artist, I never, ever get bored of Magic’s artwork, which is always on the forefront of design and evolving illustration theory, while always remaining classic and attentive to core visual ideas. I don’t know if I can gush enough.

The book reprints much of the card art from Alara, which Wizards has also published online, though it appears in a slightly larger format in the book, which also displays the concept sketches and artwork that the artists used in forming and communicating their final ideas.

In addition to the basic set of 249 cards, there are also five different, pre-structured starter decks to play with, all of which include basic rules and explanations, so it’s an excellent place to leap in and start playing if you’ve never played before. I’m going to continue to search the shiny, foil packs for some of the super-rare, powerful ‘Planeswalker’ cards to introduce them to my game, but I haven’t been this reinvigorated about Magic in… well, about a month. Because it’s that much fun.

Go and buy a pack and get sucked in.

[Click here for parts ONE, TWO and THREE]

Richard Garfield isn’t a fan of the idea of a ‘collectible’ card game, despite having invented one.

Collecting Magic cards usually involves buying a sealed pack of 15 random cards and hoping for the best. Often, you’ll get a handful of multiples and a few new rare and super-rare cards out of it. Doubles and even quadruples usually aren’t bad things, as they can always be traded away or used in building your decks, but it’s certainly a bit more thrilling to see a shiny foil card or a gold logo sticking out of the corner of a pack.

‘Collecting’, in terms of miniature and card gaming, implies an uneven playing field. While can mean an exciting game of hard-fought battles, warriors using their scant resources to intelligently battle the larger, more expensive armies of their opponents, the fact remains : the kid with the fastest bike is probably going to win the race, every time. No one likes that kid, and his stupid swimming pool that he won’t let you go in and his big collection of Ninja Turtles. Man, he even had the Ghostbusters Firehouse Playset… but I digress. As far as the amateur, kitchen-table circuit is concerned, if you have more money, you have better resources at your disposal for any of the collectible games : Heroclix, Dungeons and Dragons, Pokemon, Yu-Gi-Oh, Vs., World of Warcraft. It doesn’t give you better aim, but you definitely have more ammo.

That’s one principle of collectible gaming that I’ve always disliked. While pure skill can usually help you with a victory or two, an evenly stacked match is always more fun to play. In my many games of Heroclix with my old college roommate Brian, we’d always make each others’ collections available for a common pool. This way, when my buttocks were handed to me, I could rest assured that it was fair and brutally square. The games we played were never an issue of Have vs. Have Not.

In the professional Magic circuit, getting random cards in packs isn’t so much a concern anymore. When you play for cash, prizes and fame, you know exactly what you need and you go out and get it. One doesn’t leave deck construction to chance if you want to go home with a trophy. There’s a very strong market for individual Magic cards both in comic shops and on eBay, and it’s uncommon to see many current cards go too far over $20. If you need to do a job, you get the right tools. At that level, it’s far less about collecting and more about having a specific set of tools to draw from.

There are more than a few ways to collect Magic cards, depending on your play style. Serious players will usually collect up to 4 of each card, as having multiples of useful cards in your deck means that they have higher odds of entering play sooner. The average Magic card can belong to four levels of rarity, also - common cards have a black logo placed between the text and the image, uncommon cards have a silver logo, and the rare (and usually most powerful) cards have a gold logo. Every so often, you’ll encounter a shiny ‘foil’ card, which is a copy of one of the other cards in the set - just shiny.

As a casual player and collector, I never actively pursued specific cards on the secondary market. I settled for what the hands of fate gave me, and as I faded out of playing, I still continued to collect for a completely different reason : the art.

I’d still buy packs of cards and completely ignore everything about the card except for the pretty pictures, which continued to inspire and evoke entire universes, even without playing the game. This aspect of collecting evolved into the then-teenaged-me using the artists’ directory on the old Wizards site to send fan letters to my favorite artists, gather a small collection of signed cards, and even buy a bunch of original artwork by the likes of Quinton Hoover, Tony DiTerlizzi and Richard Kane Ferguson - three of my all-time favorite Magic artists. In this way, collecting Magic cards even outlived the game.

More recently, a market for ‘modified’ or ‘Altered Art’ magic cards has popped up on eBay, in which artists (and sometimes the card’s original artist) will either cleverly extend the art from the card’s limited image space to fill the entire card, or add totally new images to the card’s art. Some of these are humorous, like adding Superman or Domo-Kun into otherwise dramatic or demonic imagery, but some additions are purely aesthetic. The whole Altered Art Magic movement is very much akin to the ACEO craze that’s swept eBay, which I’ve also participated in. These Magic cards are still legal for casual play, of course, since the underlying text of the card is either untouched or understood, but they likely wouldn’t pass muster in a professional game. Sometimes these alterations will amplify an otherwise common card’s value a hundredfold, and other times, the card is simply destroyed for the purposes of artistic expression. If you’re going to destroy a card, what better reason is there?

All of these are very different aspects of Magic card collecting, which continues to defy any one singular avenue of acquisition. Collectors often immediately slip their cards into protective sleeves, and often play with their cards while they’re still in these sleeves to prevent chipping and creasing of the edges. Other collectors safely store their cards in the traditional 9-pocket pages. Me, I stack ‘em up and shove ‘em in a box. Aspiring collectors - go get a pack and see what you like. There’s bound to be something in there!

Stay tuned for the conclusion of my 15 Years of Magic Celebration - a rundown of the top ten most valuable and rare Magic cards.

It was something of an honor to be able to sit down with Richard Garfield, the father of Magic : The Gathering, and thereby an influential force in my psychological development. Despite battling against a bad cold, Garfield was courteous enough to answer all of the questions that Brian (a writer for Geek Monthly, who was also covering the event) and I posed to him about Magic and himself.

Garfield has had two actual Magic cards based on him and his name. First off, there’s Phelddagrif - a flying purple hippopotamus, and in a later set of intentionally jokey cards, ‘Richard Garfield Ph.D.’ appears as a nearly omnipotent ‘Legendary Human Designer’.

So, where did it all come from?

“I had been designing games for years. In fact, I was structuring my life around the assumption that I couldn’t get into game design as a living, because it’s a hard place to make a living. At the same time, I was trying to do games seriously on the side, and I was going into academics. I love math, and was teaching and learning math, and I figured I could fit some game design in.

“I think Magic came about from one particular thing I like to do with games - modify them. So, when we played chess, we often played chess with different rules. We’d, for instance, play ‘Bomb Chess’. We’d choose a guy who had a bomb on him and you could blow him up as a move. We’d play Monopoly where every time you passed go, you’d play Poker, and things like that. I loved doing that, and my friends enjoyed it, so I think that Magic was my way of learning to extend that to other people, because when people make their deck, they’re really constructing a game in a similar fashion to the way I like to modify games.”

Did you like fantasy stuff while you were growing up?

“I did, but I wasn’t a fantasy nut. I was the last one of my friends to read The Lord of the Rings and so forth, and I did like Dungeons and Dragons, but what I really like in fantasy is the shared fantasy that anything is possible, and the shared mythos that everybody has. There are so many parts of fantasy that you don’t need to explain. You see a troll - you’ve got a lot of ideas of what it does, and that works well in a very flexible, expandable game.”

So, where did the seed of Magic come from?

“Well, the epiphany, and there was a ‘Eureka’ moment, was in ‘91 in Oregon. I suddenly realized that not all of the players had to have the same equipment in the game, and that seems obvious now, but back then it was a real revelation. And it was such a revelation in fact that I couldn’t stop thinking about it, and at the same time I wasn’t 100% sure that you could make a game like that. I got people excited about what this game might be like, but the examples I had on hand didn’t work well. For instance if I said ‘let’s play poker’ but you could make your own deck, or ‘let’s play chess’ but you could choose your own army - none of those are good games. You need a new foundation, a new paradigm, and it was a few months after that when I began to figure out techniques for making it work.”

So you decided on the fantasy aspect because anything was possible?

“Ultimately, yes, although I did play around with some other ideas while I was casting this around, like science fiction, and I did some abstract design that was more Uno-esque and that sort of thing.”

Why is it called Magic : The Gathering?

“Well… there’s a few answers to that. When it first came out, we said ‘the gathering’ was a gathering of friends, a gathering of people, and a gathering of cards. It seemed like a good descriptor for our first set. We were expecting our second set to be ‘Magic : Ice Age’, and to have chapters in this book going along, but that was before we sort of ran them all together. So all the cards are now part of Magic : The Gathering - which originally going to be like the first chapter.

“My name for it was ‘Magic’, and the reason we didn’t use that is simply because ‘magic’ is a hard thing to own, and there were all sorts of really terrible names that were floating around that we could own - but Magic : The Gathering was a good final resting spot because we could own ‘Magic : The Gathering’ and people could still call it ‘Magic’.

What were some of the other ‘terrible’ names that were floating around?

“Let’s see… the one that was closest to being used was ‘Manaclash’, which actually became a card in the game - a joke about that name. And then there was also ‘Manaflash’. There was a big debate about whether calling them flash cards was too academic, or cool. Oh, ‘Lords of Dominia’ was another.”

What is your involvement with the game now?

“The last card set I designed was published two years ago - Ravnica. I’m still working with Wizards - or sort of hanging out with Wizards, I should say - but I’ve got no real relationship with Magic other than going to shows right now. I occasionally pitch them some game ideas, and certainly wouldn’t be surprised if one day in the future I work on another set, but currently, my involvement is pretty much right here.”

Do you still play?

“I play off and on. Usually when I go to a show like this, I begin playing again and learn what the environment is like, and hang out and do some stuff like that, do some different Magic play formats, but then I quit. And mostly that’s just to get stuff done. Magic is one of the very few games that I have to stop playing in order to get stuff done. There’s a few other paper games that I play that way, a few computer games, and eventually I just have to put ‘em down. But I love returning to them. It’s a lot of fun. It’s not something you can really get bored with.”

What do you do outside of Magic? You have a Ph.D. in MATH!

“I haven’t been working with math since ‘94. Magic came out in ‘93 and it grew for a year before I left academics - but I do teach a game design class at the University of Washington in their Honors Department. We’re building the curriculum - we teach one class a year. You can’t major in game design, but they’re talking about that. They don’t have enough courses yet.

“Even though it’s in the Computer Science Department, our focus on games in universal - not just on the computer. So somebody who sits in our class will see examples from games that are thousands of years old through World of Warcraft and Doom and games published in the 70s, 60s, 50s, back in the 1800s - we have a very historical sense of games.”

What’s your favorite game that’s come out recently?

“I play all sorts of games, and I’m in and out of touch with various genres of games. My favorite computer game of recent years has been Quadradius. It’s a small Flash game, and it’s outstanding. I’ve gotten together with the designer because I liked his designs so much and it’s almost totally unrecognized - though Wizards did recognize it; they gave it an award. And what I like about it is in a very special area of games for me, which is computer games almost entirely seem to focus on player skill. That is, you can sit down and play a game with some people and the most skillful player will win, time and time again. For some games, that’s okay, but one of the things I really like about paper games is that I can find a game for any audience, and everybody can have a fun time playing it. Quadradius has a hell of a lot of luck and a hell of a lot of skill, and it’s like in the poker sort of area.”

What do you like most about the MtG game, or the culture, or… whatever?

“I think the breadth of player that play it. It’s not just one type of player that plays Magic. People play for different reasons. Some people are very competitive and like to minimax their decks, and they’re sort of like the old hot rod tinkerers, where they’re trying to get their engines to perform as much as possible. Other people are interested in driving to old Edsels, or flashing around in weird cars of their own construction, so to speak. There’s a remarkable expressiveness in a Magic deck. That’s what I like the most.”

What your favorite mana color to play?

“Well, the true answer there is that I like to play whatever’s not being played, so if nobody’s playing green, I want to make green work, and I’ll play with green. For an answer which is less tethered to the environment, I’d have to say blue - but what I don’t particularly like in blue is the countering - the counterspelling. I like the trickiness of blue, so I don’t necessarily like preventing you from doing what you want to do, but I like the meta-game stuff in blue and all the weird stuff blue can do. There was a certain point when I became one of the game’s most fierce critics of blue’s counterspelling abilities, because one too many of my decks just got completely shut down, and that’s just no fun. I don’t mind that blue makes me think, but when I want to have something to think about.”

There was a story that you had proposed to your wife through Magic cards.

“It is true. I asked my fiancee (at the time) what her favorite artist was, and she told me Quinton Hoover, and so I contacted him and asked him to make a piece of Magic art for me called ‘Proposal’. A friend of mine out at the company marked up cards using the art - using the layout program, he made these cards that looked exactly like real cards, using land cards with film attached to them, and he gave me nine of them because I wanted to stack my deck. Even though I did not - I played fair. I played with one, which I viewed as fair. I don’t know if it was really fair. And I played with her for hours before I was able to cast the spell. She was just cleaning my clock, but eventually I managed to get it in play, and it said ‘Allows Richard to Propose marriage to Lily. If she accepts, both players win and we mix our decks as a shared deck’. And so I got a Royal Assassin out of it also.”

[Editor's note : Quinton Hoover's 'Proposal' card was stolen at a Tokyo show in 1999. The art has otherwise never been revealed.]

What was the casting cost?

“It cost four, all white. Later on, I actually made cards for the birth announcement for my kids. So, four green was my first child, ‘Splendid Genesis’ was her card, and four blue mana was ‘Fraternal Exaltation’, her brother. The Proposals were not genuine cards, though, in that they looked like real cards, but weren’t really printed.”

So they won’t help you win a game?

“Arguably, one of the will get you a wife. There are nine of those [birth announcement] cards - we gave one to each of our bridesmaids and our wedding party, and one to the artist, and one to the man who put these cards together. They were actually printed for me by friends at Cartamundi, there’s probably around 100 of each of those. I sent them out in cards to people.”

So, Magic is HUGE. Is there anything we left out?

“Well, the most important thing on my mind right now is that I just released a couple of games - Schizoid on XBOX Arcade, in case anybody is interested in what I’m working on, and Spectromancer is about to come out. The beta is on Spectromancer.com, and that’s going to be on PC. We just found a new distributor after our old one fell through, but I can’t talk about it right yet. For both of those, I had a lot of partners in the game design element, and Spectromancer was done with a Belorussian partner - real clever guys I met when I was in Grand Prix Moscow.”

How do you feel about the fact that your game idea has spawned such a vast collection of players?

“It’s very gratifying. Every time I come to one of these events, I’m overwhelmed all over again, and I’m grateful that the stars aligned on my game concept and it really caught on, because I’ve certainly seen a lot of great concepts not catch on in the past. So, it’s certainly way bigger than me.”

There’s even more to come. Click here for part one and click here for part two of the 15th Anniversary of Magic Celebration.

[For Part One, please click here!]

Wizards of the Coast, owners of the whole Magic : The Gathering card game (as well as the patent for the very concept of collectible trading card games), holds events throughout the world for Magic players to congregate, play, and win prizes that range from free packs of cards to cars and $50,000+ jackpots. These events have been broadcast on ESPN and they’re pretty serious about the whole Tournament thing, but neither of these things makes attending an MtG event any less fun - even if you’ve never played before.

I was traveling with fellow writer Brian, who is an avid Dungeons and Dragons player and former Heroclix player, but who has never played Magic. As I mentioned previously, I hadn’t played since my mouthbreathing high school ‘friends’ started meticulously sanding the clothes off of their female action figures and I decided that my real-life girlfriend was superior in most aspects. This particular demographical observation isn’t a reflection upon Magic players, but it IS a reflection upon living in an isolated area in upstate New York. Brian and I arrived at the Hyatt Regency in Chicago (on the shores of the beautiful Lake Michigan) and set to work to learn the game properly.

We didn’t have to go further than the entrance to the event before we found a ‘LEARN TO PLAY’ area, all set up and ready to help us learn the ropes. Behind the desk was Christian, a volunteer from Canada and unofficial ‘Magic Cheerleader’, whose ebullience made the Learn To Play Booth a hub of activity and an interesting place to retreat to between games and interviews during the course of the entire weekend. With the excellent and studied teachings of Christian and Jeff, Brian quickly picked up on the game and before I knew it, we were entered into a mini-tournament on the main floor. I suddenly became very nervous. I hadn’t summoned a Benevolent Unicorn in over a decade, my old collection of Slivers and Angels was way back in New York, and my Serpent Generator was rusty. I could barely turn the crank.

Brian and I were placed into a group of eight players, and we were all handed three booster packs of cards. Brian began to tear open his first pack, much to the horror of the accompanying players, and we quickly learned that there were rules and decorum for this kind of thing. When the DCI Judge asked if anyone at the table hadn’t played Magic before, Brian raised his hand and was dismissed as the resident smartass - which he was, just not in this specific case. We got things sorted out and we began to play.

Despite having no cards at the beginning of the day, these 15-card boosters were here for us to make gaming decks out of - and to keep! Each player would take their favorite or most useful card from the pack, and pass the rest of the pack on to the next player, in a process that would be repeated until there were no cards left. Out of these completely random cards, the players were forced to test their skill at building a viable 40-card deck out of a limited palette (as well as bonus of potentially discovering a valuable card). Mostly, I just grabbed cards that looked neat - with a focus on cards that used white magic, using the strange Godhead of Awe as the focus of my deck.

When we were done assembling decks of cards, we were paired off by the DCI Judges. The DCI, or Duelists Convocation International, is an omnipresent force at these Magic tournaments. They provide decisions when cards might not make perfect sense to both players, they organize rounds, and they prevent cheating. Yes, despite all of the fun, there can be cheating, as with any event where a prize is at stake, but I was informed that sneaky players were very rare and not something that had to be dealt with often. Should any two players remain unsure about how two or more cards interact, a hand would fly up to the call of ‘JUDGE!’, and a DCI judge, in full referee regalia, would be fast to respond and resolve any issues presenting themselves. It was an efficient, powerful system to see in action.

I ended up playing against an amazingly patient guy named Patrick, who calmly explained everything I was unsure about. Honestly, any player who was paired against us was pretty much guaranteed a spot in round two, so I’m sure that they were pretty psyched about contending with bumbling idiots - even while they remained completely honest and even suggested better moves when one of our choices was not well-made. The game was played in ‘best two out of three’ terms, and when my resurfacing Magic skills actually won a match and Patrick & I went into a third round, it felt pretty good - even when I finally lost. It was just fun to play again, and mostly know what I was doing. It was like riding a bike. The very strong core rules, designed by mathematics PhD Richard Garfield, inform everything else within the game, and they’re easy to remember.

When it was all said and done and we were both removed from competition, another player walked up to Brian and handed him a stack of at least 300 extra cards that said player didn’t want to lug home with him. It was a moment of camaraderie and generosity that would encapsulate the entire weekend and everyone we’d meet there. Can I stress enough that these are events that you want to go to, even if you have only the most remote interest in games? It might not be the best place for a guy to go looking for a date, but if you’re a chick, you pretty much have the pick of the litter. Also happening nearby in Chicago were a gathering of Masons, Lollapalooza, and the Black Womens’ Expo - and more than a few attendees of these events wandered curiously into the gaming hall.

My gaming loss marked the temporary end of my professional Magic career, but that didn’t stop Brian and I from procuring packs at the Magic Pro Shop booth and playing until 2 AM up in the hotel room. Down on the main floor, a ‘Gunslinging’ area was set up during the day for players to match decks against champions, designers, and even Richard Garfield himself - so even if you weren’t close to being in a tournament, you could claim the glory of playing against one of the game’s luminaries, win or lose.

The idea that the genesis of this was all in a small collectible card game was staggering.

By Sunday afternoon, the top eight players had been sorted out. WotC was liveblogging every deciding game onto their website, where they catalogued every match-up and crucial move to the captive audiences at home. Crowds gathered, people were forced out of competition, and professional gamer Michael Jacob from Livonia, MI came out on top, having beat out 8th place contender and close hometown friend (and guy with awesome hair), Mark Herberholz, early on.

Herberholz, a former $40,000 Magic winner, and recent graduate from Michigan State University, who was suitably crestfallen. “So close, but so far!” said Herberholz, “I think I’ve reached a certain level where I’m considered to be one of the best in the game that’s still playing, so right now the goal was to make the National team and finish in the top three, but since I didn’t do that and I came really close, it’s almost more disappointment than if I had just lost early on.”

Despite Mark’s disappointment, his position in the World Championships is already assured, so things remain both onward and upward. He seemed content to have at least been bested by a friend, and he told us that his interest in Magic has not waned. He has plans on hunting down a job at Upper Deck so that he can continue to compete in Wizards tournaments as a non-employee. Like many players, he was introduced to the game by bored friends who had found an excellent outlet for themselves. In his case, it was a $40,000 outlet.

Mike Jacob was thrilled to have won the final match against Sam Black, netting a prize of $5000, a big trophy, and a place in the World Finals. In our post-game interview, he credited a card called ‘Skred’ in his ultimate victory over Black. He quickly launched into MtG language in the interview, and for as much as I understood at this point, I felt officially initiated into the club.

“It was a choice that nobody else in the tournament had done. I usually do play a lot of unique cards. Like, there’s a 3 mana 4/4 that can’t block that most people dismissed, and there was a 3/3 haste available, and I played this one instead because I thought it was better against the field”, said Mike. “It feels pretty good. I made a lot of really tight plays, and that’s how I got here.”

When we asked what his favorite part about the game was, he quickly replied, “Definitely the people. I just have so many friends that I met through this game, and I get to see them once a month, maybe twice a month at the other tournaments I go to. If I was gonna go to San Francisco, I could call three people and have a place to stay. How many people can say that they have friends all over the United States?”

This was an answer that we heard many times from many players. Even above the idea of free lodging across the US, the friendships that were made through the game were the most enduring, solid aspect of the gaming community. When asked if he’s let his friend Herberholz hold the trophy, he jokingly said “No, definitely not! He’s had enough accomplishments!”

As fellow players walked through the hotel lobby, they frequently shouted congratulations to Mike, who accepted them modestly. As a professional gamer who often wins $20,000 to $40,000 in various gaming systems, he has no plans on stopping anytime soon. Good luck in this year’s World finals in Memphis, Mike!

While crowning the US Champion was the purpose of the weekend, it wasn’t the extent of everything the weekend held for visitors within the complex world of Magic. Stay tuned for more, including an interview with Richard Garfield himself and some of the more collectible aspects of the game.

I first laid my hands on Magic cards back in 1994, when I was an exceptionally cool 13 year old.

It was a hot summer day and I was helping out at a tag sale in the driveway of a family friend. Since he collected all kinds of comics and cards and toys (with the sole intent of eventually profiting from them), it was always fun to help out and take home anything that he didn’t feel like packing away into his dank garage again. On this particular afternoon, I was handed my first set of Magic : The Gathering stuff - a sealed box with a paperback-sized first edition rulebook and a good handful of cards - all with pictures of dragons and warriors and magical items on them. And it felt special.

I was very much into Dungeons and Dragons at the time, drawing serpentine beasts in the corners of my notebooks, listening to Jethro Tull, and fascinated with the Renaissance Faire for reasons that extended slightly beyond the bounteous cleavage present, so everything synced up sublimely. I spent the rest of the afternoon figuring out the puzzle of the cards - what symbol meant what, the terminology and the rules, and trying to understand the high concept that playing cards didn’t need to be emblazoned with hearts and clubs in order to be useable. This was, after all, the very first example of a collectible card game (or CCG) since 1904. It was a lot to take in.

Magic : The Gathering, or MtG, is a card game in which you, the player, represent a powerful wizard. Using a store of magic powers (your deck of cards), you summon creatures to attack your opponent and defend yourself with, and cast spells to various ends - make a creature stronger, or take away the life points of another player, or give a creature a special ability, and so on. If an opponent’s monster or spell manages to break through your battlements, you lose some points off of your life total. It’s that simple and that complex.

Using a vast, vast variety of Magic cards (well over 45 standard sets worth), the player constructs their own deck of roughly 60 cards to go into battle with. In this deck, the player includes Land (which provides magic for spells), all manner of creatures from dragons to moths, and a good deal of magical spells to help and hinder the creatures at battle. Given that three or four sets of 100+ cards have been coming out consistently every year since 1993, the variety of cards that is presented to the player is staggering. The biggest challenge for a competitive player is to see past this huge collection of beautiful, challenging cards and to hone their Magic deck into a finely tuned machine - and then hope that their most effective cards happen to enter their hand quickly from the randomized deck. It’s very tempting to make an army of Merfolk or Tree People or Giants, but will it work effectively in battle?

MtG has undeniably been the standard, driving force behind all of today’s popular collectible card games : Pokemon, Yu-Gi-Oh, Upper Deck’s Vs. system, and so on. To remain consistently selling millions of cards over a 15 year period is a testament to the universal appeal of MtG as a paramount example of strategic gaming, as well as stellar aesthetic sensibilities.

My own history of collecting the game is something that informed many of my ‘collecting’ attitudes. We were still in those fabled pre-internet days, so I was completely unaware that any cards existed outside of my basic set until I came across more by accident. I remember long car rides with my uncle to hunt down packs of new, mysterious cards. Legends, Antiquities, The Dark, Fallen Empires - all different aspects of this world that we were dueling in, represented in collections of new creatures and spells. We’d tear open the plastic packs of randomized cards and celebrate the new, rare additions to our armies or lament the quintriplicate cards that we were cursed with. Of course, multiples of the same card in your deck can work to the player’s advantage, but when you pull your 35th Uncle Istvan card, they lose their appeal quickly and you begin considering avunculicide. Or, like one player I met this weekend, sent all of the guys into battle in one deck and see what happens. An army of indestructible, ticked off, old Russian men with axes is nothing to scoff at.

For a variety of reasons, I faded out of playing in 1999. The local game shop was shutting down, so the generous owner was no longer going to be around to give me a free pack or two with every purchase I made. At least a quarter of my early collection was accumulated through the generosity of John Callahan. The gaming friends I had introduced the game to became more interested in drawing naked bits onto the Elves than actually using them effectively in a game. I began focusing on art and writing. The rules were starting to get convoluted. Still, even after I stopped playing, I collected the cards for a few more years, very casually, because I remained in love with the artwork, which did an excellent job of making the Magic universe a little more real. Over time, I even started communicating with some of the cards’ artists about art and illustration, and learned a few things that remain an influence on my own art-things to this day.

So, I suppose that MtG played a far more integral part in my mental and creative development than I’d previously realized, and when I attended the 15th Anniversary Celebration / 2008 US National Championships in Chicago this past weekend, it all came back to life, as strong as ever. My huge boxes of unused Magic cards that were once on their way to eBay were relevant again, and I was already leaps and bounds into creating a collection of these things - this time for play. The rules of the game had gone back to basics, the art was better than ever, and I had more fun playing games in a weekend than I can ever recall having.

I’d always sensed that there was a real culture behind the game, but when I heard that there were worldwide tournaments of Magic, broadcast on ESPN and with thousands of dollars in prizes, it was just a little intimidating. I’m not competitive by nature. Hell, my uncle and I used to glue our own art and text onto existing Magic cards just for fun, and I hid behind the telephone pole during high school baseball.

I quickly learned that there was absolutely nothing to be afraid of - the strange lexicon, the hardcore players, the structure of the tournament - everything was saturated with goodwill, a solid code of polite and moral gaming, and above all else, the fun of matching wits and skill against other players from around the United States - whether you were a seasoned champion, or a complete neophyte. I learned new games, relearned an old one, and was quickly reminded why I was so enraptured with the game in the first place.

You can’t get this at a comic con. Stay tuned for an exhaustive recap of the thrilling weekend.