I blame my mother.
My mother gave me my first Magic: The Gathering card; I believe it was a Prodigal Sorcerer. She had seen some younger coworkers playing the game in the break room at Burger King. The fantasy theme and illustrations must have caught her eye enough to ask for a card to give to her middle school age son.
This must have been 1994. My first exposure to Magic: The Gathering was thus the Revised Edition (or Third Edition if you want to use numbers). I was already interested in the fantasy genre by the time my mom brought me that card. I can’t pin down exactly when I started reading fantasy novels and more specifically the Dragonlance series by Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman and the Forgotten Realms series by R.A. Salvatore featuring Drizzt Do’Urden. Those books let me to obtain my copy of the Advanced Dungeons & Dragons Second Edition Players Guide and the Forgotten Realms Campaign Set.
Sadly, I did not have very many friends interested in playing AD&D. I wound up being the Dungeon Master for a couple campaigns with a single player each. The first campaign was extremely short. The player took the skill “Seamanship” because he thought it was related to semen, which a middle school boy navigating the throws of puberty is wont to do, I guess. His character was eventually turned to stone by a basilisk, thus ending his less than illustrious career.
The second campaign I ran lasted much longer and is still a highlight of my role playing experiences. I played a host of Non-Playable Characters (NPCs) to provide a party for the sole player. The Forgotten Realms Campaign Set provided plenty of fodder for my imagination to run wild. My most notable character was a precocious kobold named Kay, a snarky sidekick to the player’s hero. It was Kay that wooed the fellow female adventurer and took umbrage to anyone poking fun at his short stature. One memorable session required me to come up with rules for characters having sex, a complicated mixture of every attribute from charisma to dexterity. Did I mention middle age boys are full of hormones?
So I was likely already playing role playing games by the time my mom brought me that Magic card. But I was never enmeshed in those games and never truly got into the culture of D&D. Magic, though, was another story. What started with a single card became two starter decks. Then booster packs quickly followed. Trading cards with other players became an early introduction to markets and economies. My Thrull deck from the Fallen Empires set was the beginning of a love affair with theme decks. Wizard magazine became my guide to new strategies and simply to absorb the milieu of the game.
I played the game obsessively throughout high school. Most of my friends I met via the after school games club, where I shyly approached some guys from one of my classes to ask about playing Magic with them. I’m still friends with one of those players, 20 years later. Most of us would get to school early thanks to bus schedules, and we would spend that time playing Magic. My Pestilence deck laid waste to my fair share of melee games. I always kept a soft spot for blue magic after that initial Prodigal Sorcerer. I dipped my toe into direct damage with red magic and hordes of creatures with green magic. The only color I really avoided was white magic; I was more interested in darker things and the healing power and noble characters of white magic didn’t align with my teenage interests.
For whatever reason, a few of us decided to basically stop playing Magic during our senior year of high school. We started playing Hearts at lunch instead. I’m not sure if this was a case of trying to be “too cool” for Magic. I do vaguely recall not being a fan of some of the younger players, although I wasn’t a fan of some of the older players when I was younger. I tried to maintain interest in the game, occasionally playing in sealed deck tournaments run by friends. But without devoting all my time to the game, I fell woefully behind in strategy and tactics. I constantly lost those sealed deck tournaments and draft tournaments because I was not familiar with all the new powers and rules.
Ultimately, the constant barrage of new sets with new rules and the increased emphasis on the metagame rather than the game itself drove me away from Magic. I sold all my cards for a pittance to one of my roommates during our senior year of college. The Xbox 360 game Magic: The Gathering – Duels of the Planeswalkers, with its simplified rules and preconstructed decks, rekindled my interest but quickly fizzled out.
I loved all my time and money spent on Magic: The Gathering. Most of my high school friendships revolved around Magic, and it remains a common touchstone for many of my current gaming friends. It introduced me to the world of collectible card games, which in turn to drew me in to all kinds of worlds, from Vampire: The Masquerade to H.P. Lovecraft to Street Fighter. While it didn’t keep me in the hobby forever, it certainly established games as more than just Monopoly or Clue.
If you want to read about the game that fully brought me into hobby gaming, go here.
This article is part of the 2020 Tabletop Writers Diversity Initiative. Use the tags “Tabletop Writers Guild” and “2020 Diversity Initiative” to find more.
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