Hi folks! Thanks for stopping by, I'm glad you're here! This is my first Leaflet post! A bit about me ... I’m a lifelong gamer approaching middle-age. I’m also a new dad (relatively speaking) trying to figure out how fatherhood and gaming mesh together. I'll be writing about Magic: The Gathering, gaming in general, life as a gamer dad, and (re)learning how to have fun. If you like what you see, feel free to make yourself comfortable, and maybe give me a follow? Enjoy!
I started playing Magic: The Gathering in early 1995, a few months after my cousin first unsuccessfully tried to show me his collection. After hearing more about the game from other kids in middle school, I bought five booster packs of Fallen Empires from a bookstore in the local mall for, if memory serves, the clearance price of $1 each. I remember looking at one of my first “rare” cards, a Derelor, and being taken in by the artwork.
One, two, three, four, here comes Derelor!
As a 12-year-old, a veteran of Final Fantasy, and being knee-deep into Dungeons and Dragons, this was right up my alley.
Fallen Empires is the story of the end of civilization. According to the lore of early Magic, the world of Terisiare is suffering from the fallout of a cataclysmic, inter-planar conflict in the not-so-distant past, known as the Brothers’ War. Even far across the southern sea, the empires of Sarpadia are in decline, stressed to the breaking point by ecological devastation on a global scale. Resources are diminishing as temperatures drop, heralding the imminent arrival of a brutal ice age.
In the spring of ‘95, Magic was starting to get hot in middle school. I was given some insider information about a store that supposedly had a wider selection of Magic cards. They even sold individual cards, like the Revised Shivan Dragon I saw on the wall for the exorbitant sum of $25.
You're not alive if Melissa Benson's art doesn't make you feel something deep down.
I was soon able to get a few booster packs of Revised Edition and scrounge together enough lands through trades to actually build a deck. Those first experiences playing Magic after school in the math teacher’s classroom were the start of a thirty-year journey through the Multiverse. Countless car rides to and from tournaments and the “Chipotle Bracket” if we scrubbed out. “After hours” drafts at the shop running until 2am followed by late-night Perkins breakfast. Weekends at friends’ houses watching the Pro Tour. Star City Games commentary provided by Cedric Phillips and Patrick Chapin (the best duo to ever do it) was the soundtrack of my weekends grading math exams. Magic was a constant in my life through my 20's and 30's.
Fast-forward to March 2020 and my relationship to the game changed almost instantly. As frantically as I tried to hold onto the before-times, COVID-19 put a definitive end to Friday Night Magic at the local game store. Which, frankly, sucks. A lot. It’s a loss that I am still trying to process.
But I was gaining in so many other areas of my life. I proposed to my girlfriend the weekend before lock-down. We bought a house a few months later. We had a pandemic wedding in the fall of 2020 and a full reception in 2021. We welcomed a baby boy into our family in 2022. And then we sold our house and moved across town just last year. Adulting-by-choice has been working out very well for me!
But the fire…
(The land continues to burn after Obsidian Fireheart has left the battlefield.) This is the most poetic reminder text of all time.
The fire brings me to the Richard Garfield quote at the header of this post, a quote I snagged from his relatively recent Tolarian Community College interview.
Take control of your play experience.
I began a new project in 2022. I decided to build a physical copy of the Magic Online Vintage Cube.
You may be asking, "What is Vintage Cube?" One way to explain it might be... Cube is to Magic: the Gathering as fantasy football is to the NFL. In fantasy football, you shuffle all the teams together at the start of the season and draft a team of your own to play in a league with your friends. Cube is a lot like shuffling all the different types of decks together and drafting a new deck to play in a league with your friends.
The "vintage" in vintage cube suggests a lineage of power. "These are the 540 most powerful cards ever printed." But since you don't know which of those powerful cards you'll end up with, every cube draft is a unique experience. No two drafts are the same.
After a few successful cube drafts with my friends, I got to thinking, maybe I can do more. Instead of lamenting that I can't join the Gathering, maybe I can bring the Gathering to me!
I just want to play Magic with my friends. I want to play with my wife and hopefully someday with my son, if that's what he's interested in. I love collecting cards, but so many of my cards just sit around in binders and boxes. I should be using these cards more, building a library of Magic: The Gathering experiences that speak to the many ways to play the game.
Maybe this is how I take control of my play experience, and learn to have fun again.
The Juniper Order is a deep lore cut from the 1995 Ice Age stand-alone expansion, a group of humans who've essentially had it with the politics of Kjeldor and decide to go live in the Fyndhorn forests with the elves. Ice Age is the perfect source material for a gathering of magicians in the northland. The Juniper Order are the good guys doing their own thing for the betterment of their community. And the common juniper is a real world plant that is native to my home in Minnesota! 10/10 no notes.
Here's my first draft of a mission statement for the Juniper Order Library project.
Remove the barrier to entry. People who join my gathering should have no expectations or pressures of ever buying into an expensive hobby. I own cards because I want to own cards. I like having an extensive collection. For everyone else, their experience should be more or less like a board game.
Prioritize fun. Magic is fun! Encourage people to make the fun pick, not the “sweaty try-hard” pick. I hope the person who doesn’t really know what’s going on and goes 0-3 has a blast!
Recognize the three Magic psychographics. Timmy/Tammy seeks visceral opportunity. Johnny/Jenny seeks self-exploration. Spike seeks to improve their skills.
Recognize player aesthetics. Vorthos appreciates beauty through flavor representation. Mel appreciates beauty through mechanical components.
Recognize “Brian/Brianna.” I don’t know if anyone else has coined this persona already, I’m sure I’m not the first. But if I am, in honor of the Pro Tour Historian Brian David-Marshall, recognize that the history of the game is worthy of preservation.
Write about it! I am putting my money where my mouth is and taking control of my play experience! It’s time to start recording the journey.
Thanks for reading!