Do You Believe (I’m Interested) in Magic?

posted at 3:11 pm
on Jun. 8, 2006

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It’s a rainy summer day here in Vancouver, and looking out my window, it’s unlikely that my Ultimate game will be happening.

This leaves me with a dilemma.  I can go see X-Men 3, or I can play Magic.  (I didn’t say it was a BIG dilemma.  This is no Sophie’s Choice.  More like a “Do you want fries with that” sort of a choice.)

Magic is a card game that I’ve only recently gotten addicted to.  It’s so embarrassing.  Being addicted to Magic in 2006 is like being addicted to cocaine in 1997.  Magic, as a card game, is a little hard to explain.

Basically, you’re a wizard.  You have 20 health points, and a handful of spells.  You draw cards (i.e. spells) and cast them, and they become creatures or lightning bolts or magic swords.  Then you figure out how the spells interact, and ultimately, one wizard goes down and the other wizard goes home.

Games can last 15 minutes, or two hours.  If you have a good deck, it tends to beat a bad deck, but sometimes luck goes against you and you end up losing. Sometimes you get just the right combination of cards and then it’s like a grand slam home run and the other team just scuffs its feet and shakes its head.

(George, do you remember this awful sentence we copy edited once: “The girl walked by shaking her head.” Shows you the importance of commas, doesn’t it?)

There are 18,020,335,725 different cards, but they’re only 10 cents each, so it’s cheap to get started.  So far, my two friends (Rob and Clint told their two friends (me and Jason) and I told two friends (Shane and Ally) and it’s easy to see why the folks who invented the game now own most of the Pacific Islands.  Your our cards are belong to them.

My inner voice just told me that even he doesn’t get all the geeky pop culture references I keep making.  I’ll try to cut back, but it’s hard.  I haven’t been getting my daily dose of Daily Show, and the pop-culture gases just build up with no where to go…

So far, I’ve probably spent $60 on cards, and I’ve got enough to make me happy for quite some time.  I’ve just scratched the surface.  The people around me have already spent more like $100, and when I look into their eyes, they have little spinning cards instead of pupils.  Tap, untap, tap, untap, you can see them go ‘round and ‘round.

If you had to choose between X-Men or Magic, which would you do?

Update: I chose X-Men. But on the way over there, I drove by the Ultimate field, just in case.  You know, just to say I’d checked.  But my crazyass team, they were there!  In the rain!  I should have known better than to expect that Vancouverites would skip sports in the rain.  We ended up getting REALLY wet.

But we won!

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Keywords: allyson  •  card  •  clint  •  dilemma  •  jason  •  magic  •  rain  •  rob  •  shane  •  ultimate

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