How I got into Magic

As a kid, I idolized David Copperfield.  No, that's not right.  As a kid, I read David Copperfield.  The second one is actually true.  But neither of these have to do with Magic and how I started.

Magician doing Magic Things

Magic is a card game.  I had seen the infamous buttcrack photo album (kind of sfw).  I had heard about people playing the game and derisively called them nerds.  I thought it was D&D for the unimaginative (because D&D is for creative thinkers NOT nerds).

Then my niece Katy pulled out some cards to show to Noah.  And they played a game while I talked to my sister.  She knew Noah played Pathfinder (same game as D&D but cooler) and thought he might like Magic.  He had fun playing, picked it up pretty quickly and seemed interested.  He has a friend on the swim team who plays so I thought, "Hmm, I'll go to a game store and grab him a deck."

The very friendly owner of Gamescape North showed me some pre-built decks, asked about Noah's personality and based on his persona in Pathfinder, we decided he'd like a red deck.  The red deck was built around aggressive attacks; Noah's Pathfinder characters were all about power level and going for the kill.  Seemed a good fit.

Then he hit on some magic words when explaining the game to me.  He said, and I quote (as indicated by quotation marks), "it's all about probabilities."  You build a deck and make game decisions based on the probability of drawing certain cards.  In game, you can make choices to affect those probabilities (extra card draw, searching, et cetera) while during deckbuilding you make choices to make those in game choices easier (playing multiples of certain cards, land-to-spell ratio, mana curves, et cetera).  Turns out Magic is a great big math equation.

So I started building decks for Noah.  He stayed a step ahead of me on the strategy aspects, I stayed a step ahead of him on the mathy parts.  What we share is an addiction to hobbies so we spent a lot of time figuring out how to play and how to get better.

About 2 years later, we have dozens of home brewed decks, 5 modified Tier 1 decks, many tournaments played, quadrillions of kitchen table battles, so many cards that we have to give some away, and even a habit of watching other people play Magic on twitch.tv.  It's not David Copperfield but we do have Great Expectations*.

But it all started when my niece recognized us as nerds and then when I learned that it's not actually a game for nerds but a game for geeks....I was hooked.

* if you like incredible jokes like this one, you might want to bookmark this blog!