MAGIC IS OVER (if you want it)
or,
GP Portland 2018 796th Place Tournament Report WRITTEN BY the Eudemonia GPT San Diego June 2015 Champion (You Can Just Be A Casual)
(cw: drugs, alcohol, suicide)
[PREFACE: To all non-Magic players, I promise to keep any very specific Magic parts of the story concise enough for you to not lose interest. I’ll do my best to explain the parts that are funny or worth mentioning for easier reading. I am trying to help your experience: trust me.
The few Magic card names and terms will be capitalized. Wins and losses are written as “Wins — Losses” like most sports. Each round is a Best of 3 games over 50 minutes. The Grand Prix tournaments are two-day, fifteen-round tournaments that eliminate you at 3 losses during the first day.
If you still want to learn more after reading, DM me on twitter (@ciswoman) or walk into your nearest game store and scream “what are fetchlands” and someone should help you.]
2014
“like a candle made of fat, melting away”
The first real Magic event I went to was a Journey into Nyx set Prerelease at a very bad game store filled with mostly bad people. The event was slated to start at 10am but started at 11:30am. I would not eat until 4pm that day (more on why later). I didn’t have fun.
At the end of the event, one of the store’s owners was talking to the player next to me. He said that the store needed payment for the player’s order for a Case of Journey into Nyx: aka 6 Booster Boxes aka 216 Booster Packs aka 3240 Magic: the Gathering cards for the price of $600 USD. In this moment, I knew for an indisputable fact that all Magic players are insane and I couldn’t wait to be one of them.
2018, Part 1: Love in the Time of Podcasts
“we are what we are, get in the goddamn car”
“The west coast gets fucked, man. If you wanna play Magic professionally, you basically have to commit to travelling, flying out every weekend. There’s no SCG events anymore, it sucks.”
“Yeah,” I replied. I think he expected me to be more caring. I counted my Sideboard in silence and arranged it in the order I like. He stared at the table, then picked up his phone and looked at the lock screen. There were no notifications. I did the same, but I opened my phone and almost immediately locked it. I pressed the lock button again seconds later to see nothing had changed.
I stood up. “Well, good luck in the next round,” I said.
He sternly replied, “There is no next round. It’s only 3 rounds this week.”
“Oh. Well, bye then.”
Most of my conversations at the store would go like this.
I walked home six blocks from the bar/game store where I was playing a weekly event. It was my first time playing paper Magic event in quite a while. I was recovering from a surgery I had two months earlier and was having a hard time getting out of the house, so I bought a deck I thought was cool to try and force myself to be social again by playing Magic. I would only go to the weekly events two more times. The returns on my investment.
It’s easy to justify purchases as investments when you are trying to make yourself feel better. Buying a $200 Modern deck wasn’t going to break me. I could always sell those cards later. The prices might even go up! Plus, I’m paying for an opportunity to socialize. Paying with the $200 deck. Paying with the entry fee and three and a half hours. Paying with the lack of sleep at work tomorrow because events always start so goddamn late for some reason.
Group chats contain some sort of mystical energy. The friends in mine who also play Magic like to go to the few big west coast tournaments to both compete and hang out in person again. I wish I could see these tournaments as only the latter.
I live in Seattle now, a short drive from the Grand Prix in Portland, December 2018. I met my friend, Marshall (pictured above), at the Seattle airport and drove down with him in a rental car. In the three hour drive down, he showed me multiple songs that I would have on repeat for the next three months. During the few quiet moments in the ride, I would glance down at my hands and wonder if the antidepressants that I had started in the past two weeks were working. My ruined nails and TMJ told me probably not.
Seeing everyone at the hotel the night before was great, but I couldn’t relax. I never can before big tournaments. They’re your opportunity to go from being just some local game shop rat, grinding away endlessly, to having your (mostly) unpaid work finally justified. To have it all be worth something. They also cost around $80 to enter usually, not including expenses surrounding it. Caring too much about things is my specialty, the money just makes it easier.
And when I care about something too much, the anxiety is just the first part. As the event gets closer, then comes the lack of appetite. Then after that comes the full inability to consume anything other than Clif bars, caffeine, and water if I’m lucky. And after that everything just starts to meld together.
In an effort to prove my authenticity as gamer, here is a picture of one of the cards I played. I picked the one with my favorite art. You can figure out the other 74:
I wasn’t playing the best deck at the time. I couldn’t afford to pay money for anything else, so I invested a large part of my psyche into telling myself that I was playing this deck because it was meant for me. It was *my deck*. There are no other options once you get to this point.
The convention hall was cold. It was 9am on a December saturday. I wore my pleather jacket with pins (for flagging purposes) and a black bandana, looking like a bootleg poker player. I had given up at dressing well at this point in my life. I would still probably put myself in the top 10% well-dressed people there. Little self assigned victories.
ROUND 1
We played in silence. I love “table talking” with my opponents, but it is almost universally detested by competitive players. They say it gives up too much information.
I took seven mulligans in a bad matchup against an opponent that was clearly much worse than me. I don’t know what I expected honestly.
It happens.
Okay.
1–2
ROUND 2 (The Devil’s Round)
My opponent this round was also very bad, but at least he was nice. In a move so unfathomably submissive that left me in pure shock, he complimented me the entire time that I was comboing off and killing him both games. I wondered if he was trying to fuck me. You have to stay on your guard about that type of thing when you’re a girl with dumb hobbies. I screwed up and got issued a Game Rules Violation by a judge. I’m pretty sure my opponent still said a nice thing afterwards.
2–0
ROUND 3
Game 1, my opponent tried to Surgical Extraction the Gifts Ungiven in my graveyard and I responded by casting Gifts and assembling the combo that would kill them on the following turn. My opponent conceded shortly after. I thought about messaging the group “that’s what u get when you play surgical mainboard, geeeeeeeet fuuuuuuuuucked” after the match if I won. I’m almost certain I did.
Between games 1 and 2, I remember focusing really intently on the game happening next to me, so much so that the world around me disappeared. I got scared when I remembered that I needed to be focusing on what I was doing, what my opponent could be doing, the branching web of possibilities for what could happen. But I couldn’t.
I couldn’t remember what I was thinking seconds ago, each grasp at a thread of memory seeming further away than the last. I started panicking thinking about what would happen if I couldn’t calm down for the remainder of the match, the tournament, or the coming year of 2019. I thought about killing myself by taking the entire bottle of the leftover oxycodone I had from surgery at home so I wouldn’t have to feel this way anymore. I don’t remember anything else.
2–0
ROUND 4
I still don’t remember anything else.
After the round, I walked over to the food court to see their available food options that I could eat. A veggie burger and fries for $14. Wow. I drank water and choked down a Clif bar in a bathroom stall in the empty women’s restroom, the Magic grinder diet.
I walked outside and saw people smoking. I went to a convenience store and bought a pack of cigarettes for $10 in a desperate attempt to pull myself out of whatever I was in, because I thought I remembered that people sometimes smoke to calm themselves down. I smoked half a cigarette. I threw the rest away.
2–1
ROUND 5 (Five of Cups, Reversed)
Sometimes I feel like Internet Queers can echolocate. So much of our time is spent trying to obscure and highlight the parts of ourselves that we want, it only makes sense that we would develop such a language. All of this to say, as soon as I sat down, I knew that there were definitely two trans women in my immediate vicinity. We’re like bloodhounds with this shit, like a child who can find Waldo on any page so quickly that you immediately think “Oh, this kid definitely did this one already.”
But I had never seen either of these women before. The voice of the woman next to me passed so well that even I was unsure of my own abilities. They were both sitting at the same table as me, so I knew we had the same win-loss records. I did a silent prayer for The Matron of Homosexual Reparations to give all of us wins in my head while shuffling up in game 1.
I played probably the worst that I’ve ever played in my life (at least Top 5, for sure) and lost. After the match, in the first ever instance of someone recognizing me in real life for my shitposting prowess, the woman next to me said, “You’re Cera, right? I’m pretty sure I follow you on twitter!”
The internet is fucking weird.
1–2
ROUND 6
In another challenge to my echolocation, I’m almost certain I was paired against a trans man. I’m still not sure to this day. I can’t always be right.
I beat him in close matches in some embarrassing ways. He was visibly and audibly upset during the last match. He very reluctantly shook my hand at the end, and I didn’t know what to say afterward. I thought “It’s very cool that he’s expressing his masculinity!” and hoped my read was correct. Otherwise the masculinity would have sucked. Maybe it just sucked anyways.
2–1
ROUND 7 (Nine of Swords)
When you’re playing with an X-2 record in Day 1, the next loss means that all of the time spent stressing and not eating and slowly decaying was for nothing, not a single cent. In other words, my anxiety had only continued to ratchet up as the day went on.
At the same time, I didn’t have any energy to be jittery and miserable. All I could be was tired. If I won, I still had two more rounds of this. And then another day. And if I did well enough at that, another bigger tournament where I would almost certainly be more stressed. Always another thing on the horizon. I don’t know why I wanted this, but I wanted it more than anything. I had been wanting it more than anything since I started playing in 2013.
This was one of my worst matchups for my deck and my opponent knew it. He looked relaxed and I looked like I would rather be anywhere else. I lost game 1 and played as well as I possibly could in game 2, agonizing over every decision. I think my opponent had resigned himself to the fact he was going to win and let me take way too long for each turn. I combo’d off and won game 2 and he complimented me on my play. I didn’t care. I didn’t give a shit that I was playing well. I knew I was going to more than likely lose the next game. I mulliganed to 5 and he drew the perfect card every turn and it was still somehow close. But I lost. I played the tightest that I ever had before and lost.
1–2, drop
END OF TOURNAMENT, FINAL RECORD: 4–3
Later that night, we all went to a vegan bar because I begged everyone to. They ate their veggie sandwiches and chips without complaining. I drank an alcoholic iced tea out of a 32oz mason jar by myself and sent this picture to my boyfriend.
On the street outside, I recognized a woman who I’ve followed on Tumblr and Instagram since 2011 walking by. I thought about saying something like the woman next to me had earlier but overthought it too long and assumed it would’ve been weird (an assessment I maintain to this day).
Plus, she had just finished taking a huge rip from her Juul and it would’ve been bad form.
We went back to the hotel drunk and all smoked a joint on the hotel balcony. It was my first time being faded in a while. I played the song “witchblades” by Lil Tracy and the late Lil Peep from my phone at max volume and screamed the line “WHEN I DIE BURY ME WITH ALL MY ICE ON” too loud for a hotel at 12am.
I don’t own any ice. This would not be the last time I screamed that line.
2015: Sometimes There, Always Not
“we were young when we first got it in our heads that moving that far north is not moving very far at all”
I don’t know where I get my daydreams of grandeur from. They’re always changing. Sometimes it’s being a successful yet modest touring musician who has a steady enough income to keep churning out records that get ~7.3/10 on respectable websites. Other times it’s selling everything I own, snapping my phone in half, and buying a farm somewhere in the Midwest. For a while after watching Indie Game: the Movie, it was starting a game studio where I was my own personal Hideo Kojima that produced the best games that people loved but still didn’t understand, all by myself to prove that I don’t need anyone’s help. I don’t know, dude.
But of all these, the Professional Magic Player dreams were the most insidious. The dreams that tap into the part of my brain that are full of capitalist overgrowth. The rot that whispers to you, “This could be your life, you just aren’t giving enough of yourself.” That creeps in and tells you every single one of the activities you do for fun could be what you do to make sure that you don’t starve and die.
Once this idea plants its roots in you, it’s hard to rip it out. When all your friends have a similar drive to go to tournaments each weekend, the idea of giving up your competitive dreams feels like self-imposed exile. Every time you hang out with your friends outside of Magic events, the conversations always circle back to the same topic. You can’t just leave.
I lived in Berkeley in 2015 after I graduated college there in May. I had a lot of free time while I was applying to my first post-college “career” job. I had a car. I had some graduation money. My boyfriend was away for the summer at an internship. I was depressed. I was obsessed with Magic more than anything else in the world.
I would be at my favorite game store five days of the week, maybe six or seven depending on what events were happening. Every weekend was going to some random acronym event: GPTs, PPTQs, 2Ks, GPs. Carpooling with people I didn’t like very much to events, only talking about Magic. Seeing the same faces over and over, referring to them only by what decks they were playing, how good my matchup against them was. It was exhausting. I lost a lot. I think I enjoyed some of it.
The only real first place victory I have to talk about this time was me winning a Grand Prix Trial where I played awful for the majority of it. My friend and I intentionally drew in round three because we were both hungry and wanted to get food. We walked two blocks to one of my favorite pizza places and ate an entire pizza between us and drank a few beers. I played the last two rounds before the Top 8 slightly more than tipsy, and I won very easily. I considered this a testament to my skill.
The Top 8 took place in the quieter back part of the store, near the storeroom. When working at this game shop later in the year, I would use that storeroom to have a conversation on the verge of tears with my coworker about how I was a weird queer. This was only the first in a long series of awkward conversations about this fact that I (likely) have to take part in at every job I work for the rest of my life, whether I want to or not. He did not care.
Most of my wins in the Top 8 were due to my opponents making obvious mistakes or having to take a lot of mulligans. I was lucky. I was still happy. I won $80 store credit which I used to play more Magic and two Byes for Grand Prix San Diego 2015, where I spent around $400 to also finish with a 4–3 record.
I consider 2015 to be one of the top three worst years of my life. I didn’t get a job until December. I was stuck in a feedback loop of depression and dependence. These weren’t Magic’s fault. It was just the enabler. It thrives on its ability to enable.
201X: The Year that Magic Broke My Heart
“if destruction be our lot, we ourselves must be its author and finisher”
Magic is the most meticulously designed gacha that you will ever play. I’ve seen people complain about the gachapon-esque mechanics of the new online Magic the Gathering: Arena and how they can be fueling players’ bad behaviors. That’s almost certainly true, but like… have you seen the rest of the game? The game that has its own stock market? One able to be manipulated so badly that the company that makes the game had to step in and establish the equivalent of a golden standard in their Reserved List? The one that has a digital version of this same game that you don’t even have to leave your home or interact with people face-to-face to play? Having their own digital economy where they set all the prices and no one can resell their product? This is their meticulously engineered dream. They will not give it up willingly.
If Arena had existed on phones in 2015, I would have been ruined. Any spare money I had, as well as any money I didn’t have on my line of credit, was already going towards Magic to try and enjoy something. Every time I had to swipe my card for an event’s entry fee or hit “Confirm Purchase” on a cart full of card singles, I had a brief moment to talk myself down. I only succeeded in doing so around 30% of the time. If there was a program that had my payment information saved where I buy invisible currency that can only be redeemed to play Magic at any time, anywhere I had cell service, I would have rarely stopped. I might have even tried to play while driving to see my boyfriend (only in traffic though, don’t worry).
Magic is a game where you can battle your disposable income and spare time against another human being and see who comes out on top. A smaller battlefield for the same fight you can have with others in your everyday life. You will mostly lose. Losing is all part of their system.
Wherever a system exists, there will be people there to exploit it. Magic Pro teams will recruit scouts to monitor other players during big tournaments and compile this data to a document that only their players can see. People will manipulate cards’ availability to resell them at higher values. Stores will have reprehensible payouts to players. People will take your time and labor and convince you that you deserve less for your performance.
If you accepted the system and the rules going in, why were you surprised when you lost according to those rules? You should theoretically have as much time and information available to you as everyone else, so why didn’t you just win? Why did you let this happen to you?
Magic is a continual cycle of having your heart broken, thinking that the next time will be different because you’re more knowledgeable now, and repeating, trying to stay on the carousel as much as you can handle. Ask people who have played competitive Magic. They can almost always say a sentence similar to “I started playing during Fifth Edition, stopped after Mirrodin, started playing again in Zendikar.” Just the set names and dates change.
It’s hard to stay away. Especially when its become most of your life. Especially competitive Magic. The majority of articles written about Magic are purely about how to “improve your game.” Once you switch your frame of thinking into pure “card evaluation for competitive play” mode, it’s hard to switch off. The idea of multiplayer games of other Magic formats don’t interest me. I think being competitive in so many games over the years has broken parts of my brain. A relic of the things I’ve tried to renounce.
But if you still want to throw yourself into the woodchipper after all of this, the only question that remains is how much you’re willing to pay. Cards aren’t free. Tournament entry isn’t free. Nothing is.
How much time are you willing to sink? How much money are you willing to burn? How deep can you swim in the ocean that has no bottom?
You will find out your own answer very quickly.
I would pay $15 to fail a draft. I would pay $30 to fail a small event. I would pay $80 to fail by 4–3 dropping a Grand Prix. I would pay $160 plus lodging and airfare to fail. I would pay a thousand micro-transactions to fail a thousand times. I would scream in my new freezing cold apartment in a city where I had no job or friends and berate my invisible Magic: the Gathering Online opponent who has no idea how desperately I wanted to succeed, to only seconds later hit F2 to begin my turn and silently continue failing.
In my worst moments, I would pay any amount of money I had to keep shoveling drugs, alcohol, and cards onto the furnace in my chest to destroy my own arbitrary promises and moral compass because I wanted to fail so badly.
I didn’t want to win anymore. I didn’t want to shake the hands of angry opponents whose dreams were similar to mine I had just crushed. I didn’t know why I cared about that so much when other people could brush it off, but I couldn’t stop anymore. I just wanted to be done, free. I wanted the ability to sit in a room alone with myself and think “at least I tried, goddamnit,” and be okay with it. I would wait for each successive failure to give that to me, but it would never come.
2018, Part 2: Kintsugi
“searching for something familiar, do i misremember the past?”
On the second day of the tournament, I slept in. One of my hotel suitemates changed to an earlier flight to go home and take care of some personal responsibilities. I had the room to myself. I did my post-surgery physical therapy and watched trashy TV. I ate food like a normal person. I walked over to the convention center for the last time.
I was mainly just waiting for Marshall to finish the tournament so we could drive back to my place. I had enough time to do a side event Draft while I waited. I paid $15 to enter and drafted about $15 worth of cards, so I was somewhat relieved. The real thing I cared about was this:
This is the one of the best Draft decks I’ve ever had. I drafted well and was rewarded every step of the way. I helped some young kids at the next table with draft advice after they lost and asked me what they should do differently between rounds. I went undefeated and my final round opponent and I talked the whole match. He was refreshingly friendly and slightly cute. I used the Prize Tickets they award you to get a fancy limited edition 1 Card Booster, where I opened a $120 card and immediately sold it. The coolest $120 I’ve ever made. Marshall finished the final round of the main event and won $200.
“God, why did I even enter the main event if we ended with similar payouts?” I asked.
“I mean, there was no guarantee you were gonna open a card worth money,” he replied.
“Better lucky than good.”
I’ve fallen into a groove in the relative pit that is my time spent with Magic. I don’t really feel the need to strive for greatness in it anymore. It was always just another little capitalism I held close to distract me from the terror of the larger capitalism, which is fine. Some obsessions are okay, just another lens for your story to be shot through.
The story of trying to carve out a space where I can build myself into the world. A role of specific knowledge. A laborer of comfortable obscurity. The person at the Street Fighter 4 machine in a local arcade in 2009 that you overheard children say must be cheating, who would not last one second at EVO. The connoisseur who gently nudges you toward something they’ve intuited you’d like. The friend who has compiled the hidden locations of all of the best food in their neighborhood for you alone. A mixtape prodigy. The translator of the secret language.
On the drive home Marshall and I screamed along to our favorite songs. We got burritos at my favorite Mexican place in Seattle.
“These aren’t *quite* as good as the ones in California,” he said.
“Yeah.”
lyrics cited in order of usage:
“tiffany sucks” by summer vacation
“slow west vultures” by the mountain goats
“new years eve” by glocca morra
“a more perfect union” by titus andronicus
“revive” by crying
