Casual Magicking

May 26, 2021

experience – noun : an event or occurrence that leaves an impression on someone

You see it rather frequently: a new player posts on a Magic-related subreddit announcing they’ve recently discovered Magic and are looking for suggestions on what to buy next. Inevitably there are numerous variations of this same reply: “don’t waste your money on packs – buy singles.”

Really?

Why would anyone suggest a new player with an extremely limited understanding of the game or its cards skip boosters in favor of singles? They won’t know what to buy. It’s not as if a person who likes green creatures is choosing from a couple different options. There are thousands of choices spanning more than two decades of sets, and some of those green creatures come with price tags a new player won’t understand or be willing to pay.

I could be wrong about this, but I sincerely don’t think I am: the majority of people who got into Magic, maybe even the vast majority, did so through buying packs, building weak, unfocused decks, and expanding their knowledge of the game over time. Perhaps you have a story about that one guy who played his buddy’s Modern deck, fell in love with the game, and immediately started buying singles to make a similar deck. Or maybe you know someone who bought a bundle and made a deck from it, played it enough to get hooked, and immediately understood that packs are a colossal waste and started buying up specific cards they researched or friends told them to get.

Those sorts of stories surely exist, and might be cute anecdotes. But I don’t believe for a second that they’re representative of even 5% of the people who regularly play Magic. Because that’s just not how most people pick up the game. As an older guy who’s watching his son slowly get more and more into Magic, I can say with 100% surety that it’s packs that are fueling his interest. For the first 18 months he played Magic he’d happily open a bundle or a prelease kit, assemble a basic deck from it, and play a few games with me. And then those cards would languish unused on the kitchen table until I made him move them. I couldn’t get him to sit back down and play more games with me.

That is, until a new set would release. I’d give him a prerelease kit of that set and he’d be totally into Magic for a few hours, and jabber about it ceaselessly for a while after the games ended. The next day, Magic occupied the same brainspace as cleaning the cat litter.

I didn’t get it – the kid likes games of all sorts, loves fantasy, and has been collecting Pokemon cards for years. Why was his interest in Magic so fleeting? I wondered if I needed to stop trying to encourage him to play and just accept that his interests lay elsewhere.

A few months ago I decided to try one final time to see if Magic could stick with him. And I did that with…(what else)…packs.

First it was a Kaldheim prerelease kit. He liked the new cards, seemed to like the set, and genuinely seemed to enjoy the games we played. And within a few days, all interest seemed extinguished – as had happened multiple times before. So I made him an offer: build a new deck from his full collection, play some more Magic with me, and we’d open some Kaldheim Set and Collector boosters as “prize packs.” He claimed interest, and then for over a week repeatedly told me he’d build his new deck “soon” when I asked how the process was going. Out of desperation, I tore the plastic wrap off the Collector box, took a couple packs out, and set them, and a couple Set boosters, on the kitchen table next to where he eats.

That evening his new deck was built.

The Power of Packs™.

His first Kaldheim Collector booster coughed up an extended art Goldspan Dragon, and he was hooked. We’ve played at least once a week ever since. Sometimes the prize packs are draft boosters from older sets, sometimes they’re Set boosters, and sometimes, as they were for several weeks as I built up his interest, they’re Collector boosters. About a month ago these were Collector packs from Strixhaven. The kid got an etched Approach of the Second Sun, extended art Quandrix dean, foil copy of the only mythic lesson in STX, and a foil Japanese Mystical Archive Opt. He was thrilled.

I hear it already. “That’s the best stuff from his Collector booster? What a waste of money.” If that’s how you see it, fine.

But maybe…and hear me out here…maybe packs don’t have to be purely financial investments with returns measured strictly in expected value. Maybe – as stated above – opening a pack gets to be an experience. The kid doesn’t know what the financial value of the cards he opened is. He was stoked to get cool cards with cool and/or shiny art. We opened STX Set boosters last night as well, and his contained a borderless Rowan, Scholar of Sparks/Will, Scholar of Frost in addition to the regular rare. The kid is quite stoic and unemotional overall, but his eyes got big when he saw it. I’ll surely forget that moment someday in the future, but for now that gets to be a cool memory that I’ll treasure for as long as I can picture it.

And for what it’s worth, my STX Collector booster had a Japanese etched Tainted Pact, extended art Octavia, Living Thesis, and my own copy of the borderless Rowan/Will. You pays your money and you takes your chances.

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So maybe you’re thinking all of the above is fine for a new player. Let them wallow in naive ignorance for awhile, until they wise up and realize what a scam packs really are. Let’s instead consider someone like me – a veteran of the game with a sizeable collection. Why would I blow my money on packs when I can just buy the singles I want?

Before I get into that, I want to point out that when I play with my son, I use a small portion of my overall collection – just what I’ve opened since Christmas. We’ve each built 5 or so decks since February, and the kid is working with his entire collection – 3-4 times as many cards as I am. As we open packs, some of the cards we find trickle out into our decks, or (at least in my case) start building the foundation of decks I want to assemble but aren’t yet fully formed.

A-ha! Perfect time to just buy singles, right? I’d love a few more good cards for a Prismari deck, and there’s no way to know if I’ll ever open them in boosters. Why not just buy the singles?

To which I will answer with my first point about why opening packs is fine and fun:

• Everyone comes at the game from their own direction. Me – I’m starting to love building up a new pseudo-collection to work from. I’m brewing with what I open, just like I did in my earliest days of Magic. Every pack I crack could be new pieces to puzzles I’m piecing together, or the impetus that sparks a new deck idea. If that’s not you – if instead you’re looking to build a new deck for Modern, or optimize a favorite Commander deck – then packs are obviously the wrong way to go about that. So you do you and I’ll do me, and neither of us needs to judge the other or sneer at how the either of us chooses to engage with the game.

Another reason boosters can be a fun experience:

• You just never know what might happen. And for many people, that’s part of the fun. I splurged on a box of Commander Legends collector boosters last December. I have no clue what the financial value of those packs would come to, but I got a ton of cool cards that I’d never have bought as singles. As awesome as an extended art Mana Drain is, I’m a lot happier to have pulled it from a pack than spent $80+ for it. Honestly, I’d have spent the rest of my life without a Mana Drain had I not opened one in a pack. But I did open one, and it’ll surely find a home in a deck at some point.

If you go to a casino, do you scoff at people pumping quarters (or more) into slot machines, as you sit down to play a game that involves some skill like blackjack or poker? Do you scoff at the very idea of setting foot in a casino in the first place? Fair enough.

Opening a booster is a gamble. And just as in Vegas, the house usually wins. I’m not much for gambling, but I’ve played some slots when my wife wants to go to the casino, and had fun doing it. We rarely walk away richer than we arrived, but it’s an afternoon together – an experience we share that occasionally even rewards us with a free dinner that evening.

As a casual Magic player who doesn’t need or want to optimize anything I play, a pack with a 30-cent rare is not a total waste. A disappointment? Probably. But I may still have uses for it, or some of the other cards in the pack. Maybe I’ll even be inspired to try and make some janky rare work. One of my all-time favorite decks was built because I opened a couple copies of Hibernation’s End and wondered if I could build a deck around it.

If you’re different – if you have no interest or use for the majority of a set’s cards, or don’t find any joy in rolling the dice (or pulling a lever), then packs aren’t for you. That’s fine. But don’t talk to others like your choice is better or more sensible than theirs.

Cracking packs is a legitimate, and exceptionally popular, way to engage with Magic. Wizards of the Coast has always known this, and has recently built products specifically designed for the millions of players who like to do it. Scoff if you will, rant if you must, but all those singles you’re buying exist because someone, somewhere, opened a pack. And odds are, they didn’t do it while drafting.

May 13, 2021

iniquitous – adjective : grossly unfair and morally wrong

“Just buy singles.”

“Cracking packs is a waste of money.”

“Boosters are for draft.”

“Standard booster boxes are worthless.”

*Sigh*

I get it. Really, I do. Boosters aren’t for everyone. Oodles of players would prefer to spend their cash on singles. Fair enough. But must so many people scoff at or try to shame players who enjoy cracking packs?

Today (and next time, and probably the time after that, since this topic got away from me) I’m going to defend the simple act of opening a booster pack “for fun.”

And why not start there – fun. I want to establish, up front, that (almost) all of us are perfectly happy to pay for experiences. Going to a movie, eating at a favorite restaurant, traveling on vacation – these are things many of us enjoy that have few, if any, tangible benefits. We pay for them because we hope to enjoy the experience, and perhaps retain some happy memories.

And of course your own preferences dictate what experiences you’re interested in and what you’re willing to pay for them. My mother thought anything more than $5 for a movie ticket was unacceptable extortion, even if that purchase might have made her children happy for a few hours. My father simply hates the entire theater experience and has refused to go to the movies for decades, but he gladly pays hundreds of dollars to sponsor jazz bands he likes to ensure they can play for an hour at a party or festival he’s attending. Those are both valid stances, and despite not agreeing with or understanding them, I take no issue with them.

Your time and your money is your business – spend it how you like.

To circle back to Magic: opening a booster pack is an experience.

Perhaps you don’t enjoy it, but millions of people do.

Perhaps you aren’t willing to spend money to do it, but millions of people are.

What irritates me is what feels like judgment from those who see cracking packs as wasteful or pointless towards the people who think it’s fun and worthwhile. Is it really so awful to imagine people enjoying things you don’t?

You can call opening a booster gambling – many people do – and I won’t argue the point. I think it’s a form of gambling the vast majority of players can (and do) engage in responsibly, and I’d much rather spend $4 on a booster pack than pump 16 quarters into a slot machine that might eat every one and pay out nothing or shower me in a colorful, noisy jackpot. But the latter is an experience many people enjoy regardless of outcome.

I’ve even seen people vociferously argue that packs are unethical loot boxes that are exploitative and predatory. If you’re honestly of that opinion, I’m baffled by your willingness to engage with a game so fundamentally built on something you find so unconscionable. Like them or not, packs are where the vast, vast majority of Magic cards come from. Even if you aren’t buying them, someone is, and the singles you buy on the secondary market are still part of the Magic ecosystem. If you want to argue the whole booster pack concept is irreparably flawed, then those singles you’re buying are not unlike blood diamonds.

But hey…most of us see the booster as, at worst, a necessary evil to keep Magic thriving.

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I enjoy much of Tolarion Community College‘s content, and The Professor is a gift to the Magic community. But I disagree with him about the purpose or role of booster packs. Before Set and Collector boosters, Prof often repeated the mantra “packs are for draft.” And make no mistake – he saw draft boosters as serving one single purpose: limited play (draft or sealed deck.) And hey – it’s right in the name of the pack, put there by Wizards themselves – “Draft Booster.” Of course that’s all they’re for.

Prof’s reviews of Set and Collector boosters are, fundamentally if not completely, reviews of the financial value to be gained from opening those packs, and therefore his reviews of those products are almost universally negative. He sees little or no financial reason to open packs, and stresses to people that they shouldn’t do it for essentially that reason alone. He’s even begun to make videos advising people not to buy packs from recent sets, but to instead buy specific singles from those sets (as if Magic players are a monolith who all want to own and play with the same cards.)

I’m honestly puzzled by how strongly Prof seems to cling to this narrow view of what packs are (or can be) for. If you just have fun opening a pack, or a bundle, or a booster box…is there not value in that experience? And is it not up to the individual to decide what price they’re willing to pay for that experience (and, you know…whatever cards they open?)

Lets’ be honest: the creation of Set and Collector boosters was tacit acknowledgement by Wizards of what they, and many other Magic aficionados, have long understood: huge numbers of players like cracking packs. Many people don’t draft but want new cards, and even those who do draft still like ripping open a pack (or 36) on occasion…as an experience.

Tell me: how does a player get cards if they aren’t opening packs?

“Singles, you moron.”

Ah, so simple an answer. Let’s complicate it.

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Next time: this moron complicates something simple.

April 22, 2021

bife com parmesão – noun : Parmesan center cut steak; better than pineapple (or any other fruit)

Do you eat at your favorite restaurant because they have that one meal that’s just…so…good, and you get that same amazing dish at every visit?

Or do you adore your favorite restaurant because everything you’ve tried there has been exceptional, and you love knowing that whatever you feel like eating will be great?

My favorite restaurant is Rodizio Gill, a Brazilian steakhouse. It’s one of those places that offers a colon-demolishing variety all-you-can-eat meats brought to you table-side by costumed “gauchos.”

I should probably be ashamed to adore meat as much as I do, especially in 2021, when the environmental toll of meat production is becoming clearer and more alarming. Sadly, I’ve been a “meat and potatoes, hold the potatoes” guy since I was little. Though I eat less meat, especially red meat, than when I was younger, I doubt I’ll ever be able to shake the preference. I would be miserable as a vegetarian, considering I dislike almost all fruit and nuts, am pretty ambivalent about bread, and enjoy a rather limited selection of vegetables. I’m probably pickier about food than the average toddler. My family made a perpetual point of reinforcing in me the fact that if I didn’t like a particular food, it was a serious character flaw. My mother never tired of complaining about how my tastes (literally) were a burden on her and the rest of the family.

Yeah, I’ve got some serious food issues.

But this column isn’t about my bizarrely narrow palette or growing sense of guilt over my carnivorous cravings. It’s about how I view Strixhaven as the Brazilian steakhouse of Magic sets. Let’s talk about that, shall we?

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My wife enjoys Rodizio largely because of one delicacy they serve (and it’s not even meat!) – abacaxí, menu-speak for their grilled pineapple. My son also loves it, but he eats a lot of the sausage and seems to like the various cuts of steak we prod him into trying.

Me? I like it all. Well, except for the abacaxí (use up precious stomach capacity on fruit? Are you serious?) Oh, and coração de frango temperado – chicken hearts. I just can’t bring myself to partake. I gladly eat the rest of the meats, though. Some are better than others, but there’s no single item that I load up on.

So far, Strixhaven feels like a Brazilian steakhouse – it all seems delightful. Obviously it’s very, very early, considering the prerelease weekend just wrapped. But I’ve watched streamers drafting, played with a Lorehold prerelease kit against my son’s Quandrix kit, opened a few draft and set boosters, built a Witherbloom deck from my limited packs, and squared off against some early Strixhaven-inspired builds in Arena. I’ve started tinkering with my first STX-based constructed deck, a Quandrix fractal concoction that isn’t working often, but is a hoot when it does. Perhaps I’ll expound on it in the near future.

While Witherbloom go-wide pest token builds have been a bit frustrating to push through, and appear to be – far and away – the most popular early build, nothing yet feels overpowered or obnoxious. There are assuredly some cards or strategies that will prove wearyingly ubiquitous, but I suspect there’s a lot of fun to be had with the set that will further blossom with the fall Standard rotation.

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Prismari is the only college for which I’ve seen scant representation (though it looks intriguing.) I’ve yet to see anyone play it’s namesake elder dragon, despite early predictions that it would be the most powerful – and perhaps the only one with possible Standard meta aspirations. Other than Efreet Flamepainter, which has slotted into some of the spellslinger decks I’ve faced, Prismari looks like an early bust. Aggro gameplans in mono-red, mono-white, Lorehold, and Silverquill have all beat me embarrassingly fast. I do worry that my predilection for slower midrange decks will leave me irritated with what looks like a much faster meta so far. But nothing looks busted, and if I can find something wonky with a 30-40% winrate, I’ll likely consider that worthy of my Arena screen time.

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The only possible abacaxí I’m seeing so far are Lesson cards. Learn/Lesson looks great for limited play, but I’m not convinced I’ll make much (any?) use of it in constructed. So of course my prerelease kit packs were very generous with the Lessons – 4 of my kit’s packs had rares in the Lesson slot, and the 5th had the only mythic Lesson in Strixhaven (I don’t believe the college-themed booster had a Lesson slot.) One of my two prize packs also had a rare Lesson. Six of the first seven STX draft packs I opened had rare/mythic Lessons. I shouldn’t complain about the extra rares, of course, and as cards they all seem…fine. But none of the Learn/Lesson cards I’ve seen beckon me to brew with them. Some people will surely enjoy them for constructed use, just as some (deluded) people would rather fill up on cheap and smushy pineapple instead of exquisitely grilled tenderloin or sweet and spicy chicken.

But hey – everyone should of course eat what they like. Based on my absurd preferences, I’m not one to shame someone for liking (*shudder*) fruit.

To quote the always amusing Tad Allagash: “Taste…is a matter of taste.”

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Next time: Quandrix deck tech? Strixhaven Collector booster reveals? A complete retraction of this entire post once I discover I actually hate all the new Strixhaven-inspired strategies?

April 12, 2021

limit – noun : the value that a function (or sequence) “approaches” as the input (or index) “approaches” some value; or, the sort of thing that made me hate math

Mark Rosewater, head designer for Magic, has often espoused the notion that “limits breed creativity.” I’m not sure who originally came up with the concept, but that person never tried to build multiple cohesive Magic decks using about 30 boosters worth of cards.

As last year came to a close, and with my son showing minimal interest in Magic, I grew weary of the growing stacks of cards building up on my desk. I’d made the decision at the beginning of 2020 to keep any packs I opened during the year separate from my established collection. This was partially to help me track what I opened throughout the year, and partially to use as a sub-collection from which to build low-power decks to play against the kid, who had a pitifully small collection of his own.

Except the entire year passed and not once did we ever build actual constructed-style decks to play against each other. The kid would build a sealed deck from a prerelease kit or a bundle, but after a handful of games he had zero interest in doing anything more with those cards.

Money will spent!

Convinced constructed Magic with the kid was wishful thinking, and tired of so many purposeless cards on my desk that hadn’t been catalogued or sorted, I trashed the “mini-collection” experiment. All of last year’s acquisitions were added to my online collection tracker, and then dutifully filed into my set binders. I kept only six packs worth of Modern Horizons cards separate, as I had no binder to put them in.

At last – my desk was clean (that’s a lie, it was still a mess, but not because of Magic cards), my collection was largely in order, and I could get back to playing with digital cards on Arena and dreaming of one day having a use for paper cards.

Both the kid and I got Ikoria bundles and Zendikar Rising gift bundles for Christmas, and in January we opened them to do what we did a handful of times in 2020 – make sealed decks. Per tradition, these new decks got minimal play. As the Kaldheim release approached, I decided I would not be buying prerelease kits for it. No more. If the kid couldn’t be bothered to spend more than an hour with $30 worth of cards, I wasn’t going to buy Kaldheim prerelease kits.

I bought Kaldheim prerelease kits.

(FOMO is a cruel bitch.)

The kid seemed to like the cards in Kaldheim, and we did our usual handful of sealed deck battles, and that looked to be the end of it – just like all the previous times. But as recounted in my previous post, I decided to push the kid to build two decks from his entire collection. And though it took far, far too long for him to do that, he did begrudgingly give in to my obnoxious badgering and do it.

He doesn’t have a ton of cards, but he’s gotten prerelease kits for every set since at least War of the Spark, and a few bundles over the past few years. And we’ve built a few sealed decks from my stash of older packs. I imagine he’s working from ~100 boosters from various sets.

He cobbled together two initial decks, one of which is a pretty potent Gruul creature deck with two Questing Beasts, Robber of the Rich, Shifting Ceratops, and at the top end…his Ugin (that I let him have from our Core Set 2021 prerelease prize packs.) Other than lands and a few removal spells, the thing is all efficient and strong rares and mythics. And if he gets sufficient lands early, nothing I built stood a chance.

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So what did I build?

Here’s the full list of what I had to build from:

• 10 Zendikar Rising draft boosters and 1 collector booster (gift bundle)
• 10 Ikoria packs (bundle)
• 8 Kaldheim packs (prerelease kit and two prize packs)
• 6 Modern Horizon packs

Building from this modest base was both wonderfully nostalgic, and infuriatingly confining. I stretched my Ikoria pulls remarkably thin to make a Mardu (of course) mutate deck that feels like a sealed deck but is remarkably fun and functional. My second deck leans heavily on my Kaldheim cards, and is a jumbled mess of a Sultai snow deck with a light zombie/changeling sub-theme. Both decks suffer from craptacular manabases (which, yes, is to be expected from such a limited pool of cards) and both are mostly draft chaff commons. That I have been able to best the kid with them most evenings is less a testament to my decks and more of an indictment of the kid’s mulliganing skills. He has repeatedly kept 2-land opening hands and suffered from critical missed land drops.

After each evening of matches we’d open a few packs (usually 2 Kaldheim collector boosters and 2 other draft or set boosters from various sets) and use those pieces to upgrade our decks. I also suggested tweaks to the kid’s builds, such as removing The Ozolith from his Gruul deck since it had little +1/+1 counter synergies.

It was after a few weeks, when I suggested we each make third decks, that I began to see just how pitiful my remaining options were. I had a handful of angels in my “collection”, and decided to start an Orzhov deck that could strengthen over time. It played even more pitifully than I expected.

If only it were 1997 again, when I was blissfully unaware of just how wretched my first forays into deckbuilding were. In those naive days I didn’t understand – strike that, I had never HEARD of – the concepts of card advantage, deck consistency, or a workable mana curve. I was too busy giddily dropping such powerhouses as Lava Hounds, Jungle Troll, and Mist Dragon.

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Has it been fun building constructed decks and playing them regularly? Indubitably.

Have I enjoyed opening a booster and getting excited by something as meager as an Ice Tunnel, because it’s an upgrade for one of my decks? Beyond question.

Has building from such a meager pool allowed me to stretch my creative muscles?

No.

In all honesty, not having enough cards to build around anything but the most basic themes (mutate, snow) is disappointing. I know I could cave and pull select cards from my full collection, and I probably should – the kid’s got at least 3 times the cards to use, and a couple of his decks outclass anything I’ve cobbled together. But what I’m doing now was what I’d hoped to do early last year – begin Magic anew (where possible.)

So far, limitations are not breeding creativity, they are breeding desperation. Why else would I be running mediocre combat tricks in a white/black “angel” deck that’s running more non-angels than angels, since I just haven’t seen many in my Kaldheim packs?

But with that frustration comes hope. Strixhaven drops shortly, and we’ll not only be playing with prerelease kits, but the kid agreed to spend his own cash on a bundle preorder. A set booster box from my LGS should serve as initial prize packs for our weekly battles, and a box of collector boosters will arrive shortly thereafter. My pool of cards is likely to get at least 25% bigger in the next few weeks, and while Strixhaven won’t bring any more angels to boost my W/B deck, I’m excited knowing the Silverquill college may provide enough upgrades to make the deck a bit more threatening.

And in a month or three, assuming the kid’s interest holds, I just may have enough cards to get…creative.

Next time: Strixhaven strikes.

March 24, 2021

ex post facto – phrase (latin) : done, made, or formulated after the fact (literally: “from a thing done afterward”)

It’s pure serendipity that my column looking back at my journey to rediscover the joy of Magic is post #50. When I wrote about my Innistrad packs and planned my three-part look at anxiety’s affect on how I engage with Magic, I hadn’t looked at the column numbering. My plan was to write the three anxiety columns and then draft my retrospective. It’s a happy accident that the anxiety columns concluded with post #49.

Truthfully, I’d hoped to write this early in January, to celebrate a year of blogging. Life predictably intervened. Such are the breaks.

Fourteen months after I officially began this quest, where do things stand? What is my “Magic mentality”, so to speak? Did I find joy? Did I open packs, build decks, try something new? Did I learn to unclench my rage-locked fists at yet another Arena match-up with a Yorion pile?

Answers will be forthcoming, but first I thought I’d look at some highlights – and lowlights – of the past year(ish). I’ll conclude with a more verbose commentary on the journey so far.

Best pack

My anxiety notwithstanding, I did manage to open some packs. Prerelease kits, my makeshift advent calendar, a box of Commander Legends collector boosters…all were sacrificed in the name of fun. I didn’t track every pack I opened, but I tracked a lot, and there was one very clear winner: Commander Legends collector booster #10. Check out these pulls:

There were other decent cards in the pack, like a foil extended art Commander’s Sphere and an extended art Path of Ancestry. The value of the pack at the time I opened it was over $100. Obviously the Mana Drain was the bulk of that, and is the single most valuable card I’ve ever opened in a pack at the time I opened it. But it took the other pulls to push the pack over that $100 mark – a pretty monumental total for a single pack.

Worst pack

While it would be simple to point to any number of standard packs that contained a bobo rare, that’s not terribly interesting (or funny.) I’ll instead go with a Zendikar Rising collector booster with these stellar “hits”:

The siren call of ZNR collector boosters is undoubtedly the chance to get expedition lands, and I did get a few in my box, along with fantastic box toppers. While ZNR itself isn’t brimming with value, I got my money’s worth via the expeditions and some foil and/or alternate art pathways. This particular pack, however, totaled a horrific $3.78 in value at the time of opening (surely less now.) Considering $15 is typically the cheapest you’ll find a collector booster, this particular pack was an embarrassment of awfulness.

Favorite deck

My original, pre-rotation Mardoom has no competition. I’ve currently got a rotation of about 6 decks I’m playing on Arena, and all are enjoyable, but none come close to the ecstasy Mardoom gave me. I’ve tried to build various post-rotation Doom Foretold decks, with mixed results. Tergrid, God of Fright is a perfect complement to that card, but I’ve yet to get her to work more than a handful of times. My opponents, almost universally, have the kill spell in hand the instant Tergrid trots onto the battlefield.

Dumbest mistake I kept making on Arena

The ease with which you can find a match on Arena is a double-edged sword. That I can suffer a humiliating loss and then immediately jump into a new match to chase redemption is a godsend. But it leads to sloppy habits. I’ve had a blue/red giant tribal deck that I’ve been playing with for a few weeks, and its mana base is a mess. Despite having 26 lands, I swear my opening hand is perpetually a 2-lander, and I always (as in ALWAYS) draw a land that comes into play tapped when I desperately need an untapped land to keep myself afloat. I wager I’ve played at least 50 matches with the deck where I tell myself that the moment the game is over, I’m editing the deck and rejiggering the mana. And then when I frequently lose due to some mana issue, I express my frustration by immediately smashing the “Play” button to get into a new match that I’m sure will go better.

And due to typing out the above, I’ve finally edited the damn deck and tweaked the mana. That this is what it took for me to fix something I was so frustrated with is absurd.

Deck I most hated facing

How to choose? There have been so very many decks that irritate me to the point of exasperation, choosing one is difficult. Yorion decks are certainly in contention. Despite not being a top competitive option in Standard, I sure see a lot of them, and they always thrash me thoroughly.

Other match-ups like Rogues I just auto-concede to, even with decks that stand a chance against them. And I’m so very, very tired of the likes of mono-red aggro and Shark Typhoon control.

But I’ll give the nod to Gate decks pre-rotation. They were never serious contenders in Standard, but I couldn’t beat them. EVER. Not with Gruul aggro, not with Azorious flyers, not with Mardoom or Setessan Champion enchantments or Izzet spellslinging. The deck always had Gates Ablaze in hand, it always landed Archway Angel for 12-16 life when I was one combat away from pulling off a win, and it always drew at least 5 cards off of Guild Summit. I was always sure I could beat that stupid deck, because it wasn’t THAT good. But against me…it was unbeatable. Truly my nemesis for months.

Best set released since Jan. of 2020

Despite the financial and play value oozing from Commander Legends, I have to pick a Standard set available on Arena, as those are nearly the only cards I’ve gotten to use (Jump Start and Modern Horizons did get brief cameos last fall during the family outing to the mountains, but I didn’t play those cards enough to get a good idea of what the sets are like.)

I do seriously dig the mutate mechanic from Ikoria. But when I play a mutate-based deck I get blown out. When I play against a mutate-based deck, I get blown out. Zendikar Rising’s landfall mechanic and associated shenanigans are just fair to middlin’ in my eyes. Kaldheim has been oodles of fun so far, but I’m missing a lot of key rares from the set to make some of the decks I’d like to tinker with, so I’d have to grade it “incomplete” so far. That’s on me, though, not the set.

Core Set 2021 is disqualified for Ugin alone. That’s a mistake that drags the entire set down, in my eyes.

That leaves Theros: Beyond Death, whose cards are likely more represented in my Arena decks than any other set. I love enchantments or cards that key off them, and Archon of Sun’s Grace is the runaway coolest pegasus over printed. Except I just looked up the card, and it’s an Archon instead of a pegasus?! What the hell? Lame.

No matter. THB gets my vote as most enjoyable set from the past year or so, but not by any sort of landslide. I’ll miss it dearly when it rotates, but rotation will remove so much obnoxiousness in standard, I’ll deal.

Worst foil I opened

Take a look at the art of Szat’s Will. It’s not a particularly good piece of art to begin with. From a cursory glance it looks like nothing more than a torso, and a deeper study of the art doesn’t reveal much more. That the only parts of the art that shine in the foil version are the grey lines in the tentacles (and even then just barely) makes it a bad card with bad art that’s also an aggressively dull foil. That mine (like everyone else’s, no doubt) is also remarkably curled is just the whipped topping insult to the initial injury of opening the card in a pack.

Coolest planeswalker sidekick

Lukka’s winged tiger that he bonds with is certainly cool and intimidating, but Lukka never names her and she gets killed rather unceremoniously. What else we got?

Vivien Reid can summon a whole host of ghostly green sidekick critters, and she has cards for a crocodile, grizzly, and jaguar. All relatively cool, but a bit nondescript. She appears to bond with a variety of creatures on Ikoria, but the one she’s pictured with on several cards doesn’t seem to be identified in any way. Any other options?

Going back a bit further, there’s Huatli’s Raptor, and a dinosaur sidekick is pretty badass. I don’t know if it has a name, but it has its own card. We may have a winner. But we’ll keep looking…

Mowu! How could I forget Mowu! Jiang Yanggu’s fluffy flunky is cute when he’s small and has three poofy tails when he’s big. He’s also got a charm on his collar that resembles a Christmas stocking or a chili pepper, but that’s nitpicking. Not only does Mowu have his own card and several tokens, but he’s been depicted in the art of several other cards. I think a magic puppy that might be made out of rock and can grow in size and number of tails is insanely awesome. I don’t see what could possibly best Mowu as coolest sidekick.

No. Wait. I’ve got it! The third planeswalker that appeared on Ikoria has, by far, the coolest sidekick:

Cutest Art

I’m going to cheat a little here. It hasn’t been released yet, but no card, past or present, will compete with bear wizard with monocle and adorable bug friends (the blue one on his left paw is even waving!) I just hope it’s not a draft chaff common, because I will want to play this in every deck of its color(s).

Spiffiest Arena mythic animation

Goldspan Dragon. Just look at how epic this dude is:

Worst use of good art

Seb McKinnon’s art is so unique and instantly recognizable. If you don’t know his name or his art, but you play Magic, you are seriously daft. Check out this beauty:

This art is a sinister treasure; the rare Wizards wasted it on, Allure of the Unknown, is a dreadful bobo. It’s the second cheapest rare in THB, one cent ahead of Nessian Boar and one cent behind several other trash rares. I think I saw someone cast this card on Arena once. Sorry, Seb, your efforts deserved so much better.

New Legend that may get me to build a Commander deck

Ghen, Arcanum Weaver was designed for me. Not “players like me”. Just me. Other people can play the card. I’ll share him with the rest of you. But Ghen was personally created to bring me into Commander. He’s my favorite color combination – Mardu – AND focuses on my favorite card type – enchantments. I have no idea how to build around Ghen, or even how to assemble a decent Commander deck, but I can’t imagine a more perfect legend to entice me to learn.

Biggest blunder – financial

Selling one of my two Gaea’s Cradles to a friend for $300 mere days before its price doubled (it’s now worth over $1150.) Stroke of luck for friend, maddening regret for me.

Biggest blunder – play

Using my only 4 open mana to mistakenly untap an already untapped Tergrid’s Lantern. That meant I couldn’t use the ability twice, which would have secured me a win in one of the most epic Arena battles I’d ever fought. Instead I used the Lantern just once, my opponent untapped and draw Rankle (stupid Haste), and hit me for the victory.

Few things are as frustrating as losing an Arena match by doing something moronic that you’d never have done if playing with paper cards. And considering how many times I’ve botched plays on Arena by selecting the wrong option for a modal card or a permanent with multiple abilities, you’d think I’d have learned to wait the extra half second to ensure I click the right thing. I’d tapped and untapped that blasted Lantern at least 10 times in the match already, without screwing up. And then I collapsed under pressure. Beyond dumb.

Yes, I’m still salty.

Coolest bobo rare opened

Esika’s Chariot is not a good card. The standard version has cute cats in the art, but that’s about the only positive that can be said about it. The first Kaldheim collector booster I opened had a foil showcase version of the card in the penultimate (i.e. money) slot. You can get a foil showcase for $1.

Not a great pull by any measure, but damn is it a nifty looking piece of cardboard:

The “Boy, did I have that wrong” award

I thought Elder Gargaroth’s art showed the creature looking right, with giant horns coming out the back of its head. It is, in fact, looking left, with tusks coming out of its mouth.

The “Say something nice about M21” category

The showcase cards are mostly bland and bad, the enemy color Temple reprints were unnecessary and a waste of multiple rare slots, Ugin is a horrific mistake to print back into Standard, the legends were largely underwhelming, and every single time my opponent plays Seasoned Hallowblade, they wreck me with it. Oh, and my kid’s prerelease promo was Pursued Whale. That’s crap, and entirely the set’s fault.

Wait, I was supposed to say something nice about the set? Oof. Alright, if I must: the bundle promo is a rather cool alternate art Pack Leader.

Oh, and here’s a bonus “nice thing”: Rin and Seri was a fun (and adorable) buy-a-box promo. I didn’t buy a box, so I had to get it as a single, but that duo will likely helm the second Commander deck I build.

That’s it. That’s all I got.

Replacing the Core set this year with the Dungeons and Dragons set is a stroke of genius, even if they botch the execution of it.

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Neutral.

The word itself is just so…neutral: both wonky (“eu”?) and bland (“al”). It could be all cool like “new troll!” or “newt roll!”, but instead is another word for unexceptional.

That’s how I’d describe my Magical journey since 1/1/2020. My grand plans to try Commander at my LGS were rightfully scuttled, and I spent the year largely immersed in Arena, with occasional kitchen table diversions with a reluctant kid who was far more interested in opening packs than doing anything with the cards they contained.

My Arena winrate, if you discount the decks I auto-conceded to, was almost assuredly an uninspiring 50%. There were stretches where I played for the pure joy of the game, and periods of slogging drudgery that amounted to little more than joylessly earning daily or weekly rewards.

My goal of using this blog to encourage the opening of packs seems laughable now. It wasn’t until December that I cracked some packs “just for the fun of it”, and I was rewarded with a pretty substantial cache of great cards (plus a sizeable dollop of regret over my decision to crack those packs.)

If I’d written this post a few weeks ago, I’d have said I was in a similar headspace as I was 14 months ago. I might’ve even been (mildly) pessimistic about the next chapter I was starting.

And then I did something I hate doing: I pushed the kid to spend time on a task I knew he didn’t want to do. If my kid ever describes me as controlling, or overbearing, or meddlesome, he’s a filthy little liar. He spends the vast majority of his free time doing his own thing – mostly playing Xbox, with the occasional respite reading fantasy books. COVID suspended his weekly tae kwon do and piano classes, leaving him with school and…screens. Lots of screens. Magic barely registered on his radar, though he’d have insisted otherwise if questioned.

It was the Kaldheim collector boosters that did it. I wanted to open some, and I wanted to have a REASON to open some. And so I created a reason: prize packs. The kid was tasked with making two decks to battle with. He didn’t do it. I reminded him of the task. He still didn’t do it. I badgered him even more.

No decks.

Tearing the plastic wrap off the box of Kaldheim collector boosters took more willpower than I thought I possessed, but once it was off, I was committed. Two packs were removed and put on the kitchen table next to his seat. A hard deadline for deck building was imposed – and met! Decks were shuffled, games were played, prize packs were opened. Awesome cards were revealed and added to our respective collections. Shockingly, decks were even updated afterwards.

And for perhaps the first time in 14 months, games were played again a week later. “Monday Magic” (or least weekly games) was instituted. More packs were opened, more cool cards divvied up, and more decks built. Magic was even played twice in the same week!

Cynicism lives in a very special chateau nestled deep within my heart, but somehow I’ve boarded the place up and turned off the lights. At least where Magic is concerned, I’m optimistic. Maybe it’s because other facets of my life are looking stormy and bleak, but I am embracing this positivity. The kid and I will play Magic and have fun. Until we don’t. Except that’s not going to happen. This time is different. It must be.

Could I be lamenting this rosy outlook a week from now? No. Not happening. There will be “Magic Mondays”, or the equivalent, until Strixhaven releases. And we’ll buy prerelease kits, open prize packs, make new decks. Who knows, we might even venture to the LGS this fall and try Commander together, pandemic permitting.

It may not be the start of a new decade, or even a new year, but it’s a new era.

And it will be Magical.

March 4, 2021

denouement – noun : the final part of a play, movie, or narrative in which the strands of the plot are drawn together and matters are explained or resolved

Unsurprisingly, my last article discussing my struggles with anxiety (as it pertains to Magic) has been significantly delayed due to (wait for it)…anxiety. The last few weeks have largely revolved around moving my father to a smaller home just five minutes from me. The move was…difficult, and depressing. My father is struggling to get unpacked and acclimated. Mentally he’s deteriorating faster than I expected, which lead to him insisting on bringing far too much stuff to his new place. The house looks more like a hoarder’s den than a downsized home for a senior citizen approaching the end of independent living.

I had the bulk of this post written the day after I posted the previous one, but getting it online and edited just…didn’t happen. It wasn’t in me. It’s not really in me now, but I want to get this posted and move on to lighter topics. My apologies to anyone who might have been checking the blog for updates. I really (REALLY) hope to get back to near-weekly musings.

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Though I presented holding onto a booster pack as a third option beyond opening it or selling it, in truth holding a booster is just a delayed version of one of the other two options. You either hold a booster to eventually open it or to eventually sell it. I think almost everyone holding onto a sealed product has earmarked it for a specific purpose.

Not me.

I hold product because I can’t bring myself to do anything with it. Too scared to open it, too scared to sell it…convinced that whatever option I choose I’ll regret. And so the dust builds up and my indecision begets anxiety.

About a month ago I spent an entire Saturday morning and early afternoon in nervous (but delighted) anticipation. UPS was going to be bringing me two packages filled with pre-ordered Kaldheim products. I was genuinely looking forward to their arrival.

When they came, I opened the packages and spread the haul across my desk to take it all in. A set booster box, a collector booster box, a bundle, the KHM Commander decks, even a couple loose collector boosters that I’d bought before fatherly generosity made the purchase of a full collector box attainable. I was excited! New set, new products, and a determination to open some packs and see what I got. I’d been enjoying the set on Arena and was looking forward to seeing what paper packs begot.

By Sunday evening, as I went to bed, my stomach was sour and I was maudlin. I’d been unable to bring myself to open any of that Kaldheim product, and had instead already found places to stack it amongst all my other sealed products I have no intention of opening anytime soon.

A month later I still haven’t touched what I preordered. I didn’t buy it to make money from it, but alarming reports of horrendous EV (expected value) for the set makes cracking packs…less desirable. And whispers of the strong likelihood of a glut of dirt cheap collector boxes on the horizon make the notion of selling any of this stuff, even 10 years into the future, appear laughable. As cool as much of the set looks, it appears many have already written it off as a veritable Dragon’s Maze – a virtually worthless set doomed to failure and likely to be available for a pittance for years to come.

Other people’s opinions shouldn’t, of course, have any outsized influence on me. A set’s value extends far beyond the financial red and black. If the set has fun/interesting/beautiful cards, why not just ignore the naysayers? Why not just open some packs and enjoy the experience?

And there’s the rub: how would I enjoy any of the packs I open? My kid talked like he was interested in trying out cards from the set and building some new decks, but weeks have flitted by and he’s made no effort to do that (despite periodic prodding from me.) FOMO did get the best of me prerelease weekend, and $60 for two KHM prerelease kits netted me 3 actual games and about an hour of the kid’s time at the kitchen table.

Why open any more boosters when I can actually play with KHM cards on Arena?

And so, Kaldheim joins the Ranks of the Unopened. Excitement for the new set spirals into cynicism about the uselessness of all those packs I bought. A deeply buried seed of hope cannot best my anxiety.

So I’ll hold onto my KHM packs, just as I hold onto those 28 original Innistrad boosters. Not because I want to hold them – not because I have any semblance of a plan or purpose for them – but because my other options feel like colossal mistakes waiting to haunt me.

Doing nothing is better than doing the wrong thing.

With each passing day, though, the indecision of doing nothing with all these packs bothers me more and more. I argue with myself:

“The money is already spent. Open them.”

“There’s nothing of value in your packs, or the set. Hold the sealed boxes to sell someday.”

“As sealed boxes from a set with a giant print run, they’ll never be worth all that much. Open them.”

“Even the worst sets with the lowest EV will someday be hard to find as sealed product. Hold them to sell.”

“You love the showcase cards and will love adding them to your collection. Open them.”

“Collector boosters have guaranteed you’ll never pay much to buy the showcase cards you want. Hold the boxes to sell someday, and buy singles.”

“The set has lots of cool cards for Commander. You might finally be inspired to start building Commander decks. Open them.”

“Every pack you open will be one less you have in the future, when you might have a playgroup that would enjoy using them. Hold them to sell.”

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It’s absurd. I know it’s absurd. I’ve created Schrödinger’s packs – held in some bizarre limbo between opened and sold. The realization that I can’t even decide what I’m holding them for gnaws at my mind.

Returning to the Innistrad packs that inspired these last three posts, the only surety I feel about them is that anything I do with them will be a mistake. If I open them, the cards they contain will be all but worthless and the packs forever lost. If I sell them, the value of individual Innistrad packs will assuredly rocket well past what I got for them at the time of sale, and the money I did get for them will be spent on groceries or the electric bill – or more packs I’ll be unable to open. If I hold them, there will come a day when I realize I should have done something with them years earlier, if only to be rid of them and what they represent.

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Anxiety manifests differently for everyone who fights it, but I believe most people with it feel trapped. They’re faced with choices that seem impossible, or all feel doomed to be wrong. They’re unable to see a way out of their predicament. They’re lost, and the map that should lead them home instead points them to a dragon’s lair.

If Magic was the only facet of my life that anxiety influenced, it would be easy to dismiss all of this is a ridiculous first-world problem. “Oh, that poor man who can’t decide what to do with the luxury goods he purposely spent his own money acquiring.”

How I face Magic is just a microcosm of how anxiety weighs on my daily life. I take medication that lessens the brunt of that anxiety, but also deadens the joy I might otherwise find in life. Some days that feels like a deal with the devil; others – a saving grace.

These last three posts, as flippant as they may appear, are an attempt to battle my anxiety by looking at one facet of how it controls me. I’m fully aware that these posts may have come across as the absurd whining of a privileged manchild that can’t figure out how to play with his toys. And if that’s how you’ve read them – so be it.

In the end, my intention’s with this mini-series have been entirely selfish. If you’ve read along, though, I appreciate it. If you don’t suffer from anxiety, I hope what I’ve written gives you a small glimpse of what it can be like. I hope you understand that as idiotic as it may sound to not be able to decide what to do with a pack of Magic cards, that small struggle is emblematic of much deeper issues that can warp daily life.

If you are battling some form of anxiety yourself, I hope you may see a little of your own conflict in my words and understand. Feel free to reach out (casualmagicking@gmail.com) and say hi. I’d welcome the connection.

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Next time: it’s a milestone: post #50! I’ll take a whimsical (and, I promise, a much less dreary) look at my Magical journey to rediscover the joy of the game. Despite what the last few posts may imply, there’s much to celebrate.

February 15, 2021

caveat venditor – phrase [latin] : let the seller beware

As established in my last post, I don’t see opening my original Innistrad packs as a legitimate option. The sealed packs themselves are fairly valuable, and yet likely contain little to nothing to make opening them a worthwhile endeavor. So what to do with them?

How about selling them?

But of course I can’t possibly do that.

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To state the obvious, nearly all sealed Magic product increases in value over time. A few years ago single Innistrad packs were (if memory serves) in the $15 range, and they’re now worth closer to $20 each. While not a massive jump dollar-wise, an increase in value of 33% in a few years is pretty decent. And as the game ages and likely continues to grow, interest in old sets will only grow as well. While the impending release of Time Spiral Remastered may portent an eventual Innistrad Remastered release, I don’t think such a thing would seriously dent the going rate for sealed original Innistrad packs.

And honestly, I can’t sell these Innistrad packs knowing their value will only grow in time. I don’t need the money, so there’s no urgent need to unload them. And they were bought nearly a decade ago, so it’s not like I feel compelled to justify or recoup the original expense.

I bet I know what you’re thinking: why not sell them to be rid of them, since they cause me some level of distress simply by sitting on a shelf in my house? What’s the ever-(over?)-quoted mantra? “Does it spark joy?” Well…no. And thus it seems stupid to keep something that does nothing other than produce anxiety. So selling them – removing that burden – seems perfectly reasonable. Intelligent, even.

Except that selling would be absurd. These things are the most valuable sealed items I own (collectively, at least.) They’re from a beloved set that I all but missed. They could someday provide a glorious and rare opportunity to experience a true bygone era of the game. I may not have a playgroup at the moment, but someday I undoubtedly will, and 28 packs would be enough to do a full 8-person draft or a 4-person sealed deck tournament. How cool would it be to break them out at some future gathering and experience the set for the first time? I have packs of Dark Ascension and Avacyn Restored as well, in case there’s a great way to experience the Innistrad block.

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[As an aside, I’ve never read a good word about Avacyn Restored. Packs of it run $11-12 and a booster box goes for less than half an Innistrad box. But a complete set of it is 20 cards smaller than Innistrad yet worth over $40 more. Maybe it was a flavor fail, or not well received at the time, and I know it was considered an awful draft set. But its cards are certainly worth more as a whole in 2021 than what Innistrad has to offer. As a value proposition, Avacyn Restored definitely looks like a safer bet. So…clearly Innistrad’s charms run deep. All the more reason not to part with those packs, right?]

Looking beyond the Innistrad packs to other parts of my collection, I’ve frequently considered selling some of my Reserved List cards. I don’t have a lot, and many are single copies that are part of complete sets that I lovingly collected 15-20 years ago. But seeing what they’re currently valued at is astonishing and admittedly tempting.

Sadly, just the notion of trying to sell some of them fills me with existential dread.

Where do I sell them to get the best return?

Ebay? No chance. I’ve seen too many stories about people who were scammed out of valuable cards, or got into prolonged battles over a card’s grade and therefore its true value.

An online store? As if. What if these cards that I’m sure are near mint get downgraded, and my return on them gets nerfed? Do I really want to find out that what I thought was a $100 card is worth significantly less because of some tiny nick on one edge that I never even noticed? And do I want to take .50-.60 cents on the dollar when they’re surely worth more if I can sell them elsewhere?

My local LGS? I tried that once, and they seemed to have little interest in anything over about $50. And the offers for what they did want were disappointing compared to potential trade-ins to popular online sellers.

And then there’s the conundrum of deciding what I could even bear to part with.

Can I really sell my only copy of a card that is part of a complete set that I’ve cherished for years? What if it’s a card I realistically never see myself playing (Lion’s Eye Diamond, I’m looking at you.)

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• 

• 

If I sell now, am I selling into a spike, maximizing my return before the bubble bursts? Or is another round of spikes lurking post-stimulus checks, or post-COVID, or post-economic rebound? If I don’t need the money right now, shouldn’t I hold onto any Reserved List cards of value, knowing they’ll likely be worth more in a month and surely worth more in a year or two?

When’s the “perfect” time to sell, because I will greatly regret selling any other time? Never mind the fact that I’m infinitely aware that there is no “perfect” time – I’ll still hold out for it. Doing otherwise would be a huge mistake.

Case in point: last summer I (uncharacteristically) sold a card. I let a friend buy my Gaea’s Cradle for $300. Within a few days – no joke – its value shot to over $700. It’s now worth over $1200. Talk about serious, serious regret. I’m certainly glad it went to a friend who will put it to good use, instead of a faceless internet stranger or online store, but were I to have the chance to do it over…no way in hell do I sell that card. Greatest regret of my Magic hobbydom.

Those questions above – worries, to be truthful – tirelessly haunt my every potential decision, turning the entire swath of them into indecisions. Better to do nothing than the wrong thing.

“Now” is not the time to sell, nor will it ever be.

The cards, the packs – they will be worth more later, and mean too much to me now. Selling would be a mistake I would regret, and I’m already wading through regret – with Magic in particular and life in general.

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So. I can’t open those packs, and I can’t sell them. Clearly just holding onto them is the best course of action, the one least likely to generate anxiety, right?

Right?

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Next time: wrong.

February 5, 2021

saudade – noun : a deep emotional state of nostalgic or profound melancholic longing for an absent something or someone that one cares for and/or loves

It’s a rather simple thought experiment that I run on occasion (and then regret revisiting): what do I do with my 28 unopened booster packs of original Innistrad?

My choices, as I see them, are as follows:

1. Open them
2. Sell them
3. Hold them

I’m doing #3, though I don’t feel as if that’s by choice. I can’t bring myself to choose either of the first two options, which means I’m doing #3 by default. I suppose, as my beloved Rush once opined, “if you choose not to decide you still have made a choice.”

I’m going to dedicate a column to each of those three possible choices and why all of them generate an unhealthy amount of internal conflict within me. Today’s entry: how the once joyous action of opening a booster pack has turned into aggravation and anxiety.

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Whenever I would walk into the “cat room” in our house, I would feel ill at ease. Aside from being the room where we keep the litter boxes and food dishes for our four cats, the “cat room” is also where my Magic collection lives – set-specific binders filled with cards from most sets from Ice Age through Zendikar Rising, my decks, and all my sealed product (booster boxes, bundles, decks, etc.)

When Magic returned to my life in 2017, a large Ikea shelf was assembled in the “cat room” and decorated with my collection: a mix of boxes, binders, and loose piles of cards that filled most of the shelves. As I starting filling up the bottom rows with set-specific binders, sealed products got progressively moved up until they were stacked on top of the unit. And prominently displayed out front was my open-but-mostly-full booster box of original Innistrad. Having never played with any Innistrad cards (outside of a couple sealed deck games) I didn’t have any real notion what might be in those packs, but they were kind of old and I’d noticed people discussing the set in the most reverent of tones. Surely these were special packs, to be prominently displayed.

Eventually I got around to looking up the actual cards in the set, to get an idea of what I might find when I opened the packs. I was…surprised. And not in a good way. Innistrad as a whole had decent value. But where that value lay was startling (to ignorant me, at least.)

While things have changed in the past few years, at the time I first dug into what was in the set (probably sometime in 2018), there were two cards responsible for a huge amount of the full set’s value: Liliana of the Veil (at one point hitting $133 in value) and Snapcaster Mage (topping out at $85.) I don’t recall a single other card being worth more than $20 at the time, and there were shockingly few cards worth more than the retail price of a pack – $4. And those packs hadn’t been $4 in years.

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The set’s total value (the total price for one of each card) peaked at about $420 in the spring of 2018, and has largely been in decline since then, mostly due to significant drops in the values of Liliana and Snapcaster (current values are about $60 and $40 respectively.) While a few other cards have seen their values climb over the past few years, there are still only 9 cards that are currently worth more than $5 – a pretty paltry sum considering the set’s age and reputation as among the greatest sets ever released.

That reputation appears built almost entirely on its beloved limited environment and dark horror-world flavor. While the set wasn’t printed in the kind of quantities modern sets are, Magic was hardly flailing in 2011. Innistrad followed the Zendikar and Scars of Mirrodin blocks, both of which have sterling reputations and more financial value overall. Clearly Innistrad was far more influential when it was released than it has been in the years since. There’s just not many cards in the set that people are still playing or paying for.

I don’t recall what an individual pack of Innistrad would run you a few years ago, but I believe it was in the $15 neighborhood. Today a loose pack will cost you closer to $20. And were you to buy one and crack it, you’d be desperately hoping for one of the 3-4 cards worth more than that $20 bill you laid out for the privilege. And lest you believe there might be value beyond the rare slot, keep in mind that only 3 uncommons in the set are worth more than 50 cents (and all still worth less than $1), while just a single common will fetch more than 30 cents (the pauper-popular Delver of Secrets, which can be had for a little more than a buck.)

Learning all of this, the notion of opening any of those Innistrad packs to add to my collection seemed…pathological. Why open a fairly valuable old pack from a bygone era if it’s quite likely to contain a rare worth less than a dollar?

But that’s the logical take, and I think we all know most players who like to open packs are well aware of the rather illogical gamble they take every time they tear a booster pack wrapper. Until that box of Innistrad, I’d never NOT just opened every pack I’d ever had. Oh, I once tried to spread out the opening of a box of Urza’s Saga, cracking just one pack a day. I don’t think I lasted a week. Out of furious frustration at opening nothing but bobo rares, I caved and opened the rest one evening, sure as I was that the good stuff was hiding in the remaining packs (it wasn’t.)

To be fair, before about 2018 I’d never explored the financial side of Magic – I didn’t have the income to buy cases of booster boxes or $10+ cards. But even learning the likely financial bath I would take were I to open these Innistrad packs, that still wasn’t what kept my hands off them.

It was the atelophobia.

I don’t know that there’s a fancy medical word for the fear of regret, but atelophobia comes close – it’s the fear of failure. And like many people with anxiety, I have that to some degree – I’d rather do nothing than do something that might be a mistake.

Opening the Innistrad packs would undoubtedly be a massive mistake.

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I will never own any more original Innistrad packs. I don’t have the stomach to buy $20 booster packs that likely contain, at most, a few bucks worth of cards. I don’t have any nostalgic love for the set. And I don’t have the disposable income – or emotional desire – to pony up $720+ for a sealed booster box. Those 28 Innistrad packs are it, for the rest of my life. If I open them, even just a few of them, that leaves me ever closer to having none. And what if someday I wish I had some – to play sealed deck, or give to my son or grandchild, or just open in some wild frenzy of pack-cracking joy that seems impossible to comprehend right now but could someday be attainable?

Because I gotta tell you – I really, REALLY regret not keeping some of the old packs from my early days of Magic. Not even considering the financial value of some of them, how awesome would it be to have kept a handful of packs from every set I bought over the years – Tempest and Urza’s Saga and Future Sight and on and on – that I could pass down to someone someday, or just have to open in 10 or 20 or 40 years? Or to include in a sealed pack collection stretching back to Magic’s early days?

• 

• 

• 

That regret doesn’t sit well with me. The vast majority of those old packs were opened and the cards filed into binders shortly thereafter. Only a handful ever saw real play. Even fewer were sold or traded. So many packs, for so little purpose.

Thanks to my newfound knowledge about what I had in those 28 packs, every time I walked into the “cat room” and saw that box of Innistrad boosters I was bothered by their mere presence. It was as if that box of cardboard and foil was taunting me, daring me to open them and then immediately regret the decision to do so.

And I eventually could no longer handle how that box made me feel when I saw it, and I hid it behind other sealed product that elicited no such angst.

Except…now almost all of my sealed product evokes the same deep-seated anxiety within me. Even something as inconsequential as my partially-opened box of Zendikar Rising set boosters bothers me. I bought it with all intention of opening the whole damn thing. And the kid and I used some of those packs to build sealed decks that we battled with for just a handful of games. So why not just open the rest?

The fear of regret – of failure – of making a mistake.

Sure, I can buy more ZNR (without overspending) for at least a few more years. But I know that a year or two from now what disposable income I have to put towards Magic will be earmarked for some other product. If I open those packs now, will I even use the cards in them? In 5 or 10 or 20 years from now, will I wish I had kept them sealed? One could argue that it’d be best to make that a problem for Future Me, but Present Me refuses to be such an ass to Future Me.

Back in December I powered my way through a box of Commander Legends collector boosters, opening one a day in the 12 days leading up to Christmas. I hoped the experience would help me learn to better handle the anxiety that grips me each time I open a pack. And you know what? It did help me. Though difficult, I made it through each pack, opened a pretty sweet collection of cards, and finished the experiment convinced of its worthiness and sure that progress had been made.

Except…now I am wracked with guilt about it. For weeks I’ve mentally kicked myself for blowing through the only Commander Legends collector boosters I will ever own, now that their prices have become exorbitant and no more are going to be printed. I should have saved some…should have saved ALL of them! How cool would it be to have them to open years from now, when those packs will be wonderful artifacts of a different time in my life, in Magic’s life?

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These are not normal or healthy thought processes. You know it, I know it, but I can’t figure out how to alter them. Opening those collector boosters was supposed to be step one in a (now clearly misguided) “healing journey.” And just a few weeks after taking that step, I’m consumed with the notion that it was all a stupid mistake.

Anything I did with those boosters would have been better than opening them.

Anything I do with my Innistrad boosters will be better than opening them.

For me opening a pack, any pack, regardless of what’s inside, is to lose a little.

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Next time: to sell or not to sell?

January 22, 2021

exordium – noun : the beginning or introductory part, especially of a discourse or treatise

Yo, check this out:

This is not a random picture yoinked off the internet and posted here. This is a photo of my own, personal booster box. Twenty-eight packs of OG Innistrad, from a sealed box I bought in the fall of 2011. Though not the oldest packs I own, they are comfortably the crown jewels of my sealed Magic product collection.

And I hate them.

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For starters, the damn box is open and missing 8 packs, so the immeasurable cachet of having a sealed booster box of such a famous set is gone. Which, of course, begs the question: why are there only 28 packs in the box? Or, from a different angle, why the hell are there 28 unopened packs of Innistrad in that box?!

Short story time.

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The fall of 2011 was the last time I had a Magic playgroup. Though I don’t recall how we connected, in 2008 I started playing 1v1 Magic with a guy named Larry, who lived in Castle Rock (about 35 minutes south of me.) Sometime in 2009 his son Tom and Tom’s girlfriend Amanda started to join us frequently, as did Tom’s friend Daryl. I convinced my one other Magic-playing friend, Todd, to make the long drive south for weekly Magic. Each week there would be 3-6 of us at Larry’s house playing all manner of kitchen table Magic. It was what a playgroup should be – disparate people gathering for drinks and games for a few hours on a Thursday night. Standard stuff for many of you, I suppose.

In 2011 Larry moved to Larkspur – even farther away from me – and the drive stretched to 45-50 minutes. Todd and I still made the pilgrimage, but it felt like an ordeal at times. After enduring it for months, I was strongly leaning towards bailing on the group. But I was reluctant to give up weekly Magic.

To try and make the trek more enticing, I suggested that when upcoming set Innistrad released, we all buy 6 packs of it and build sealed decks that we’d play against each other. After every two match losses a player had the option of adding another booster – a pity pack, if you will – to their sealed pool, in hopes of improving their deck moving forward. It was a sealed league of the type I’d played in several times, with a playgroup in Seattle, many years earlier. Great fun, especially with 5 or 6 members.

Apparently my initial deck was lousy and I lost some matches, since the booster box I bought for this sealed league is missing the original 6 packs and two “pity packs”. Or maybe I just opened a couple packs out of curiosity or lack of willpower.

I think our Innistrad sealed league disintegrated after two weeks. By then Tom and Amanda had been married awhile, and they had been offered jobs on a boat (doing what I don’t recall) somewhere out east. They would be gone for months, and Daryl, a jazz musician with evening gigs, was less and less likely to be able to make it regularly, leaving the playgroup at a pitiful three dedicated members. Todd and I chatted, and agreed that the drive out to Larry’s place was just too egregious to continue (especially since Larry wasn’t a fan of multiplayer Magic, and 1v1 Magic with 3 players is…not ideal.)

Disappointed that the sealed league fizzled, and feeling like my links to Magic were all but frayed, I put that Innistrad booster box in a closet and actually forgot about it. In fact, I largely stepped away from the game for 6 years, only playing a few times a year with Todd.

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Since returning to Magic with renewed gusto in 2017, I’ve frequently been tempted to open those Innistrad packs. But I can’t bring myself to do it – not even a single pack. And the reasons why I can’t open them are what I’ll be exploring over the next month or so. Because believe it or not, I’ve turned a task as simple as deciding whether to open a booster pack into mental agony.

Yes, I’ve finally decided to write about my anxiety and how it affects the ways in which I engage with Magic (and, I worryingly suspect, life in general.)

I’ll try to keep it from being a miasmic slog through the wreckage of my unkempt psyche, and mostly Magic-related. But (because of course there had to be a “but”) the upcoming weeks will be about me trying to figure out some issues around my relationship with Magic, and I don’t realistically know where this is heading…

January 13, 2021

cathexis – noun : the concentration of mental energy on one particular person, idea, or object (especially to an unhealthy degree)

That it took me so long to post for the first time in 2021 is…regrettable. One of my goals for 2021 was to write a bit more frequently – weekly, in fact.

Oops.

Score one for jettisoning goals before they weaseled their way into a steady routine that I would be anxious about breaking. Failing early is so much easier.

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The reasons for my absence are both numerous and singular.

• 

• 

My father is declining mentally, and after a trip to his neurologist recently, his mental faculties registered on the dementia scale for the first time ever. And there’s likely no going back up the scale. How long he’ll be (mostly) of sound mind is a complete mystery.

So the past month has been a flurry of activity to try and get him moved out of the giant house he lives in alone (ever since flippantly abandoning his previously beloved cats to the care of his housekeeper) to a place just five minutes away from me. A decent chunk of my time, energy, anxiety, and headspace has been devoted to this endeavor, and it’s felt like dragging a sentient wool coat through a sticker bush. It could be argued that I consider myself the wool coat in this analogy.

Add in the absurd yet completely predictable terrorist attack on the nation’s capitol by a mob of learnproof nincompoops, a few too many house projects/problems, and new responsibilities at work, and I haven’t had a lot of vacant mental storage to roll the blog around in recently.

And yet, I have thought about the blog, but with a focus far, far too narrow in scope. I’m now over a year into my concerted effort to (re)discover the joy of Magic, and I was determined to start 2021 with a post reflecting on how the journey has gone. Other blogging notions appeared and were soundly chased off – I was going to summarize my first year, and I was going to do it with my best, most creative, most emotional post yet, and I was under no circumstances going to post anything until I had that up.

Ha.

Ha ha ha!

I crumbled, pathetically, under the weight of my own demands. That post, like several others I was hellbent on writing around the time I swapped calendars, is not even an outline. It’s not even a set of bullet points on a mental PowerPoint. If I’m being blunt with myself, it’s not even vaporware.

It’ll get written (I think.) Just not in the immediate future. And truthfully, that deflates me. A look back at my first year, written in February (oh, how optimistic of me), just won’t spur the same creativity, the same passion, that a fresh look back would have brought. But it was time to release what kept me frozen, and take the necessary detour that you suffer through now.

And thanks to my overly singular focus, there’s so much from the past few weeks I was going to blog about and…just didn’t. Did my advent calendar cough up more spectacular value, or peter out with a string of 30-cent trash rares? Was my collector box of Commander Legends a ridiculous rally of riches, or a bonanza of bookoo bobo bombs? Did the kid actually build decks from the packs he got for Christmas, and was Magic actually then played? How is my attempt at building my first Commander deck going? How does it feel to go second on Arena for 16 of 18 games, including separate stretches of 5 and 9 in a row? Does anyone else even care one iota about any of this?

If you’ve read up to this point…thank you. You’re a trooper. Or a saint. Or a masochist. Or really, really bored.

I promise my next post will not be a post about what I was going to post but then didn’t post because I couldn’t quite write that post and had to post a rambly non-Magic post instead.

Seriously. Back to my irregularly scheduled weirdness (about Magic!) next time.