Innistrad as Preamble

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…