Blogomattic A Fine Line Between a Story and Reality

Magic

It has been a few years since I have sat down with someone and played a good game of Magic:The Gathering. I had walked away some time ago when my significant other of the time lost interest. On top of that the game had gotten expensive and started to shift in a direction that I didn’t care for. I was aware of a Xbox LIVE arcade game centered around M:TG and intended to buy it. Today, I did. Without going into a review, I will say that the game is fun, but a huge let down. But the XBLA game is not what brings me here, tonight.

Seeing some of my favorite cards on screen brought back many memories of games played on my ex’s bed while we ate pizza or opening a brand new pack of cards (the smell, oh the glorious smell) and slowly thumbing through the new cards reading (in detail) what they did. The best part of opening a new pack from a new set was opening the first pack. Excitement would be high as I painstakingly went through each pack and sorting the cards. I always followed the same examination order. First look, second look, art examination, then flavor text reading. I wanted to take in every part of the card in order to immerse myself into this world. Maybe I though that living in the world made the game more fun, or maybe I longed for an escape, but I needed to be in it.

As I watched cards pop up on my screen, many that I had learned the game on and some that I saw come into existence during my time, I remembered each and every memory I had of the game. Be it sitting on a cooler in the back of my friend’s van as we played on a cold December day, the times spent sitting on the ex’s bed with a vanilla coke in hand, or the countless hours spent meticulously sorting and cataloguing my collection, or remembering the very first time I played with my friend Joe, I was both happy and dismayed. Happy to be temporarily immersed back in a world I had walked away from, and dismayed by the fact that the game will never be what it was to me… and never can be.