And I’m finally back to writing my column at PopMatters.
I’ve been out of the game as it were these last few weeks. I was wiled away by the prospect of getting back into playing Magic. I’ve been lamenting leaving the game for a while now and wishing I could get back into it. With money being a major factor as to why I left the game, it was also difficult to jump back in. Over time one loses contact with the game and makes it even harder to muster up the drive to come back. The same thing happened with Go, though in that case it was a lack of places to play.
Then I went to the NJ State Championships, went 5-0, had a great time and reinvigorated my passion to play across from a real person. I almost didn’t go to the tournament. Found out about it 2 days before it was scheduled to be held and I had a podcast to get ready for, posts to write and many other excuses I could make up to justify not enjoying myself for a weekend.
Then I started researching Magic in my area. Played in a Limited tournament (one where you build a deck from random card assortments) and then a Constructed tournament (one where you bring a prebuild deck). I came in 2nd place in both. Lost the last match in the first because I didn’t understand some rules on new cards and being too rusty to notice a minor thing that cost me the game. The latter tournament being rather impressive for me as it was a longer tournament with a metagame I knew next to nothing about. Still have some skills knocking about in my head in both games. Hell, I might be even better than I was before in both Go and Magic as I’m older and wiser and can understand the lessons I internalized in my youth.
Over these last few weeks, I’ve had a lot of fun and learned some stark differences in my reaction to playing online and playing in front of a real person. Magic is the deeper and better game than Hearthstone, but now I feel my upping and quitting that game may have more to do with not getting what I want out of a card game from the digital ether.
My feelings are in my post at PopMatters. Hopefully I’m back for a longer stretch this time.