I remember very well the first time I quit Magic. It was the summer of '69, the leaves were... no, wait -- that's a song dagnabit. Ok, take two. It was the summer of '96. Yes, that sounds much more accurate. At my advanced age, things get confused sometimes. Wizards had just released Mirage (I think) and it was slowly becoming apparent that they would be releasing a new set every year. EVERY YEAR! And if you didn't want to have to buy Moxen and Loti, and Time Walk, and play "the Deck" or "Kird Ape," then you had to play this new "Type II" that was being introduced. But to do so, you had to buy a new set of cards with TWO whole extra expansions, EVERY YEAR!!! What the hell? This was their idea of a "budget" format?
At the time I was finishing up high school and earning my money running a cash register at the local grocery store. To my seventeen-year-old mind, this was exorbitant, outrageous, mean-spirited, extortionist highway robbery. Plus, none of the newer cards were as powerful or cool as the older ones had been. (Remember, back then in the prehistoric days, in addition to avoiding dinosaurs while walking five miles uphill through snow -- both ways! -- we were so starved for stuff that Serra Angel was flat out the best creature in Magic.)
Seriously, goblins? Patrol? Come on.
So anyway, Mirage has just come out, I'm working at a grocery store and generally mad at the world while completely full of the time-proven wisdom of my seventeen years of life experience (in other words, I was full of bull**** and bravado), and I decided I wasn't going to let the man keep me down anymore. That was it, I was through with Magic. So, I went off and sold all my cards. Just like that. Went to the store, unloaded them and never looked back. Well, at least not for a few months. Then I went off to college. For the most part forgot all about Magic. Oh, I'd remember it every so often between marathon dorm sessions of Duke Nukem 3D or Command and Conquer. Sometimes I'd think about those goofy goblins when we did things like steal the third floor lounges chairs and stuff them down the elevator shaft. But for the most part, I moved on. I had successfully kicked the habit. I progressed with my life, joined the Army, played rugby, dated a few girls, got rejected by a lot more, made friends, skipped class, experienced hangovers, learned to bartend. Basically, I just went to college.
Fast forward to 2002. I'm in law school in Florida and still in the National Guard. The talk of war is heating up. My unit gets activated, we go to Ft. Stewart, Georgia for training and I get to experience what are quite honestly the very, absolutely, definitively worst days of my life. I think its been largely forgotten now, but the conditions faced by the first NG and Reserve soldiers mobilizing out of underprepared military bases were completely insane. I could go off on a ten page rant about it, but I'll suffice it to say that when we arrived in Iraq, where we slept on the ground, got shelled daily and nightly, got one to two meals a day, and had to secure our own water, we viewed it as a marked and significant improvement. Sometime during the trainup I had developed a hernia. Not wanting to miss the war, I kept my mouth shut and ignored it. While we were in Iraq it progressed to the point that I could no longer ignore it. The turning point came during a patrol when we took a listening halt and I realized the reason I couldn't push the bulge of my intestines back into my abdomen was because they had caught on my pistol belt. (And no, I wasn't carrying a pistol. I was carrying a SAW; don't ask why it's called a pistol belt.)
Now, I didn't want to leave my unit, but I knew I was taking a very serious risk to my health by staying. It was late in May, the president had declared victory just a few weeks ago, and rumor had it we were shipping out to go home with 3ID in two weeks. And rumor was the rumors were true. So, the next day I went to the unit medic and showed him the injury. Seven hours later I was on a plane to Germany. Two days after I landed I saw a headline in Stars and Stripes exclaiming that 3ID and all attached units were staying an extra few months. I felt about as low as a dog on the Titanic in a limbo contest. After surgery I was sent on 45 days' medical leave in the US.
Sadly, this is an actual picture...
Well, my recuperative leave ran out, so I got healthy and went back to Iraq to finish out my tour. Much like Gilligan's Island's two-hour tour, our "four- to six-month deployment" ended up being a bit longer than advertised, in our case 15 months. (Please note that you never saw FLNG members whining to the media because we spent over a year deployed, unlike 3ID which spent most of its "over a year" in Kuwait eating at Burger King and Subway.)
When I returned home I started to play Magic again, without much skill I'm sorry to say. But slowly, through perseverance, hard work, an excess of nerdiness, and much cursing and swearing, I managed to become a slightly above average player. By slightly above average I mean that I would see and recognize my many play errors about one turn before my opponent used them to crush me. Fortunately though, my ability to design and create decks was still very solid. Not to toot my own horn (well, OK, but in a humble and unassuming way), but I, along with many other players in the pre-netdeck days when it was considered bad form to play something you didn't design yourself, independently created versions of Zoo, The Deck, Ernhamgeddon, and something remarkably similar to current builds of Red Rock.
Keeping non-affinity, non-LD decks
out of standard for two years running.
In a way, this was good, because it could have served as a wake-up call that forced me to realize my obsession with being the acknowledged "best" had cost me the single thing I most enjoyed about Magic. Unfortunately, all it did was make me work even harder on my playing skills to get recognition that way. I began to neglect my job, my health (stopped going to the gym) and my social life. Finally, I had to stop and ask myself "What the hell am I doing?" The answer was surprising, yet so simple and elegant that I knew it for truth immediately. I was looking for greatness.
Everyone wants to achieve greatness. No matter how honestly, truly humble any person is, we all want to do things that are remembered after we are gone. The simple truth is no one wants to die, but since we all know we will, we all strive to achieve enough so that someone, somewhere will always carry some small piece of who we are, and who we were, inside their consciousness. This yearning for greatness takes many different forms; some people, such as Mother Theresa, express it by taking up the cause of helping others to become great, or to simply give others a chance to do something great with their lives. Other people, such as Adolf Hitler, express this desire by attempting to shape the world into a structure that precludes their ever being forgotten.
History is a harsh judge, and realizing that, while I do greatly enjoy Magic, it is the writing and theory aspects of it that I am best at and enjoy most, so, henceforth, I will not be playing competitive Magic. I'm selling my online cards, as I did so long ago with their paper counterparts, and focusing on spending my "game time" writing and explaining thoughts and details in a depth I could never achieve with the constant need to achieve "results." What do I plan to do with this newfound freedom from slavery to "be the best?" The same things I did last time I quit. Spend more time doing everything else.
I don't know what your "Competitive Magic" debate is, but I suspect that many people face the same conundrum I did. That is, being good at something, and enjoying it, but not being skilled enough to be at the top level, and spending so much time and effort on that one thing that the rest of your life ends up suffering as a result. It is not an easy decision to make, nor should it be, to decide that other things in your life are more important and must take priority, but if you suspect that may be the case, then try taking a week off and ask yourself if you honestly enjoy the grind of the old, or the opportunity for new things, ideas and hobbies more.
Credits
Editing: Dr. Tom and Binary
Pictures: Dr. Tom and Binary
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