Magic the Gathering: You Are What You Eat

Posted by Rampant Coyote on July 10, 2018

My eldest daughter, Rowan, is competing in Magic: The Gathering tournaments with her husband. Just local, low-key tournaments, mind you, but still…

I feel like the geek gene has been passed down. My wife and I were playing MTG when it was the brand-new geek obsession. We had black-border alpha cards. We have cards from the limited edition alpha release. (Until I traded it, I had Birds of Paradise with the original misprint).  We didn’t realize how limited edition the Arabian Nights expansion would be, so we only got a few of those old cards, but we have lots of cards from the Antiquities and Legends expansions. Old stuff. We have only grabbed the newer blocks sporadically, and then usually just a couple of starter packs and some boosters. We haven’t been into it like we were back when it was new.

So maybe we passed down the geek gene.

Or maybe… it started when she was tiny (was she even a toddler then?), and we put her down for a nap at a friend’s house. This friend also played Magic: The Gathering, and collected the cards. She sold one or two of those early collections, complete black-border alpha / beta editions.

Unfortunately, she had one of those collections-in-progress in the same room as the supposedly-sleeping baby Rowan.  She managed to grab the heavy collector binder, turn right to the page with some of the most rare and prized (read: expensive) cards: multi-lands. I think they were called “dual lands” back then. By the time we’d checked on her, she’d managed to eat three cards.  I think she ate a Mox Gem card too. Yep, Rowan had expensive tastes even then. Literally.

We replaced the cards with equivalent ones from our own collection, or at least ones close enough that our friend could trade straight across for the replacements. Those cards were expensive back then, and probably 4x as expensive today, even in “lightly played” condition.

So maybe something stuck. More likely, Rowan’s husband’s love of the game turned into her own interest in participating with him. But I’ll just pretend that it was her early attraction to the cards that helped form her current hobby. I just hope she no longer tries to eat the cards.

 

Filed Under: Geek Life, Retro - Comments: 2 Comments to Read



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