I’m a senior in college and I’m counting down the days until graduation. Graduate school – and by proxy the rest of my life- looms large in the fall. My college girlfriend encourages me to submit an article about the game I spend so much time on to a website that takes open submissions. I have a reputation as a strong writer and decided to go for it. My article ends up on StarCity Games and I am elated.
Six months later I’m in graduate school and questioning everything about my career path. My site supervisor doesn’t seem to like me very much and isn’t giving me opportunities to do my assigned work or learn on the job. My college girlfriend now has an ex in front. I have no friends but I know about a website where I can write about Magic.
Seventeen years later I am sixteen years into my career in a position that the same site supervisor thought was a “wrong fit” for me. Happily married with a wonderful family, my tenure at ChannelFireball – the fourth website I’ve written for, has come to an end.
I started my journey as a Magic writer on a lark. For about a year I had been heavily invested in the Pauper Deck Challenge on Magic Online. It was the spring of 2006 and the rest of my life was waiting across the threshold of graduating from college. I had a Master’s program all lined up and a rather light workload. I spent my days helping friends with their final papers. I had a reputation as a strong writer and a good editor. The fact I had been writing for years as part of my English (General Language and Rhetoric, major code 123) certainly helped hone my voice, but it all started with my dad.
My dad is a salesman and a musician. He and my mom still live in the house I grew up in and the basement is my dad’s workshop. It’s where his office is and where he endlessly tinkers with guitars, refurbishing them and getting them “just right.” It’s also where his library used to be because in addition to those things my dad is a voracious reader and would often come home from work trips with another dime store paperback to add to his collection. His library was where I first learned about Roger Zelazny and the world of Amber; where I first saw the art of Steve Ditko and the tales of Dr. Strange shrunk down to the size of a large index card.
When high school came around and I needed help editing my reports dad would come around with his red bic felt tip and tear me to absolute shreds. There was more than one project I worked on where I am positive the number of drafts produced by the family printer killed a small tree. I can remember at least one time where he made edits that I simply refused to make because I was tired and wanted to go to bed. Now he’ll occasionally read my articles and tell me how he doesn’t understand a word of it, but it’s clear I know what I’m talking about.
Before high school my dad would pick me up after Friday Night Magic. I would take the subway to Neutral Ground and play sealed deck. Occasionally I would do okay but more often than not I was just there to sling cardboard and be around the store. I became one of the many “little kids” that were known in the store. At some point in the evening I would go to the payphone in the back and ask dad to come pick me up. He would drive into Manhattan from Brooklyn, find a parking spot outside and one in the shop where he would read a book until I was ready to go home.
None of this would have happened if not for him. I love you dad.
I was fortunate to have grown up during the height of written Magic content. Not only were there a ton of places to read about the game, but the prose was so varied. There was high theory and foundational concepts sharing the masthead with John Friggin’ Rizzo. Authors had freedom to link all manner of nonsense in their pieces, from music to other more questionable subject matters. Some of these are best left in the past but there is an allure and a charm to those days beyond nostalgia.
It is very easy for me to look back and say that era was better. It’s harder to recognize that the current model benefits more people, albeit in a different way. Back then there were multiple websites but they only had so many slots for writers and they tended to go to people who had proven themselves in a very specific way – high level tournament success. I don’t need to tell you that back then the majority of writers were male presenting.Who knows how many voices we never heard because they couldn’t spike a PTQ? Now while the top flight opportunities are not as abundant we exist in an era where your access to a car and the East Coast of the United States matters far less than your skill. You no longer need to be a generalist who knows the right people – you can be a specialist who has a blog or a Patreon and has the chops and the ability to access Arena or Magic Online. We may have lost something but we have found a bigger world. After almost 15 years in the old world I find myself entering the current day and age.
There is a sense of freedom now. I no longer have deadlines, something I am sure my family will appreciate.
I met my now wife online. I had moved back to Brooklyn for a new job. Spending my first years after graduate school in the suburbs was hell on my social life. Many of my friends were entering the stable years of their life and I was largely on my own for building a new social network. After a few months of not much success I was going to give up on dating for a summer and decided on one final date. Turns out it was the last first date I ever went on.
I didn’t hide that I was a gamer from her. She thought I meant video games and so when I started telling her about Magic it was clear she did not quite understand it (although she did try, looking up Crystal Shard and Chittering Rats). We’ll be married ten years in May and she never once complained when I had to break out the laptop on a vacation to try and finish an article or when I had to stay up late to meet a deadline. She still doesn’t understand the game but that doesn’t much matter. I love you Jaclyn.
Magic is special to me because it gave me a place to exist. Writing gave me a way to express myself. It was a digital third space for me, just like the punk and ska forums I frequented in college which have been absorbed by the omnipresence that is Reddit. The enshittification of the internet has fractured so many things but I hope that as long as there is Magic there is a way we can find each other and share our love for the game and what it means to us.
Where does that leave me? I still have a lot to say about the game, whether it’s Pauper or Commander or something else. I was lucky that over the span of my career I was often afforded the opportunity to write about whatever I wanted, as long as it was related to Pauper. Editors often gave me assignments outside my wheelhouse and while some of them landed, quite a few didn’t. Still I managed to stay a digital ink stained wretch for a decade and a half. In other words, I’m not going anywhere but I am going to use my newfound temporal flexibility to try some new things. Maybe I’ll link to music videos, like I always wanted to, or work on longer form pieces. Perhaps I’ll help the next generation of writers or maybe I’ll just focus on nine-to-five a bit more.
Before I close this piece, here are some things I want to leave you with:
- There’s no such thing as a guilty pleasure in music – like what you like and don’t apologize for it
- Let’s (Fuckin’) Go Mets!
- Fascists deserve to be punched
- Look out for each other because sometimes we are all we have
- Magic is for everyone
And now, in the grand tradition of my forebearers, some props and slops
Props: Mom, Dad, Stacey, Jaclyn, Simon, the Pithy Drillers, Mike, Mike, Paige, Brian David-Marshall, Mike Flores, the Reverend Toby, The Ferrett, Joshua Claytor, Steve Sadin, Lauren Lee, Cedric Phillips, Adam Styborski, Evan Erwin, Huey Jensen, Reid Duke, James Keating, Emma Partlow, Corbin Hosler, Gavin and my colleagues on the Pauper Format Panel, the entire Fat Cat EDH crew, the judges and scorekeepers who made my coverage gigs a delight, anyone and everyone who took the time to read my articles and reach out with some kind words
Slops: Anyone who has ever made anyone uncomfortable in any Magic space. Kindly fuck entirely off
“Well so, we keep on/No one else to blame, going down in flames/Saw it coming all along”
NerdtotheCore 