By Gathering We Make Magic
Have you ever played a card game and just felt like something was missing? Well Magic The Gathering, a competitive and sometimes casual card game that was created by Wizards of the Coast in 1993 might have just what you were looking for. Over the last 31 years, the game has expanded past everyone’s imagination coming up with new mechanics and creating new worlds for the players to take part in. Since Magic's inception, there have been new ways to play the game popping up throughout the years. The majority of these are competitive formats that Wizards of the Coast keep up to date with new cards being printed and even keeping up with a banned list ensuring that no one card will dominate any format or at least ensuring to ban the card as soon as it is seen to be dominating any given format. However, Magic does not have to be played competitively the game's most popular format is a casual, one-hundred-card singleton format called commander.
Local game stores are where Magic The Gathering and other card game events take place on a weekly basis. While Magic is not the only card game it does have one of the largest player bases of any card game, with players showing up to game stores on any day of the week to play games of Magic. The term Friday Night Magic began in 1996 as an incentive to get players to play at their local game stores to earn points to hopefully qualify for the next pro tour. Today we know Friday Night Magic as a casual space that anyone can come to and learn how to play the game and more competitive systems have risen for the players that do still have intentions of qualifying for the next pro tour. Today the path to the pro tour is a little more complicated first you need to qualify for the regional championships by winning a ReCQ at a local game store your next step is to do very well at the regional championships if you do well there then you are finally qualified for the pro tour and then can eventually qualify for the world championships that happen once a year.
I have always been a very competitive person growing up I played basketball, football, and even travel baseball until I was thirteen years old. Calling it quits on sports was not an easy decision for me and figuring out my day to day after that was not an easy task. Around March 2014, I found Magic The Gathering and quickly introduced it to my friends so that I would have someone to play with at home. As I am approaching my ten-year anniversary of beginning my Magic journey, I am excited to showcase some of the events that I get to take part in through this course by sharing them through Instagram and Behance.
I believe that I chose Magic The Gathering because of how invested I am into the game, I keep up with the newest sets that come out by reading the spoilers and feel that generally I am more invested than the average player to prepare for the next formats. I am also fairly well connected with my local game store building up my reputation and going there on and off since 2014. My goal with choosing Magic as my niche is to hopefully build a portfolio impressive enough to obtain my first communications internship through them. While an internship would be nice it is not my only goal for 2024, I would also like to become more comfortable with sharing things that I enjoy online but specifically Magic content as many of the professionals for the game create and share their own thoughts and creations for the game.
I put a lot of thought into what I was going to do for this course I knew coming into this semester I would need to pursue a niche or a brand that I would be knowledgeable enough about and also inspire me to create a social media brand around the idea. It had been a few months since the last time I had given Magic any thought but in late January I picked the game back up and it felt like I had landed back in 2014 with so many new ideas and thoughts surrounding the game that enticed me to come back and also inspired me to make it my choice for this course. What inspires me about Magic is the amazing creators that are currently creating content for the game that you can tell just care so much about the game and that the true reason deep down that they are creating Magic content is because they love the game and only want it to live on longer than themselves.
With a little less than ten years of experience under my belt I have had many different experiences playing and interacting with not only the game but the people around me. Fortunately, enough I have been lucky to not have any experience with anyone being exceptionally rude or outright cheating in a match the experiences I wanted to talk about are all good memories. One of my first personal experiences that happened at my local game store was meeting Mr. Kenny and his son Weston, in 2014 Weston and I were about the same age so we made friends quickly and fortunately his dad was a collector, so he had hundreds and hundreds of cards that they were willing to share with me in turn allowing me to attend my first tournaments. I will never forget the kindness that those two showed me and I will always try to remember their patience when interacting with a new player that might need some help to get started.
