Getting Back into the Game

Your 30s are intense. If, like me, you work full-time and had children around when you turned 30, then you will likely empathize with the feeling of a complete loss of personal identity. All the things which you were excited about and considered to be your defining activities and pursuits are supplanted by the routine of: get up stupid-early; get kids ready for the day and drop them off; go to work; pick up kids; feed them dinner and get them ready for bed; pretend that you may accomplish something after the kids are asleep but you are inevitably too exhausted; go to bed. Repeat. Now, there is much fulfillment and meaning to be found in this routine, but it really has the direct effect of completely annihilating your sense of self.

I have heard childrearing described as a 20-year long tunnel that you get sucked into and then pop out the other end one day with a sense of bewilderment asking, “what just happened?” I’m only a quarter of the way through said tunnel, but I surmise that is pretty accurate. So, what does one do about this situation? Well, you need to be very intentional about making space for your passion wherever and whenever possible. Perhaps the most critical action you can take, as we will get to, is to make a scheduled routine for whatever your hobby is, otherwise it will not happen! Time will pass, and you will miss out on the thing(s) you enjoy. You’ll wake up dead one day. Dead, and unhappy! OK, enough staring into the abyss, onto the story.

I have been rather painfully aware of the lack of card games in my life over the last several years, which may seem counterintuitive given the nature of our business. “You make card sorting robots, right? Making card sorter machines must mean you play cards all the time!” No, you’re wrong. It means cards have become a business to me and all the associated fun and whimsy have been thoroughly snuffed out. Well, something needs to change here! I really love and miss playing Magic cards – it’s the whole reason I started this business in the first place. So, starting this year, I have been making intentional efforts to bring cards back into my life, and get back into the game.

Back in February, I made a couple of very basic Magic card decks to introduce my son to the game. Mind you, my son had just turned five in December, so this was arguably a premature maneuver (it does say 13+ on Magic card packaging). Much to my surprise and delight, he grasped the basic premise and – with some coaching – we were able to play a couple of matches to completion. I imagine this is every Magic player / parent’s dream, that we can teach our love for the game to our kids and eventually maybe attend a tournament together.

Alas, the attention span of a five-year-old is short, and the next day Lego was his sole focus. Magic was forgotten. Meanwhile, back at the office, Lorcana fever had taken hold of the TCG Machines staff in a big way. With our CTO regularly attending tournaments, and lunchtime games becoming a common occurrence, it was clear that Disney’s latest foray into the trading card game space was more than a passing fad. Not to be left behind, I picked up a couple of starter decks to see if they might hold my son’s interest a little better than Magic. Lorcana is only 8+, after all. Let a man dream!

At around this same time, I was invited to participate in my first ever Vintage Cube draft with a few buddies, and that was a riot. If you’re not a Magic card player, I appreciate that this means nothing to you – nothing! The idea is that you make decks from a pool of cards curated from only the most powerful cards printed throughout the entire history of the game of Magic. Makes for some insane gameplay. The power-level floor is very high, so you’re just cookin’ with gas all the time. Fortunately, that group of friends seems keen on making Vintage Cube drafts a relatively regular occurrence. Unfortunately, that entire play group is populated by fathers with young children. Coordinating events with your adult male friends is like herding cats at the best of times. Large, man-shaped cats. Layer in fatherhood, and there is no apt metaphor to describe the difficulty.

I digress. So, March rolls around and on Easter I gift the Lorcana starter decks to my son (giving gifts on Easter is a thing my wife’s family did when she was a kid, so now we do it. Seems bizarre to me, but Easter is a pretty strange holiday to begin with, so who’s to judge?). We manage to get through two games, but I can tell he’s not super excited about it (despite the apparent abundance of enthusiasm on display in the below photo). Darn. Those were expensive starter decks. Still, it was fun to learn something new and expose my son to more strategy-based card games. Eventually (fingers crossed), something will stick.

The following month, in April, I managed to get out to not just one, but two events for the latest Magic set release: Outlaws of Thunder Junction (OTJ). The first was a pre-release tournament hosted at Sentry Box Cards. I didn’t do particularly well, 2-2-1 (a perfectly neutral record!), but the set was super fun and I had a blast. The second was, hands-down, the most ridiculous card function I have ever participated in. Through friends of friends, I was invited to join in an OTJ release event hosted at someone’s house. The premise for this event? One person competes in an OTJ draft on Magic Arena, displayed on a ridiculously large television screen, while the other people sit in the same room and mercilessly critique the decisions of the person in the driver’s seat. Also, actual good advice is given. Also, everyone is drinking. Heavily. Very heavily. Many bottles of rum were emptied. We managed to complete three drafts, with a different person drafting each time, at which point it was 2-something in the morning and it was time to Uber home. Amazingly enough, we managed to win seven rounds on our first draft.

Happily, this crew of Arena draft aficionados gets together in this fashion for every new set release of Magic, so this has been a wonderful group to fall in with.

OK, where and when are we? Ah yes, onto May. Given the prevalence of Lorcana being played at work, it seemed a natural junction to set up a company Lorcana tournament. It had long been our intention to do some kind of fun, team-building event each month and a casual Lorcana tournament seemed like the perfect advent for this tradition. So, on May 10th, all 16 of us played through a five-round bracket tournament using a bunch of starter decks (and some of our more experienced players brought their competitive decks as well). It was great fun, I have no doubts we will be doing more of this in the future, though for this month we have elected to go bowling.

To round out May, my group of dad-friends got together for another round of Vintage Cube draft.

Not sure when the next one will be, but excited for it nonetheless! And (hoping that the third time is the charm), I bought a couple of Pokémon “ex Battle Decks” to try out with Casey – ages 6+, this has got to be it, right!? Casey and his friends go through cycles of being interested in Pokémon and Pokémon cards, so I leaned into this in the hopes that it would hold his attention better than Magic and Lorcana. Did it? Yes, it did, though still not with substantial staying power. We played a handful of games over a handful of days – curse you, Greninja! With your 300 HP and your devasting Torrential Slash attack! Alas, now those cards too are sitting on a shelf in Casey’s room, ignored or perhaps forgotten. Sigh.

Now, here we are in June. So far, I have attended another ridiculous rum-drinking Arena draft event for the Modern Horizons 3 (MH3) release, and I’ll be going to an in-person MH3 draft this evening. To keep all this positive momentum going – because 30-something dads with young kids cannot be relied upon for consistency! – I will be planning to attend a draft event every week from here on out. I may need to scale that back to every other week, we’ll see how this goes. But, the important thing is that I’ve institutionalized some Magic back into my life, and in so doing, I’ve reclaimed a little bit of my annihilated sense of self.