What the Cards Reveal
Illustration “Card Smarts” by Liam Toebbe Copyright tTR
“Hey Doc, want to go to a tourney?” Jed asked over the phone.
“What tourney?” I countered, knowing I was in for an adventure.
“It’s a qualifier for an international tourney in Japan. Top eight get first and maybe second round byes. They also get their airfare covered. And bragging rights, of course.”
“Where’s the qualifier?”
“Atlanta. I’m taking the school van, and four other guys. You’d make six. We have a hotel already, splitting the cost. We leave on Friday, play all Saturday, return Sunday. Come on Doc, you need to do this.”
“But I don’t even have a deck.”
“We have an extra deck for you--Death Cloud.”
I would soon hear the words “Death Cloud” raised in the tourney room with surprising frequency, sometimes from an opponent in a strangled voice, sometimes in triumph from the Death Cloud deck-player. I would say the words myself in exultation several times that Saturday. On that day, my faith in our culture’s youth rose several notches.
Jed was a former student at the college where I taught. He had begun a chess club, which morphed into a collectible card game club after I showed up displaying a handful of Magic the Gathering cards and asked, “Hey, have you guys seen these?”
That regional qualifier tourney involved 615 participants. I was in dismay at the turnout. A few years later I attended a pre-release tournament, when new cards were introduced into the play sets. Over two thousand players showed up, and the demand was so great that the organizers ran out of boxes of new cards to sell to the participants. At the Atlanta tournament, we met in a large conference hall, early that Saturday morning, mostly young guys in blown-out jeans and t-shirts, none too persnickety about appearance nor hygiene, each hopeful at the prospect of winning the tourney, each carrying a deck of no more than sixty cards, no less, each deck consisting of roughly one-third lands that power the spells, another thirty-six or so cards being magic spells, some conjuring imagined creatures that battle for the player, some as enchantments, some as instant spells, some as sorceries, some as artifacts. The mix depends on how the deck is intended to work, the combinations or strategies of card deployment.
Once the available card sets are established, good players become familiar with the most efficient card collections, yielding what is known as the meta-game. Some decks are “aggro,” meaning they rely on a kind of exponential growth curve of damage-dealing, while others are mid-range in that they don’t rely on speed as much as durability, or a player might choose to play a control deck that seeks to frustrate the other player’s strategy by use of counter spells and delay tactics. My favorite tended to be the combo-deck, which involved getting certain special cards in play that, like a time-bomb, would explode when they were brought together. The best players learn what the percentage chances of victory are when one deck archetype is played against another.
Back in 1993, Richard Garfield and associates double-mortgaged their homes to produce enough capitol to generate six million magic cards for this collectible card game. Garfield had been using cards to teach probability, and realized that if the cards were used in a game context, the probabilities would really matter for the players. They called their company Wizards of the Coast, hailing from the Seattle area. They hoped to have enough sales to make and market another set of cards six months later. They sold out at their first exhibition, forcing a rushed production of new cards and reprints of the first set.
There were other card games and different ones to follow. Tactical Strategy Rules (TSR), the makers of the Dungeons and Dragons role-playing game, produced the Spellfire and Blood Wars card games. Media Factory produced a Japanese-origin game named Pokemon, based on a popular hand-held video game, and there was also the very popular Yu-Gi-Oh card game, produced by Konami. These last two were the basis for successful animated television series in the late 1990s and early 2000s. In most such card games, the players face off in a duel, a competition between card-wielding strategists. Each player begins with a pre-established number of life-points. It is the goal of the contestants to reduce the competition’s life-points to zero. Any who have played video games are familiar with life/health counters that they track in order to keep their avatars ‘alive’ in the game.
The Atlanta tourney was one of perhaps a dozen that year, sprinkled across the globe. In small towns everywhere, smaller less-formal tournaments are held almost every Friday night. Larger cities might have several such diversions happening simultaneously. For a lot of young folk—predominantly male—this is the high point of the week.
It is easy to dismiss this kind of thing as a wasteful manifestation of popular culture. What I’d argue though is that the popularity of such activities is a fact of our society, and it has not gone away. It is thirty-eight years since Magic the Gathering cards were introduced. D&D, a pencil and paper fantasy game, at one time counted six million players, having begun with an early version of published rules, named Chainmail, in 1976, forty-five years ago. Magic the Gathering was so successful that the company bought out TSR, and later Hasbro bought out the Wizards of the Coast. There is money at stake. Many comic book stores found it a lifesaver to be able to sell the cards. One clerk asked me, “So, you have been assimilated?,” echoing a Star-Trek mime involving the unstoppable Borg menace.
Scoff if you like, but it is impressive to see this amount and degree of effort among the youthful rabble, even if it is in a game context. I was not a great player—easily distracted, and unable to track all of the small details that contribute to good game play. The better players are impressive. They know how to plan for what cards are drawn from the top of their own decks, and some are rather good at predicting what will come up from the opponents’ decks. Probability with teeth. There is plenty of strategy involved. My Death Cloud deck featured a card by that name that when played would knock out both players’ creatures and lands, reduce life totals, and force discarding cards. It would upset the other player’s plans and worked well with other cards in the Death Cloud deck that could return from the graveyard, or otherwise bounce back. My deck had those cards, while my opponents’ decks generally did not. Advantage, me. Note that this kind of gaming context had its origin in strategic war gaming, but was created by military folks whose ‘game’ involved real military forces.
In general, these card game players exercise impressive cognitive ability. The game demands focus, concentration, strategy, and luck (which can be enhanced by subtle play protocols). Out of the 615 participants, I came in 229th. I feel that for an old guy who hadn’t spent most of his income and hours and hours of practice with my deck, I did pretty well that day. It was also satisfying to be included by younger peers who, because of my extra decades, only treated me as a slightly defective friend. Even so, it is humbling to be badly defeated by a scruffy kid who you otherwise would think lacks the intellect and experience to be any threat at all. That is what I’m writing about here: the underlying talent of these game enthusiasts.
So what skill-sets do these gamers otherwise possess? They are able to keep track of a large number of variables. They are not multi-taskers in that during game play they have one objective that happens to involve probability determination, foreseeing potential future outcomes, and planning for different changes in the play conditions. I would trust them to be excellent at all sorts of logistical problems. They are not shy of competition, but are fairly quick to admire excellence in others. Veteran players are well-versed in the heights of victory and the lows of defeat. Every game is a reset. They learn quickly, are impressively adaptable. They have memorized a dizzying amount of card data—names of cards, types of cards, card play mechanics, game play protocols, rules of engagement, and on and on. Any single card will have a large variety of information printed on it. A creature card, for example, has a name (for example, “Rabid Wombat”), a type (Summon Creature), a casting cost (two green mana and two of any color), a color suite affiliation (Green), an attack strength index and a defense strength index (0/1), and various abilities, such as flying, or come-into-play effects, or safety from spell attacks (Rabid Wombat gets +2/+2 for each creature enchantment placed on it). Good players have absorbed a huge amount of information, suggesting they have improved memory capability out of the exercise of practice. Players are not passive observers—they must be actively engaged and fully committed to the game play.
Perhaps one of the more subtle aspects of the gamer is the question of socialization. These folks have been generally classed as ‘nerds’ and are not usually embarrassed by this label. They have delved into the rather pervasive culture of the fantastic, becoming versed in all things magical: Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter, Walking Dead, science fiction, Star Wars, Star Trek, American Gods, Firefly, Studio Ghibli, the Marvel superhero movie franchise, Conan the Barbarian, the X-files…in short, a lot of what has been produced for entertainment consumers since the 1950s, and even earlier. According to Gary Allen Fine, these people join “social worlds” of common interest, and negotiate their involvements among peers in various game contexts.
These impressive card-playing experts provide a contradiction to the tendency for older generations to look down on the younger ones in judgment, and find them wanting. I have peers in that older collection of baby-boomers who express despair at what the youth are doing, how they aren’t measuring up, why they are so slack and ineffectual compared to us. For those who feel such unease, I suggest they try matching skills with the gen-xers and gen-aughts and millennial gen-ys. You can borrow my Death Cloud deck. Good luck with that! After a few rounds, tell me just how feeble you think these gamers are.
References for Further Reading
Fine, Gary Allen. Shared Fantasy: Role Playing Games as Social Worlds. U Chicago P: 2002.
Riggs, Ben. “The Story of D&D Part One: The Birth, Death, and Resurrection of Dungeons and Dragons,” 26 Dec. 2017. https://geekandsundry.com/the-story-of-dd-part-one-the-birth-death-and-resurrection-of-dungeons-dragons/
Wizards of the Coast. “The History of Magic.” https://magic.wizards.com/en/content/history
Scott D. Vander Ploeg, Ph. D., is an early-retired professor of Humanities who taught English Composition, American Literature, English Literature, World Literature, Film Studies, Shakespeare, Chinese Culture and Literature, and Peace Studies. He was named Kentucky college Teacher-Of-The-Year in 2009, and was elected Executive Director of the Kentucky Philological Association. He has recorded essays for a regional NPR affiliate for a decade, and later wrote a column about the arts and letters for a small-town newspaper. He is a Sifu in Yang short-form Tai Chi, a jazz drummer, and an amateur thespian.
(c) 2021 Scott D. Vander Ploeg