tabletop gamingD&D || galileo campaign | strixhaven resources
Cyberpunk || ren notes
Koriko || sumire's journal
marin the gatheringAnd it's starting to happen a bit, although this new old special interest stemmed from D&D, so I can always use D&D to engage with it too.
It's Magic: The Gathering.
I learned to play MTG around the same time I first joined my brother's D&D group, so this was probably anywhere from 2004-2006. I know I was really into it and would not miss our Friday night games - anytime the DM was too busy to prep, we played MTG instead. And on D&D nights, we played during breaks, while waiting for other members to arrive, and so on. When I started work at Kino in 2006, I brought my cards to work to work on my decks during my break time sometimes. One of my colleagues asked me to teach her to play, and then she got hooked, too.
She started dating another guy at work, who's already played MTG (he quit a few years after this, but I have seen him on the local D&D forums so I guess he's a TTRPG-er too), so we soon spent a lot of lunch breaks playing against one another.
The two of them joined local tournaments and stuff, so they got really competitive, and I think that was around when I played less, because that isn't my scene. Around this time, our D&D games were also slowing down because of the transition from 3.5e to 4e and the fact that everyone in the group except me and my cousin were unhappy with 4e.
[Side note: I maintain that 4e was ahead of its time.]
So, we played less MTG, and less D&D... until at some point we just stopped. And while we've tried to restart a D&D game every couple of years since, I think none of us went back to MTG. I even sold/gave away all of my cards except my decks, which I regret so much now. (Seriously. I am a hoarder; what possessed me to give away my cards??)
And then I started DM-ing a Strixhaven game in late 2022. Strixhaven is one of the settings in MTG's Arcavios plane, and the more I played in this setting, the more I read up on all the MTG lore I've missed since I stopped playing.
Around the second half of 2023, I bought Strixhaven cards with zero intention of playing again. I just liked the art, and loved them as collectibles. The fact that they were useful as references in our D&D game was a plus point. Then a friend gave me some cards from his Forgotten Realms set. Earlier this year, I met with a local distributor about bringing D&D and MTG to the store where I work, and I said "I'm collecting again, but I don't want to play anymore."
Then... I listened to an episode of Asians Represent where they did a critique on the Kamigawa: Neon Dynasty set, and they talked about playing MTG again, and it made me want to build a deck. I already had enough cards for one - I just needed some lands maybe! So I ordered a bundle of random bulk, and... I guess this is my life now, again.
In a way, it feels nice to circle back to MTG which always did come hand-in-hand with D&D to me a long time ago. I do regret giving away all of my old cards - I thought I was done with MTG, but I think now that I was just done with hyper-competitive MTG. Rather than building decks that are highly optimized, these days I'm more drawn to building decks that tells stories, or based on my favourite characters and lore within the Magic multiverse.
As someone obsessed with lore, MTG lore is just too good for me to leave it behind.
