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The Magic of Gathering

How a fantastical card game became my unexpected anchor in a chaotic world.

A close-up photograph of hundreds of colourful Magic: The Gathering playing cards stacked on each other across a flat surface.
Magic: The Gathering was created by a mathematician in 1993. In the decades since, it’s boomed into a billion-dollar industry. Its players have also become more diverse. Photo via Shutterstock.
Mel Woods 17 Jan 2025The Tyee

Mel Woods is an award-winning Vancouver-based writer, editor and content creator. They are a senior editor at Xtra Magazine.

In the five years since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, in-person connection has been hard to come by for many of us. But over the past few years, I’ve found connection — and, more importantly, reconnection — in an unlikely place. Competitive Magic: The Gathering.

Yeah, I’m talking about the 30-year-old nerd card game of spells and shiny cardboard. But over the past year, I’ve travelled across Canada to compete in high-level tournaments, spent more money than I’d like on those shiny pieces of cardboard, and made a wealth of new friends and rekindled old ones, all through slinging some imaginary spells and cardboard across the table from someone else.

Later this month I’ll fly to Ottawa for the Canadian regional championship, where I’ll compete alongside a few hundred of the best Magic players in the country for a top prize of US$5,000 and a qualification for the Magic: The Gathering World Championship.

Sure, Magic is not as trendy as pickleball or as high-stakes as competitive poker, but travelling to these tournaments and immersing myself in the world of competitive Magic has been a surprising balm and anchor to me in a tumultuous world over these past few years.

A magical trajectory

First created by mathematician Richard Garfield and published by Wizards of the Coast (of Dungeons & Dragons fame) in 1993, Magic is both a collectible card game and a gaming system, with a multitude of ways to play that vary in intensity and structure.

While for much of its history it was seen as the realm of misogynistic sweaty nerds in basements, the game has boomed into a billion-dollar industry over the past 31 years. It has been acquired by Hasbro and launched high-profile partnerships with Lord of the Rings and the software voice bank Hatsune Miku.

Along the way, the player base has also diversified, with thriving communities within the game for women, racialized folks and LGBTQ2S+ players.

Celebrities like Post Malone and True Blood actor Joe Manganiello have gotten in on the action. Even alt-pop icon Caroline Polachek recently posted about playing Magic to her Instagram story.

I attended MagicCon Las Vegas this past October alongside more than 15,000 of the game’s fans.

And if you want a true measure of just how mainstream it’s gone, 2025 will see the release of a highly anticipated tent-pole expansion in partnership with Marvel.

A busy interior space is set up with long rows of tables at which people are seated playing Magic: The Gathering. The high black ceilings carry bright white lights. A high black banner to the left of the frame reads 'MagicCon Command Zone.'
Thousands of players gathered for MagicCon Las Vegas this past October to meet, play and connect over the game. Photo by Mel Woods.

I first learned how to play Magic in 2017 while hosting an overnight radio show on Calgary’s CJSW 90.9 FM. My friend Marta, the station’s program director at the time, taught me and some other staffers to play using shoeboxes full of old cards our station manager had donated.

Late at night between our shows, we’d build decks from the loose cards and casually play back and forth as we figured out the complex rules of the game. I connected to the game immediately, enjoying its seemingly endless possible ways of playing, the collectability of the cards and the engaging storylines.

When I moved to Vancouver after that magical radio summer, attending Magic events at local game stores like Rain City Games and Magic Stronghold helped me find my footing in a new city. I made friends in the local community and eventually joined a WhatsApp group and subsequent Discord server for organizing meetups at coffee shops or the common rooms of apartment buildings.

Throughout grad school I would alternate my nights working as a server at a comedy club with taking transit to one game store or another to play Magic. By late 2019, I was attending two to three Magic events a week.

Then the COVID-19 pandemic hit, and things came to a halt. It turned out that a ban on social gathering also includes Magic: The Gathering.

So, much like the rest of my life, my Magic life moved online, to the game’s digital version, MTG Arena.

While I still had the joy of the gameplay, I immediately missed the connection and the constant activity of meeting strangers and making connections in person. Of making small talk between rounds, and asking someone about the cool art on their play mat.

I missed, well, the gathering of Magic: The Gathering.

A stable presence in a tumultuous world

As things slowly reopened, so too did my connection to Magic. But it took on a new flavour since the me that came out of the pandemic — like many of us — was very different from the me who went in.

In those early pandemic years of the 2020s, I went through a mass layoff from my job at HuffPost Canada, came out as non-binary and started medically transitioning not long after. My now-fiancée and I started dating at the very start of the pandemic, and by the time things really started to reopen in earnest, we had started living together.

Even as I found my footing in a new job and personal identity, things still felt shaky all around me — something certainly not helped by geopolitical instability, the collapse of social media platforms and some big questions about my chosen profession of journalism.

But you know what was stable and familiar in this brave new world? A Friday night Magic event at my local game store. The steady release of new cards and new sets and new events.

So, as soon as the stores reopened and events started back up, I threw myself back into the fray with even more gusto.

I spent hours every week reading message boards and articles about the evolving meta game of any given format. I listened to podcasts, and I talked with friends about what cards to put into my decks, or how to optimize my play.

And then I started to get invested in competitive play. While you can play Magic casually with friends at your local game store (or kitchen table, or local community radio station), you also can play Magic for real stakes and real money against strangers at tournaments around the world.

A large signboard with black text and white and orange colourways charts a map towards competitive play for Magic: The Gathering players. The sign is titled 'From local hero to world champion' and features a flow chart that demonstrates the trajectory from 'qualifier' to 'world championship.'
A banner at the fall 2023 regional championship in Calgary showing how players can compete in local events to win invites to regional championships that then lead to the game’s marquee events. Photo by Mel Woods.

There is a sprawling international infrastructure for competitive Magic ranging from events at local game stores through regional championships — organized in Canada by Toronto/Montreal game store Face to Face — and beyond.

Do well at a regional championship and you can qualify for the pro tour and the world championship, basically the Olympics of Magic.

Last year, the world championship in Las Vegas featured a US$1-million prize pool.

My competitive career started in earnest in early 2023, when I participated in an online league for players of marginalized gender identities (co-founded by Vancouver’s own Haiyue Yu, who I still play regularly with at Rain City Games).

The stakes for this online tournament were low — a $10 entry fee and eight weeks of playing one match a week online through the game’s digital client against someone else in the league.

Ask anyone who’s ever played a board game with me, and you’ll know I’m a deeply competitive person. I love to try hard at something and invest my time and energy into getting better at it.

So, I tried hard, and somehow managed to place high enough in that online tournament that I qualified for the in-person Canadian regional championship in Calgary in September 2023.

Many people are seated across from each other at a long row of tables fitted with black tablecloths. They are playing the fantastical card game Magic: The Gathering at a local competition. Mel Woods, the author, is smiling at the camera to the right of the frame. They are wearing a dark grey ball cap, a black graphic T-shirt and a silver necklace.
The author, right, plays Magic: The Gathering at the Vancouver CommandFest in May 2024. Photo by Kar Yung Tom.

Compared with social formats like the super popular Commander, the competitive scene usually revolves around much more streamlined “Constructed” 60-card decks across various formats in competitive paper play.

I chose a relatively affordable deck, “Mono-White Humans,” that suited my playing style, full of little creatures that attack fast. It wasn’t a top-tier deck in the meta game at the time, but it was a respectable choice and felt familiar enough to pick up.

So I sleeved up my little guys and flew to Calgary with little expectation for myself. And then through that magic combination of luck, skill and good vibes, I managed to make the second day of competition, rank in the top 64 and win $150.

But arguably even better than my tournament result was the space around it.

A set of colourful Magic: The Gathering cards sits on a colourful cardboard mat featuring a colourful graphic with purple, blue and grey.
The author’s Mono-White Humans Pioneer deck, used at the Calgary regional championship in September 2023. Photo by Mel Woods.

Rewriting the ‘Old Boys club,’ and centring joy and friendship

Over that weekend in Calgary I spent long nights catching up with the friends I stayed with, one of whom had also transitioned in the time since we’d last seen each other.

Marta and I went for dinner, and she came with me to the convention hall for the second day of competition to play in some side events. We reflected on those late nights at CJSW and how we’d gotten from there to here.

And while I’d been somewhat terrible keeping up with everyone since my move to Vancouver and the pandemic, competitive Magic gave me the impetus to go back to Calgary, to visit and to reconnect with these people I hadn’t seen in years.

And I think one of the best things about competitive Magic for me as a hobby is that I’m not actually that good at it. I’ll never be the best at it — and I’m OK with that.

Making the top 64 of that tournament was a big deal to me. While I fantasize about the world championship and the pro tour, I don’t really think I have the big computer brain required to really be good at Magic; after all, I’m an arts major who got concussed last year.

But being just good enough to qualify for these events has given me an excuse to travel across Canada and rekindle these bonds. It’s given me something to strive towards and work on, when so many other aspects of my life might seem unstable or out of my control.

Shortly after Calgary last year, I went to another event in Toronto, where I capitalized on combining a work trip with another big Magic tournament. When I returned to Vancouver, I started regularly playing local qualifier events, hungry to be able to attend the next regionals.

I subsequently did, travelling to Montreal in May 2024 — my first time in the city and a chance to connect in person with various friends from online — and back to Calgary in November 2024, where once again I stayed with my friends Isaac and Alex and nostalgically reflected with Marta about playing at CJSW.

Playing competitively has even helped me build new bonds. Several of my local friends also played in the most recent regional championship in Calgary, and it was fun to track not only my own progress in the tournament but theirs as well, and get dinner together after a long day of playing.

I’ve also started playing in competitive team events, a collaborative structure where you work together, alongside friends I made playing at my local game store.

My partner affectionately calls the pair of them, along with the 40-plus-person Discord server where we organize events with other local players, my “Magic boys.”

I joined a Discord testing team server called Sanctum of All, specifically targeted at welcoming women and gender-diverse people, who may be traditionally marginalized from the “Old Boys club” of the competitive side of the game.

From there I’ve been able to watch players like Jason Ye and Rei Zhang reach the highest echelons of the game and rewrite the image of who a competitive Magic player can be.

At the most recent regional championship in Calgary, I even got paired against another player from the server from Montreal, and got to game against someone I’d only ever interacted with online. (I won, but it was close!)

Later this month I’ll be in Ottawa for another Canadian regional championship. I’m excited to stay with my friends Abi and Ben and their two perfect cats.

I’m excited to sleeve up my deck and try to make the top 64 again, or do even better.

And after that I’m already qualified for the next one in Montreal this spring, where I can’t wait to play the game, sure, but also eat bagels and catch up and meet up with friends.

And then there will be more tournaments and more friends and more joy.

Above all, I’m excited for the gathering.  [Tyee]

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