I haven’t played Magic the Gathering since last year, and I haven’t played my favorite form of Magic, booster draft, since December 2023, during Lost Caverns of Ixalan. This month, I’m admitting that I have left the game behind.
I got back into Magic in 2006 through an Ice Age draft my friend Subrata put together, and over the next few years I played a bunch of drafts starting with Time Spiral, as well as playing in a casual multiplayer constructed game (through which I made a couple of long-standing friends). By 2012 I had started listening to podcasts and wondered, “are there podcasts about Magic drafts?” Well, there was one, Limited Resources, which I’ve been listening to since Gatecrash. There are more now, and I’ve listened to a bunch of them over the years.
Honestly I credit Magic podcasts with helping me stay motivated to run, starting around 2015. These sorts of podcasts naturally tend to have energetic hosts who are generally engaging speakers, and the topics are meaty enough to keep my mind engaged and not thinking about how much running sucks.
I maintained a Windows partition on my Macs to play Magic Online, but I dropped it when Magic Arena came to the Mac. During COVID I played a lot of Arena, and got pretty good at draft, if I do say so myself. I even spent a bunch of time playing Standard, and really enjoyed some of the blue-red turns decks when Kaldheim was legal.
The last set I really enjoyed was Dominaria United, but frankly many of the sets in the last few years have had pretty crappy limited environments, being super-aggressive and really not offering a lot of variety or ability to pursue longer strategies. It was the sets of 2023 which really did me in, especially Wilds of Eldraine, which I drafted a bunch (because it came out when I happened to have a bunch of time to play), had a terrible record at, and just thought was incredibly un-fun to play. When Lost Caverns of Ixalan followed it and was also super-fast, I resolved not to play again until they had some sets which were considerably slower. And while that did eventually happen late last year, by that point I didn’t feel like getting back in. I’d moved on.
In addition, now they’re releasing 6 sets per year, 2 or more of them being “Universes Beyond” media tie-in sets, and I just don’t have a lot of enthusiasm for jumping back in when a set’s limited environment comes and goes in just 2 months. I’m sure these sets are going to sell very well (the Final Fantasy set has supposedly set sales records), but they’re not going to sell to me.
The destruction of the Magic Pro Tour and Grand Prix circuit in 2020 also had a small effect, as I’d enjoyed following the personalities and watching a bunch of the coverage of the events. The Pro Tour is largely back, but the Grand Prix are a thing of the past, and three Magicfest events per year is not really a sufficient replacement. It was easy, a decade ago, to get immersed in the larger world of Magic, even if only following it online, and that world mostly doesn’t exist anymore. (I think a lot of this is because Hasbro decided investment in that arm of Magic was not worth the money.)
So, I’m in the process of dropping the Magic podcasts I listened to, including support for them on Patreon. I think it’s a credit to how engaging the game can be, and how good these podcasts are, that I stuck with them for a year and a half without playing. Part of me is going to miss them, but I realize that the time I’m spending on them can be better used on other things.
What other things? Well, I’m going to try audiobooks, especially some longer ones which I might be reluctant to read in print, slow reader that I am. Especially since I realized (thanks to Debbi) that I can download them from the library through Hoopla and Libby. We’ll see if they manage to keep my attention as well as the podcasts. If not, I’ll probably try moving to other kinds of nonfiction podcasts.
So, Magic, it’s been fun – and expensive. I left once and came back, and it’s possible it could happen again. But for now this is goodbye. Maybe it was just time, but I do wonder if I’d have stayed in if they hadn’t printed so many sets in the last few years with limited environments that I just hated.
Now to figure out what to do with all those cards filling half a closet in the home office.