Magic has been such a huge part of my life. At my lowest point after moving to a new town, we were gifted a pile of cards from one of my dad’s coworkers. It was the only thing keeping me going and more or less saved my relationship with my dad. It’s still, for me, the best game ever designed and in my 40s with 3 kids I still play and watch hours of content every week. Heck, we even have some hall of famers on our cap sheet at my current startup which somehow fills me with pride.

My son has introduced me to Yu Gi Oh and Pokémon but they both lack the fundamental elegance of MtG. It’s probably not fair to call Magic simple given the size and complexity of the rules at this point, but at the lowest level it really is just about combining simple things to achieve infinite variety. The best cards have short text and chime nicely with the theme of the card and wider story. The worst are like Yu Gi Oh, a page of complex tiny text that tries to do too much.

One of the saddest things is that, as you become better at the game with a deeper grasp of the rules and the cards, you never really recapture that feeling of the early days, when every card was exciting. Draft comes close (picking cards from random booster packs to try and piece together a deck) and Cube certainly captures the nostalgia (drafting with packs made of your favourite or most powerful cards). But still the smell of an opened booster takes you back.

Wizards has made many mistakes over the years and but Magic is extremely healthy and several recent sets have been all-time greats. Both Magic Online (the ugly but fairly complete online client that has _every_ card) and Arena (the more modern client that’s a bit simpler and easier to play but only has recent stuff) are actively maintained so you can play anything, anytime.

My only sadness now is that I never really made it to the pro tour, but there’s always time.