I have no steady interests, only recurring obsessions. And living in Detroit now as an adult seems to reactivate long-dormant ones – obsessions, that is. It might be that a place naturally lends itself to the playing out of different impulses. I’m always obsessed with something, and if you’ve been reading my letters for a while you know that that thing can be pottery or kendo or tacos or meandering walks or the latest draft of my manuscript. Obsession for me is like a vine; it simply grafts itself the fenceposts of whatever’s around.
For several years when I was a teenager I played the card game Magic: The Gathering. I wasn’t one of those kids who’d bring the cards to school (I felt far too self-conscious to do that), but I’d take my long white boxes over to my friend Ken’s house and we’d play in his basement, sometimes climb over the wall in his backyard to go to Gamers’ Inn, a card/board game shop in the strip mall on the other side. After that it’s a familiar story: we moved on to other games, other interests; the cards languished in my parents’ basement for years until they were given away or sold at a yard sale or thrown away with a bunch of stuff that time a pipe burst and the basement flooded.
I’d more or less forgotten about Magic until I found out that DB and some of his friends still played. In the months before I left New York I’d join them on occasion, and we played again on my recent visit too, cases of beer in the fridge, bags of charcoal for the barbecue later that night, a form of some ancient male bonding, except instead of crouching in wait with bows and arrows for a herd of elk, we’re at an apartment in Brooklyn conjuring elves and goblins on a dining room table. But this last time it was different, this last time something took hold.
One of the things that sets Magic apart from other strategic games is that in poker or chess the pieces are fixed, but in Magic, a new set of cards comes out every few months. Games impart their values through their mechanics, and one of the primary mechanics of Magic, even before you really start playing, is assembling your pieces. Building your deck. Deckbuilding teaches economy, probability, thematic resonance. A deck has sixty cards, is a balance of “spell” cards and resource cards that you need in order to play the spells. You can have a deck of more than sixty cards, but each added card makes it less likely that you’ll draw your other cards. What I remember most about playing the game as a kid isn’t even playing the game, it’s the countless hours spent crafting decks, shuffling them, drawing opening hands over and over, adding and removing cards, sifting through 25-cent boxes at Gamers Inn for the pieces of a new deck idea. What I see now is that it was in a way preparing me to write and edit novels, to start with one or two scenes and follow them through to an entire book, and to edit that book down to only what is necessary, to only the strongest components, the ones that work best with each other. Magic for me was competitive storytelling.
