Community News
Community News
Magic and the Nostalgic Mind
John O’Keefe, May 14th 2025
Happy Magic players are all alike; every unhappy Magic player is unhappy in their own way. Having played Magic: The Gathering for more than twenty years, whenever I think about why I’m not playing enough, or why I might not want to play anymore, some part of my brain always reminds me of the early days. Nostalgia is a powerful weapon, and it is very easy to look back on your humble beginnings of our beloved (or beleaguered) trading card game with rose tinted glasses. Don’t worry, this isn’t an article about quitting Magic. I don’t think this is a puff piece editorial for Legacy of the North either, which in case you don’t know, is Ontario’s Premier Legacy Community and Point’s League (which you should all join). And I’m also not writing a Magic themed Anna Karenina, as much as my first draft liked to think it was. No, I wanted to write about my early memories of Magic, during my formative years (the late 90s / early 00s) that got me hooked on Phonics, so to speak, and why those reflections continue to influence how I approach Magic: The Gathering today.
When I started playing Magic, I was a kid, and the game was also in its infancy. Blessedly, no one in my play group (the five or six of us at school who owned between 40-60 cards) was an expert. No one knew all the rules. No one had seen very many cards. Everyone thought the game was cool. Everyone was in a constant state of wonder over seeing some new card or learning about some new combo. ‘Wait, so what happens to all your stuff?’ I’d ask, sitting across the lunch table from my friend Brian, as he demonstrated the Animate Dead / Worldgorger Dragon combo for the second time that week. Yes, I lost that game to a giant Fireball and yes, I’d phone him later that night to ask how I might have responded to it.
We had very little resources and even less knowledge about the game back then. It was great. A kid’s older brother might own some well-loved cards, maybe a couple decks, maybe a repurposed hockey card binder of unorganized Magic cards, but for the most part, we only knew about the cards we owned. It was in this extremely limited environment at school or in our basements, where we collectively made decks and competed against each other.
There would be no higher aspirations than that level of play for many years. And I don’t think this was ever seen as a bad thing. In fact, it was this limitation that forced us to use our imagination. Having graduated from playing D&D, Magic was a faster game, and therefore, we could play during school, and most importantly, have more fun. There was no threshold on our level of fun and imagination back then, the impressionable mind knows no bounds. Whenever I played my Rat deck against Stef’s Elf deck, we migrated our D&D narrations to Magic, verbalizing our spells as characters, like we were doing battle in a dungeon (playing on the old card table in my parent’s basement was essentially like being in a dungeon anyway). I was some wicked black mage who, like the pied piper, controlled all these plague-ridden vermin! Stef was an Elven Sorceress who summoned her legions… to gain a stupid amount of life every game!
Today, Magic is a very different beast. From the endless spoiler season, daily articles about new brews, strategies, and combos, to feeling like you’re always making wishlists, always buying cards, always thinking about how you’ll have to change this or that deck after yet another ban announcement. There is no shortage of Magic content or our access to it. Every player has an opinion about the game, what they love and what they hate, and now we can be very public about those opinions on social media. The reserve list, MSRP, rising card prices in general, secret lair debacle after secret lair debacle, Universes Beyond.
In 2025, Magic is a huge game, a very mature game, and like anything over the age of 30, health issues begin to pop up. There are plenty of reasons why even the more enfranchised players feel disillusioned about the Magic of today… and tomorrow.
For me, I try to keep things in context. Yes, it’s still just a game, regardless of how deeply rooted my memories of it are but it is also an ever-changing game, a living game, if you. Magic remains a new game every time you play it, new cards added every time you open your eyes, new rules every other day. I’m being facetious but also, am I? I once took a break from Magic, my first year University, sold off completely, and focused on my studies. I made it almost two years before I bought it back in, after the release of Zendikar, and hardly recognized the game. There is a reason why no physical copies of the comprehensive rules of the game exist commercially. I have a lot of respect for Judges, but we should also give players their due credit in keeping up with the game. And Magic is a game that has a massive community. The Gathering is still a very relevant aspect of its nature, especially in a post-COVID world. How many times have I moved to a new place, with no real connections, and thought ‘oh, I’ll just go play Magic at a store and make some friends that way.’ Some of my best friends, long, lasting relationships, have been made through playing Magic. Few other IPs are so robust in their offerings. I wouldn’t travel around the world just to play Magic, but I would if I knew my friends were going to be there. But Magic, as a living game, survives on change. Change is an essential aspect of the game’s longevity, as any of their designers will be quick to tell you. That ever-changing nature is something few other cards games, board games, or even video games can effectively offer. As a living game, has always gone a step further by regularly (perhaps too regularly) capturing your imagination through its presentation, its lore, and, as I want to scratch here, its enduring cool factor.
To make my point, we must go back in time…
It’s summer 1999 and I am a pudgy ten-year-old with a sunburn. My mom is taking my brother and sister and I to visit our aunt’s family for the weekend. My aunt’s kids are older than us by a few years and obviously thrilled at having to entertain us for two days. Plus, I’m not in anyone’s good books. The last time we visited, I destroyed Cousin Mike’s Medieval Lego set. Mike is 16 and plays Final Fantasy Tactics on PlayStation. Mike has seen every Back to the Future film several times. He has opinions about films and wants you to know them. Empire Strikes Back is the best Star Wars movie, he asserts. We nod at him, having so far only seen A New Hope (we’re allowed to rent one movie every Friday – Episode 4 was last week). He’s telling us that ‘Mystery Men,’ and ‘Pushing Tin’ were pretty good movies. More nodding.
I’m not saying my cousin was a role model, but he was close. He was certainly an example of things to come. However, the fact that he had nothing but disdain for me was self-evident. He loathed my presence. I get it now, but I don’t think I was trying to be malicious or anything back then. Look, when you give a ten-year-old two bowls of Cinnamon Toast Crunch at 7:00 AM on a Saturday, you get what you deserve. For Mike, the wounds were still fresh – and not just from the Lego incident – but a litany of other, smaller crimes gone unpunished from prior visits.
Again, I get it, babysitting us was effectively passed down to Mike and his older siblings by our parents, so, through the benefit of hindsight, I sympathize. The easiest method of babysitting three kids under 15 was by a series of distractions. And boy, did they try to distract us! We must have watched hours of rented VHS movies during those visits (Empire among them), played a bunch of board games (Risk, Monopoly, D&D), and video games on their family computer (StarCraft, Diablo 2, and The Sims) way past our bedtime (it was summer after all).
I suspect my cousins look back on these visits with a different lens than the nostalgia-for-90s-IP that I’m writing about. I’m sure it wasn’t a chore for them though. I remember plenty of times when they had a few laughs and not just at our expense. The playground at the end of the street was always a good time for playing Spotlight. Staying up late telling scary stories in our sleeping bags. And there was one trip to A&W where no one thought of asking what not to put on their burgers that concluded with us throwing the pickles and tomatoes in the parking lot, and watching the soda make a river of unwanted vegetables float away. The Pickle Parking Lot and Root Beer River, we’d dubbed it.
Anyway, it was during this visit that, because of my sunburn, I had to stay inside while everyone was out playing frisbee. Characteristically bored, I went rooting around in Mike’s room where I eventually discovered a book with vibrant pictures of strange cards. Alone, I sat at his world map office desk (which I would later inherit when he went to university) and was consumed by a myriad of colorful images on each page.
The book was, of course, The Magic: The Gathering Official Encyclopedia Volume 1: The Complete Card Guide, released in November 1996. The encyclopedia, if you’ve never had the good fortune to get your hands on a copy, is quite a treasure. At the time of the book’s publication, Magic was only three years old but had established itself as the premier collectable card game. The book, I suspect, was something of a godsend. Prior to its release, fans had to be resourceful in their quest to acquire cards from the dozen or so sets that had been released up to that point. Good luck using dial up. Magazines such as Inquest, Duelist, and Beckett were great ways to do learn about new cards, decks, and strategies, with long checklists and price information, but having a single volume that encompassed every card (plus pictures!) was vital to say the least.
I had no idea about any of this stuff as I sat at Mike’s desk. I don’t think I knew it was a game, honestly, and I didn’t care that there was a forward by Richard Garfield either (I wouldn’t seriously get into reading novels until next summer, after all, so this experience fell under the ‘picture books are fun’ category). I just liked looking at all the different cards, I liked the art, and I thought ‘this is cool.’
When I was ten years old, I had a ten-year-old brain that was little more than a wet sponge. I realize that we source information on a daily basis from a variety of mediums, but mostly our phones. Back then, I was on information overload from a picture book and loving it. Now when I say wet sponge what I mean is, regardless of my understanding, I soaked up everything I saw and put it somewhere for my brain to make sense of later. I am a visual learner. I seem to understand things most clearly in the form of images, videos, and books. While I guarantee you, I did not know this as I turned the pages of The Magic: The Gathering Official Encyclopedia Volume 1: The Complete Card Guide, my brain did. Looking at the cards on each page, I absorbed information on several different levels, obviously lacking any meaning or understanding, but took it in because it was so cool to look at! And nothing was more immediately cool than fantasy art.
Let’s look at the book. On the cover of The Magic: The Gathering Official Encyclopedia Volume 1: The Complete Card Guide, we’re treated to some fantastic images of cards that few ten-year-olds could resist. Three iconic Magic cards grace the cover, set against a flashy card back, with big letters announcing that over 2000 card images are contained within, are Balduvian Horde, Juzam Djinn, and Black Lotus.
Each of these three cards has their own unique history within the game but it’s their art I’d like to discuss here rather than their utility. Any player can write about what makes Black Lotus the most expensive Magic card. About what makes it the best card ever printed. But what about the card itself on an aesthetic level, removed of its utility?
There is a lot of literature out there on these very topics. I don’t think I’ve got an ounce of the required knowledge or experience to bring anything new to something so well covered. Removed of its history, is the Black Lotus a visually arresting piece of art? No, not really. Blasphemer! Get him! Come on – It’s a black flower against a green background, and there’s some sunlight beaming down on it. It’s archaic, maybe in a deliberate way? Don’t quote me on this, but I’m told Christohper Rush himself said that if he’d known it was going to be such an iconic card, he would have spent a bit more time on it.
Today, and despite these opinions, Black Lotus remains universally known, even among non-players. Ten-year-old me thought it was the least interesting of the three. The art for Balduvian Horde, I felt, was strictly better. Check out these brave Balduvian dudes, with their wintry Balduvian breath. Burly Balduvian brawlers set against barren… Balduvia? Ugh, love it. Who are they fighting? What is their story? (I don’t recall trying to read the card back then).
Anyway, the art. I can’t tell you how much significance I placed on the cover of The Magic: The Gathering Official Encyclopedia Volume 1: The Complete Card Guide and those cards that morning, since, for all I know, these were the first Magic cards I’d ever seen in my life. Ok, these look cool, I probably thought. I have no idea what any of it means. I’m not trying to tell you that this was some profound, life-changing moment for me. It wasn’t. I found this book and quietly flipped through it for an hour or so. I still play Magic to this day and that morning is burned into my memory, so something must have happened.
I don’t know the specifics, but if you look at a normal Magic card with borders, the art itself takes up somewhere between 40-50% of the card. That’s a lot of art on a card that is approximately 2.5 inches by 3.5 inches (6.3 cm by 8.8 cm). For me, it’s where my eyes always go first. Before the name of the card, the cost, the rules text, or any other identifying characteristics of a Magic card are made known to me from a visual examination, it is the art itself that I am drawn to first. Today, there are tens of thousands of unique Magic cards in circulation, and it is not a stretch to say that many, if not all, can be identified by players by their art alone.
Juzam Djinn is another iconic piece of Magic art, gracing as many magazine covers in the 90s as Sarah Michelle Gellar. The art on Juzam depicts a benevolent demon, as only Mark Tedin and his Tedin lines could draw him. Juzam’s emerald, green skin and white eyes! That devilish smile enormous horns straight out of Legend (1985). It’s the fiery red background for me. It’s the little man dangling for all dear life (he’s cooked!). Juzam’s golden nose ring, slay. This Djinn is in charge and you’re lucky he doesn’t eat you! Even as a kid, I knew this card, this demon, was a powerhouse. Once again, I had absolutely no context for what this game was about. I was purely going off what I was seeing, trying to make sense of all this information. And yet, somewhere on that journey, things came together. This guy was a creature, a demon. Black Lotus wasn’t a flower but an artifact. The more I looked the more things came together.
Delving further into The Magic: The Gathering Official Encyclopedia Volume 1: The Complete Card Guide, pattern recognition begins to take hold. Though the onslaught of images continues page after page, I now have some sense of the environment. Colors, symbols, borders, text. They all have the same background, OK, OK. Cards depicting an ice age, the art on the enchantment Snowblind. A green hooded man struggles to press forward in the think of a winter storm. Incredible art! Horrendous card. What I got from it was a guy in green on a green card. OK, makes sense. But then I see Juzam, a malevolent, smiling demon, also green, against an inferno. Black card. What is going on!? The juxtaposition was making my brain go wild! The bubbly black borders of the card looked so old and arcane on purpose. This was something that immediately appealed to my ten-year-old brain, medieval stuff was cool – hence why I had the need to play with and thereby destroy Mike’s Lego set.
Turns out Mike played Magic and, surprisingly, was only too happy to teach me. For those who know me, you know I almost exclusively play black. Black in any format, since it’s the best color, but especially in Legacy. It might therefore surprise you to learn that the starter deck Mike made for me that summer was green. Yeah, I was surprised too. I already knew I liked the dark, evil looking cards (because they’re cool) just from flipping through the Encyclopedia. Green… wasn’t my first choice. But hey, beggars can’t be choosers. It was a free deck of Magic, and he taught me how to play.
The deck was nothing special. It was a 40-card green deck for a ten-year-old in 1999, you can imagine how complex it was. It had Giant Growth from fourth edition (the huge brown mouse set against a dark blue background – bonus points for the little skulls laying at his feet – skulls are super cool) and Shanodin Dryads also from fourth edition (you know the art). It had Llanowar Elves, which needs no explanation but let me tell you, that art still goes hard.
I mean it was a straightforward green deck for those days. You ramped with Wild Growth and Llany until you landed a Craw Wurm or Gaea’s Liege – a combo, if you will, with those Shanodin Dryads or other forestwalkers when your opponent wasn’t on Forests.
Anyway, we probably spent an hour or two going over the basics of the game and it was pretty cordial. Mike might have even had fun, if I recall, as I did not win a single game. Maybe teaching me how to play was one more distraction. Maybe we legitimately had a great time one afternoon indoors during the Summer 1999. All I know is that I learned how to play a new game, and I had fun doing it. Towards the end of that visit, I got to go through his cards and, in addition to the green deck, pick out a card I liked to take back home. Any card of any color. I chose Frozen Shade, entirely based on the art.
Among all my memories of Magic over the years, that introduction remains the clearest.
Today, I’m thirty-six, still playing Magic, and thinking about it as more than just a game. I don’t know how healthy that is, personally, but I think, as with anything you’ve known for so long, it’s easy to identify with and forget it is its own thing. I know how that must sound, but trust me, there are worse things to imagine as extensions of your personality. A fantasy card game that gave me an outlet for self-expression, before I even had a clear sense of who I was, is hardly unhygienic.
These days, I don’t get to play as much but I still love building new decks and collecting cards for some wacky brew I’ll probably never get to play. I think at this point I’m programmed to think about Magic, subconsciously, and brew weird decks in my sleep. I love talking about Magic. How many times has a non-player caught you talking Magic with a fellow player, only to ask, ‘are you two even speaking English?’ There’s something about having that shared language, you can just slip in and out of, when you talk Magic. Where you have this immediate understanding with another person, despite maybe not really knowing them at all.
Magic is also a form of meditation for me. How many times have I zoned out, flipping through binders, card boxes, or scrolling through advanced Gatherer searching for that one card that will fit the theme of some jank I’m building, and completely losing track of time. Countless hours! How many movies or TV shows have I watched while double-sleeving (or unsleeving) commander decks? How many minutes of my life have I simply lost to shuffling… absently staring off into space. Did I pile shuffle already? Better do it just to be safe. Or what about those moments when you and your opponent are simply sitting there silently, waiting for the other to do something because they already said go and you didn’t hear them? Ok, maybe that’s not meditation, but it is very reflective.
More than twenty years playing Magic. For the average legacy player, as I understand it, those are rookie numbers. I was late to the game and, judging from the average age demographic at a typical legacy tournament, I’m on the younger side. We’re not getting any younger. Today, I’m in a place where I’m not playing much legacy, or Magic in general, anymore. That’s life, though I admit, it can cause something of a minor existential crisis – for anyone who’s been playing it for so long, and on a regular schedule, to then suddenly go without it. Sure, like many of you, I’ve tried MTGO and ARENA. Though sadly, Magic without the gathering is no Magic at all.
Presently, I’m treating this time as a period of quiet reflection. I’m meditating, writing, and considering what Magic means to me when I don’t play it. What my collection, these Legacy, Pioneer, and EDH decks I spent so much time (and money) building mean when you’re not using them. Flipping through binders and boxes that may sit on a shelf for the next twenty years. It’s an interesting time to reassess. Consider this scenario yourself, as I believe it is one many aging players may someday find themselves in.
Anyway, I wanted to sit down and write this because it’s important to me to understand what the game means to me at this point in my life, given my history with it. Playing Magic is still fun for me and that’s important. I still look forward to playing in real life. Thinking about Magic is still thrilling. Appreciating Magic’s art, real art, is a wonderful thing. Magic is still cool but until recently I’ve never questioned that quite as often. I can’t prompt ChatGPT to search my memories for me. I needed to write this article as an exercise on why I love the game. If this is what it takes, expect further writing from me, but also expect me across the table from you.
