Magic: The Gathering turns 25 this year. Rather than fading into obscurity, the original collectible card game is still going strong. But if you haven’t been playing it regularly for the last decade or so, it’s easy to feel like you’ve been left behind.

My own history with Magic goes way back to 1994, when I received a copy of the revised gift set. I remember that it came with a pair of 60-card decks, a bag of glass counters and an instruction manual. I played it a bit with my girlfriend at the time, and I remember both of us marveling at the idea of a complex tabletop game made up of nothing more than a couple of stacks of cards. It was an elegant novelty, but after a few days we tired of it and put it aside.

In the interim, Magic kept gaining momentum. That gift set also appreciated spectacularly. It now sells as a collectible for about $1,000.

Magic has grown into a juggernaut and made the game’s developer and publisher, Wizards of the Coast, into a powerful force in the hobby games industry. Along the way, Magic cleared a path for many things we take for granted in the world of gaming. If you play Hearthstone, Gwent or any other digital card games, if you like getting random loot from sealed crates, or if you enjoy playing any number of board games that utilize a “deck building” or a “drafting” mechanic, then you owe a debt to the developers of Magic: The Gathering.

But, for those of us who stepped away from the game, how do you get back in?

Every year that I go to Gen Con, the nation’s largest convention for tabletop games, there’s practically an entire airplane hangar filled with people slinging cards, but it’s just not a place that I’ve ever felt welcome. Everyone seems to have a dance partner at those events, and rarely is there a place to simply learn a few moves.

Making things more complicated, Magic has changed a lot in the last 25 years. Flipping through the odd deck of cards, there’s more than just land and creatures and enchantments. Now there’s dual lands and artifacts, vehicles and pilots, double-sided cards, and even planeswalkers — nonplayer characters who will fight at your side.

So what’s the lapsed Magic player to do? And how is it that Hasbro’s team at Wizards of the Coast (WotC) has kept the franchise going for the last quarter century?

Yer a wizard, Charlie

To learn more, I reached out to Gavin Verhey, a former professional Magic player and now a member of the research and development team at WotC. His small group comprises the brain trust that makes Magic what it is.

He said that the hardest thing to do was simply step into your game store and ask for help.

“Magic itself is pretty friendly. It won’t bite you,” Verhey said. “If you go to your local game store, we have what are called ‘welcome packs,’ which are totally free. You can just ask for one and the store owner will hand it over. Inside are two decks. You can find a friend or anyone that’s interested and you can just sit down and play. All the stuff you need to learn is right in there.”

Sure enough, my local game store had its fair share of welcome packs behind the counter. Inside were two 30-card decks. They even came pre-shuffled and complete with a handy cheat sheet to explain the turn order.

“We spend a lot of time on those in Magic research and development, actually,” Verhey said. “We decide exactly which cards go into these decks. Figuring out the best combination to put in there can make for the perfect learning experience, so we’ve really gone back and, over years and years and years, crafted the best welcome decks around. That way, you can start playing and have a look at a little of that hidden, background complexity that awaits you. You can field some big, cool creatures. There’s some nice, rare cards in there now, for example. But all without overloading you too much at the very beginning.”

After that first visit to the local game store for my free taste, I took a few decks home with me and sorted through them. Then ... I promptly got stomped in my first game in 20 years, laid out flat by my oldest daughter.

An inauspicious start, to say the least. But I still had a ton of fun. Things felt familiar. I was putting out land at a decent pace, using it to summon creatures and cast spells. There were enchantments that were cast onto other cards, and instants that would interrupt my opponent. And it all built up to a crescendo with powerful cards dealing colossal amounts of damage on both sides.

In short, it was the same game of Magic that I had first played more than 20 years ago.

But the more packs that I opened, the weirder things started to get.

A wizard, a mage and a spellcaster walk into a bar

The next step up the ladder of complexity, Verhey said, was to grab one of Magic’s planeswalker decks. These are fixed decks sold at retail and online that are all built around a central character drawn from the lore of Magic: The Gathering.

Yeah, Magic has lore now.

The current set includes new twists on older characters like Jace and Vraska, as well as newcomers like Huatli from the most recent set of cards, Rivals of Ixalan.

So what’s a planeswalker? As the story goes, the world of Magic has splintered into many different planes of existence. Planeswalkers are powerful spellcasters in their own right, capable of traveling between these planes. In terms of gameplay, they sit on the table right alongside you and contribute their powers to the fight. Players cast them just like they would a normal monster or even a spell, but they persist from round to round and use their influence to support you in battle.

“It’s kind of like another player has shown up to help you out,” Verhey said. “It kind of sits off on its own [...] with a life of its own and it can do one of its abilities on each of your turns. Each planeswalker usually comes with three, sometimes two and, on rare occasions, four powers.”

Once you get the hang of your stock planeswalker deck, Verhey said, the next step is to build a deck of your own. For that, he recommended for me something called a deck builder’s toolkit. Inside is a set of semi-random cards from the current set, as well as a collection of booster packs from each of the previous two sets. Toss in a 20-sided die to keep track of your life total, and it’s everything you need to spice things up.

Verhey said to look for themes among the cards that you have at your disposal, like different types of creatures or repeated powers. In the current set of cards, there are four different creature types: pirates, merfolk, dinosaurs and vampires. By doubling down on one creature type or another, you can create a deck of cards that are compatible. The toolkit even comes with a handy how-to guide to make sure you have the correct mix of land, creatures and other types of spells before you sit down to play.

The next thing to do is to step into the ring, as it were, and take on the competition.

Friday Night Lights

The easiest way to try out your new deck, Verhey explained, was to show up for Friday Night Magic. It’s a series of casual, semi-competitive tournaments held every Friday at local game stores all around the country. So, I used WotC’s store locator, headed to Facebook for details on the stores closest to me and blocked out some time away from the family in order to attend.

Then, I proceeded to get super-nervous.

I didn’t have anything to be afraid of, however. Waiting for me last Friday at Brass City Games here in northern Illinois was the shop’s owner, Shane Miears. Not only did he give me a quick tour of the store, but he actually sat down to play a few hands and give me tips on how to win with the deck I’d built at home. After about an hour of screwing around, the shop had begun to fill up. More than a dozen people were there, all different ages and backgrounds, just to play Magic for the night.

A common complaint about Magic is that it’s an expensive game to play. At a high level, that’s certainly true. To get the most sought-after cards, you might need to drop a lot of money on the secondary market. But I was surprised at how affordable getting started was. Between the standard planeswalker deck and the deck builder’s toolkit, I was up and running for around $40. Throw in a deck box and some decent card sleeves, and I felt like I had a fighting chance at the table for less than $50.

After a $5 entry fee, I was squaring off against the competition in the city of brass.

What struck me more than anything was just how social an experience playing Magic is. It was really wonderful to get out from behind my computer screen for an evening, and talk to strangers about a game and a hobby that they were excited about.

I’m not really sure what I expected, but these weren’t just faceless voices on the other end of a headset. These were other functional adults. These were my neighbors. I met a teller from the local bank who has been playing Magic for years, and a leasing agent from whom I might just buy my next car. More than just finding a few good hours of great gaming, I stumbled across a whole new community.

Best of all, everyone I sat down to play against seemed invested in teaching me how to get better. They were practically showering me with tips. I learned how to gingerly draw sleeved cards so I didn’t accidentally pick up too many at once. I discovered how to make the most out of the turn order depending on the type of cards left in a small hand, and even how to effectively bluff. I learned to love the mulligan, which allows you to redraw your starting hand as many times as you like, so long as you simply draw one fewer card each time. The trick in those first few opening rounds is to have enough land to sustain you, and taking a mulligan until you get the right mix is essential if you don’t want to get “mana screwed” early on. I also developed a deep and abiding hatred of cheap, plastic card sleeves. They make shuffling, playing or otherwise handling your cards an absolute nightmare.

Two decades after first being introduced, I’m suddenly a fan of Magic

I also realized that I have a lot to learn about playing Magic well.

Of the six hands that I played that night, I lost every single one. Friday Night Magic is played in a best-of-three style, so that means I was completely shut out. But I still had fun, and I want to go back. I want to play more. Two decades after first being introduced, I’m suddenly a fan of Magic. All it took was getting up enough courage to lose badly — publicly — while sitting across the table from my peers.

The plan is to keep stopping by Brass City for Friday Night Magic as often as I can throughout the year. Later, things should get interesting as Magic closes in on its 25th anniversary. That’s because this year, WotC is releasing several special new sets, including one that will celebrate iconic cards from throughout Magic’s history. Then, in April, the franchise will be going all the way back to where it started.

“It’s called the Dominaria set,” Verhey said. “It’s a return to Magic’s original home world. So for our anniversary, we’re going back to where it all began and that’s really exciting to us. It’s really an action-packed year of Magic.”

So if you’re a lapsed player like me, or have yet to even cast a single spell in anger, 2018 sounds like a great year to get into Magic: The Gathering. Swing on by my local store, and I’ll see about teaching you a thing or two.