THE PT SUCKS

a Magic article by: CML

1.

It was in 2011 I first decided I wanted to be on the Pro Tour of Magic: the Gathering. I remember my good friend, during a time of crisis, asking me about my life aspirations. I hesitated as I realized I didn’t have any, groped around for some answer, and articulated the first thing that came to mind: “I want to be on the Pro Tour.”

He knew what I meant.

He laughed and said, “Is that all?”

“No,” I lied.

2.

The Pro Tour, at that point, existed as an abstraction, like Lorwyn or Cockaigne. I had no idea what it really was. In fact, I knew basically nothing about paper Magic. I had played maybe one paper tournament, financed by redeeming sets of M11, ROE and Zendikar, and selling the cards individually to a dealer whose establishment has long since gone under but who was savvy enough to know me a bumpkin. How easy it is to forget what it’s like to be a beginner! The cultural norms, the libertarian combo of illogic and self-obliviousness, have a steeper learning curve than the game itself.

In those days, I lived on the Internet. I had turned my back on my personal history, where I’d written, had sex with women, attended a college that was miserable yet well thought-of, and done other “normal” things. Two years of illness and East-Coast cultural norms had been cruel to me, though I had been crueler to myself. Recovery from such deep melancholia necessitates suspending judgment, which let me at least forget who I’d been. A consequence of that was that I knew not who I was. A consequence of that was that I played a lot of Modo.

Antidepressants and isolation had made me susceptible to the same myths that take root in the mind of those who read the Internet too much and do too little — in other words, the kind of people who are attracted to the Pro Tour. I recall relishing how pointless the goal was. However silly it was to struggle towards the PT, it harmed no one. It was no New York finance job. It was my choice.

Since then, three and a half years have elapsed. I’ve come off antidepressants, participated more in society, and less in Magic. I’ve made friends from Magic, and enemies too. My contacts who “live on the Internet” have cited Magic as the best thing to happen to them, and the PT as the best thing about Magic; few of them still play. The people I trust, who still play, and have recently been to the Pro Tour, have told me the Pro Tour sucked.

With all that in mind, I’m surprised I made it on. Years of experience and context have taught me what I couldn’t know in 2010 and 2011: I’m not good at card games. (Chances are, you aren’t either, even if you make it to the Pro Tour. I will come back to this.) Our deck was very good, though, and that’s how I found myself in the top 8, the semis, the finals, and winning, each step more improbable than the last.

Readers will be unsurprised to learn that the moment of pure elation described by mountebanks and salesmen like Mike Flores does not exist. I was happy, yes, but I would have been more unhappy had I not won. The sheer physical misery of the tournament, the insomnia of the night before, had at last caught up with me. When my good friend Rob won his PTQ, he reported a similiar feeling, looking back on the day through the fog of fatigue, the tunnel vision of competition, and wondering how it all happened.

3.

I hadn’t really cared about being on the Pro Tour until I was on it. At that point, I found I wanted to do well. Why not? It’s the only time it ever makes any kind of financial sense to prepare for a Magic tournament.

Our preparation consisted of the following:

—Some use of the Modo Beta, many bugs experienced, zero reported. Putting the “testing” in “beta testing.”

—One or two paper DDF drafts, unavailable online prior to my departure to Europe, two weeks before the tournament.

—Drafting a friend of a friend’s one-drop Cube in Fulham, London. (Thanks for the hospitality, James Stevenson!)

—Text consultation with my friends at home on some of the lower-key and desolate nights in London, Paris, and Amsterdam.

—Drinking Belgian beers in Antwerp, available for half the price of the crafts at Café Mox.

I realize my routine invites accusations of disingenuousness — did I really want to do well? Sure, but not enough to plan my trip around it. I’d never been to Europe before, and minimizing the Magic aspect of the trip was a sound emotional hedge.

4.

During my first week and a half abroad, I wrote profusely — the kind of passive acceptance of novelty that is the privilege of travel. None of the notes were about Magic. I barely thought about the Pro Tour until I got to Belgium, and even then the game itself was far from my thoughts.

In Antwerp I met up with Jason Waddell, the Cube designer.

“I can’t get it up for Magic anymore,” he said.

“Why not?”

“Too many other things going on.”

“Me too.”

“Don’t you still play?”

“Yeah.”

“Aren’t you here to play on the Pro Tour?”

“Well, kind of … it was a convenient excuse.”

(You see, far before I’d wanted to be on the PT, I’d wanted to go to Europe.)

Jason nodded.

“I do wish ChannelFireball would publish my Vampires article,” I said.

Jason laughed. “They wouldn’t even publish me at this point. Didn’t you used to write somewhere else?”

I had. “My column was a complete waste of time,” I said. “I didn’t make any money or any friends, nor did I put myself in a position to do so later. I basically learned nothing about myself.”

He replied, “Is it bad that I find every part of Magic culture to be abhorrent?”

“I don’t,” I said. “I like my friends. But sometimes I think we exist outside of it. I didn’t make many friends from playing StarCraft.”

“The beautiful video game,” said Jason.

“Yep. This guy I played StarCraft with is now a successful StarCraft II commentator. He’s banging a former Miss Oregon.”

“The thing about StarCraft coverage,” said Jason, “or eSports coverage, is that they know it’s important; the shoutcasters always act like it’s interesting. The Magic guys spend the entire time trying to convince you that it’s cool.”

“I wonder if they fool themselves,” I said.

“I mean, don’t they have to?”

We had another beer and were happy.

“What are you playing at the PT?” said Jason.

“Temur.”

“Which colors is that? It’s been a while since I checked.”

I told him.

“I feel like, in order to care about the price of a Magic card, you have to be poor,” said Jason. “Like, I have this set of Tarmogoyfs just sitting on my apartment floor — nobody’s used them in the last six months — and I don’t check the price, ever. Who cares? Is Modern Masters 2 coming out soon? I don’t know what any of the new cards do. Yet life goes on.”

The next day I awoke at noon and caught the train to Brussels. A brisk walk through an area as generic as Bethesda and I was at the hotel Evan had chosen, for its excellent price.

5.

To reiterate: I am not a good player. We needed to find an exceptionally strong deck for me to have much of a chance.

During our testing back in Seattle, I’d fixated on a RUG deck featuring Sarkhan Unbroken. The deck seemed abstractly bad, but it kept crushing the pre-existing decks.

My excitement when I knocked on the hotel room door had little to do with this. Traveling solo can be lonely, and weird and new things are often best experienced with the anchor of familiar people. I guess I just wanted to be social.

Evan opened the door and smiled; Ed came over from the laptop and greeted me warmly. The room was like a tableau from any Magic travel article, where the artist had forgotten a few trivial elements; there was dry cereal on top of the fridge, and the furniture had been rearranged to facilitate testing both online and in paper.

The sterile hotel room, the people I knew only from Magic, the ubiquity of that game while the hours I was abroad counted down with existential inevitability: there was something depressing about it after the endless discovery of the last week, all the more so for my being a willing and active part of it …

… Evan and Ed were playing Abzan Aggro. I thought the deck was great and wanted to play it too. Normally I’d be able to borrow it without a problem. But I’d brought cards only for Temur, unwilling to lug around more than a few hundred dollars of value from hostel to hostel. Though Temur kept splitting sets with Abzan, Evan and Ed insisted it was bad. This was corroborated by more friends back home who’d brought it to a PPTQ and lost to themselves. It seems stupid that card availability should be such an issue playing at the highest level, but with players thousands of miles from home, it has to be pretty common. My other option was mono-Red.

Testing for events like this, with wide-open possibilities, ill-defined metas, and large teams of strong players vying to crack the code, is very hard. You have to be in touch with your biases in order to get meaningful feedback, or else hope to get lucky when the pairings go up on Friday. And what do you do when your friends too suffer from those biases? Testing is even harder when you’ve been going on Orwellian bar crawls in Paris and smoking doobies in Amsterdam for the last week. Magic takes motivation and brainpower, and the good life sometimes saps both. This is not the least of the advantages the established and sponsored teams have over the average one-time qualifier.

We built mono-Red and tinkered with the list for a day, but, try as we might, we couldn’t get it to stop self-destructing with unacceptable frequency. Its difficulties against Abzan Aggro, with its suicidal manabase and clunky curve, were also discouraging. Temur split another set with Abzan and I decided to play it, over the protests of pretty much everyone.

But who can you trust more than yourself? Time and results teach us that all of life is a small sample size for Magic. They also teach us that admitting mistakes, much less doing something about them, can be the process of months and years. Some people never get there, and I count among them anyone who believes in the Potemkin-style farce of “professional Magic.”

6.

I began to develop my ideas about pro Magic during my first big tournament I played, the SCG Invitational in December 2012. It seemed ridiculous Reid Duke should only earn $15,000 for doing something so difficult. Now first place at an Invi is ten grand. They are no longer held at venues nearly as nice as L.A. Live.

This is part of a trend. SCG Seattle has moved first to Tacoma, and then to Portland. SCG Atlanta was in a suburb 15 miles from Atlanta proper. SCG Somerset is in the only town in Central Jersey you can’t reach with public transportation.

Wizards is way wealthier than SCG and way more miserly. Tours and Taxis of Brussels calls itself “an urban experience,” but it’s just a big brick building that’s gentrified into a convention center instead of lofts. With its echo of “Thurn und Taxis,” an aristocratic house whose members have backslid into soccer commentary, Tours and Taaxis calls to mind the babbling of Magic commentators and makes a pun almost as bad as “Treasure Cruise.”

When our Uber made it to the site and we saw all this, it was evident why the PT was in Brussels and not, say, Amsterdam or Düsseldorf: who would visit this city, much less this grimy old warehouse, unless they really had to? Brussels is the D.C. of Europe. The site must have made our hotel seem expensive.

Everyone who’s attended a Grand Prix knows Wizards’ parsimony extends far beyond the venue. The cash prizes for Magic tournaments have more or less flatlined as real eSports have grown stratospherically. First place at a Legacy GP pays less than the cost of building Shardless BUG. The money from winning a PT can only be called “life-changing” if you’re on the PT. Yet for some reason I thought events might shell out to effect at least the appearance of treating the players well. No dice! Quite literally. Our swag bags had: 80 sleeves, of shoddy quality and questionable taste; one deckbox, the kind that costs a couple bucks at even the most doomed of local game stores; a t-shirt you wouldn’t want to wear in public; and nothing else. For the playmat, you had to pay something like 40 Euros; if you wanted cards to round out your deck, they too were overpriced. Wizards never stops trying to profit off its players. Why would they?

I paid a couple bucks for two copies of Draconic Roar, cinched up my swag bag, and called another Uber. The driver didn’t speak a word of English and had trouble finding the place, and my phone thought the country code for Belgium was the area code for Arkansas, so we wasted a few minutes locating the taxi. This annoyed Evan, who then wasted half an hour on foot vetoing various restaurants. Traveling with all but the best of friends is infamously risky, but so much as trying to find suitable grub with Magic players, communicating with the locals through their broken English, is a real ordeal. I hadn’t realized how much I’d enjoyed traveling by myself.

Evan quizzed the maître d’ on the peanut content of fusion tapas, and we ordered.

“Of course it’d take this long,” he said. “It’s Europe.”

We ate.

“I guess we’re not gonna get any testing in tonight,” said Ed.

“Are they going to bring us the bill?” said Evan.

“Not unless you ask for it,” I said.

“Do you speak any of the languages?” said Evan.

“No.”

“You just get by OK?”

“I do.”

We got the bill and paid for it. “Merci,” I said.

“Mercy,” muttered Evan, at once taking great interest in his napkin …

… At another restaurant and met up with a few more players for a draft. Conversation was more or less Limited to Magic … has anyone ever made any good friends their first time on the Pro Tour? I drafted a mediocre Red-Green deck, and Evan got ranched by a gentleman who twice had Orator of Ojutai into Assault Formation. The hilarity of this stood out to me on a day otherwise barren of memories and humor.

7.

The next morning I woke up early and grumpy to someone else’s alarm: the obnoxious reveille of Magic travel. I put on my Richard Sherman jersey, didn’t shower, and left with Evan and Ed.

I called an Uber and walked the wrong way out of the hotel for half a block. This nearly sent Evan into anaphylactic shock. Looking around the venue, I saw maybe three people I’d met before. Some CFB guys walked by, but seeing celebrities is a poor substitute for seeing friends. An old acquaintance was there to support her boyfriend, a lugubrious and hairy argument against the “pro Magic” lifestyle. I sat down across from her and said hello; “I’ll talk to you later,” she replied, walking away in no particular direction …

… Fanfare; congratulations; speeches; self-affirmation. “We want you to be at your mental best,” said one of the functionaries, to a room full of the tired and jet-lagged; he probably believed it; a few others might have, too. Pairings for draft were posted, in two places only. It took me some time to push through the crowd, yet more to figure out that my table number was a pod number. My table was soft — I recognized only one Japanese guy, and I could spot the fish, along with the other Magic stereotypes, just like any other tournament.

“It’s just Magic,” Rob told me, the night of; “There’s no reason you can’t do well, just don’t overthink it.”

I opened the first booster and overthought it, picking Roast over Blood-Chin Fanatic. I got passed an Ukud Cobra … twelve hours before, we’d discussed forcing Blue-Black, as it could support up to four drafters without sucking too bad. No: I will put the guy to my left in Black, then get the hookup for Green in pack two … I opened a Foul Renewal and a Brutal Hordechief, passed them both, and felt disgusted. This is a format defined by rares. My deck had none.

What made my botching so bizarre is that I wasn’t at all nervous — I felt nothing special. Make of that what you will. Was it because I was indifferent to Magic, or because I had no expectations — the PT was a freeroll? Some of it surely had to do with my experience playing poker for higher stakes and performing musically, but I still felt bad I felt so little.

8.

All these ideas were going through my head as I built my deck, throwing in a Temur Runemark so I could have 23 spells. I marinated in self-abnegation for ten minutes. Often when I’m playing a match and pretending to calculate odds or evaluate contingencies, this is what I’m really doing.

I was paired against one of the fish round one and lost the Red-Green mirror, getting one-shotted by Magmatic Chasm game one when I was a turn away from killing him, and flooding biblically game two … “They shouldn’t pair people who passed to each other,” he said, and I felt the disgust you feel losing to someone you think you should beat, the contempt for their post-match consolations, the self-hatred at your own elitism … “How did you end up in Red-Green?” he continued. “So I first-picked Atarka’s Command; that seemed like a slam dunk, but it kind of dried up, I was wondering why, now I know! …” I shook my head in despair — Atarka’s fucking Command? Over Ukud Cobra? — and sent out a self-scourging Facebook message to my friends at home. For the first time since I’d last played competitive Magic, I hated myself. There are hundreds of bad players at the Pro Tour, and to lose to one, to suspect yourself of being one, in such a moment, is the emotional obverse of all the self-deprecating talk you have to make to play this game and remain sane.

The next round was even funnier. The guy was so nervous he could barely say “Hello” to me without slurring. His handshake was like Stephen Hawking’s. Nerves had rendered him temporarily Parkinsonian. This extended to his mental processes. He binned a Typhoid Rats Epically Confronting a morph and Flattened a Stampeding Elk Herd. It didn’t matter. I still lost in two. At this point my swag bag broke and, lacking a backpack not laden with dirty laundry, I had to ask for another one. If anyone is interested, I’ll sell it for two dollars.

The next round was funnier yet. My opponent was Korean. The language barrier foretold an uninteractive match. I lost game one, the hopelessness of my position obscured by the fact that one of his Djinn Monks was a D6. (At least half of my opponents needed to borrow dice and/or paper; I did too — and when I brought up that the black background of the Company life pad made it impossible to write any notes, the guy next to me nodded sagely and said, “Typical Wizards ridiculousness.” He understood!) At any rate, I skillfully made the Korean mulligan both game two and game three. As things grew more hopeless for him, he even knocked the top of the deck. Just like in the movies! To travel is often to confirm stereotypes. Worldwide Magic nerds are about how I imagined them.

One win seemed a fair and just record for my draft dreck, and I went into the lunch break optimistic. Here I should reveal an embarrassing secret: I thought lunch would be provided.

Ha! What was I thinking? After fifteen minutes in line, ten euros, a two-ounce burger, some rancid coffee, I comprehended the absurdity of my expectation. You can always count on Wizards to rent the worst venue in the worst city in a given region. The lunch break was nowhere near long enough to make it anywhere with reasonable grub, and however dismal Brussels is in other regards, the food is excellent. They even have stands serving artisanal fries, and, for the true PT grinder, you can avoid exercise with a 4-Euro Uber to anywhere. In my case, a tripel or duvel or tripel duvel might have been better.

Of course, the only thing worse than eating during the lunch break is not eating. Evan had left the line to pee. The ten-minute roundtrip walk to the dungeon latrine was too long for us to hold his spot. He had to hop in the queue that, as lunch wound down, cleared as slowly as a Modo eight-man might fill. The sun was making me feel like a troglodyte, so I smoked the other half of the cigarette Josh Wiitanen had generously given me, spoke to a friendly Aussie with a sweet Sonics cap, and crawled back into the cave. My self-loathing was nearly complete.

9.

Everyone else was right: my Standard Constructed deck was bad.

In Round 4 I lost to Jeskai Control. “You shouldn’t’ve played Temur,” said Ed.

In Round 5 I lost to Red-Green Dragons when his Hornet Nest epically confronted my Arbor Colossus. “You shouldn’t’ve played Temur,” said Ed. This really pissed me off, because he was right.

In Round 6 I sat across from a gentleman who had flown in the night before. “Where from?” “San Francisco.” (Where else? Play the game, see the convention centers.)

Next to me was my Round 1 opponent. He had not won another match. “Things not going so well for you either?” he said. Indeed not — misery loves company, except for me. I got squished by GW Aggro, signed the match slip, didn’t check drop, and walked out of the area. I intended to go back to the room, at least to change out of my putrid Richard Sherman jersey. I had neglected my appearance that day far more than any other day on vacation, and I wanted to feel like a normal person again.

Why won’t Uber load? What does “SIM card missing” mean? What do you mean it’s missing? Where is the SIM card? I open my phone. It’s there. That’s almost worse! Is anything else missing? I did drop my phone on the bathroom floor a few rounds before, while shutting myself in a stall to hide from the ignominy of another loss and empty my bowels, some kind of metaphor for something … I walk the five minutes to the bathroom and scrutinize the floor of the stall I think I’ve shat in. Nope; nothing. Maybe one of the level threes has swept or swabbed it away. Is it worth it to look in the adjacent stall? Someone’s in there. Fuck it. I’ll use one of the computers to find a route to the hotel and feel better. Wait, I don’t have a key. I’ll have to find Ed. Ed doesn’t have one. “You shouldn’t’ve played Temur,” he says, helpfully. He’s right! Evan has a key. “Headed out?” he says. “My phone is dead,” I answered. People are on the computers! Why are they still on the computers? Because the round hasn’t started yet! Why hasn’t the round started yet? It’s 25 minutes over. People are walking by me in a single direction. A murmur is rising somewhere to the left.

“CML!” says Evan. “Come check this out!”

On the flatscreen we saw Patrick Chapin, talking to a judge. Hundreds of people were clustered around the flatscreen while the events transpired in a higher resolution fifty yards away. The PT is so rarely a spectacle even to itself. I watched the argument for a couple minutes and was happy. I really didn’t give a damn. So I yelled: “Come on, Patrick, you’ve beaten tougher charges!” and no one turned around, no one laughed. It was in this moment that I understood why Rob had said, after his first PT, “I don’t want to be anything like those people.” I left the hall.

10.

I realize that my attitude and my performance suggest a simple explanation: “If you think the PT sucks, you might just suck at the PT.” This is partially valid. Let me be the first to say that had I done better, I likely would have felt better — we compete because winning feels good. There is also a whiff of the Internet social-justice outrage, viz. I beef with the PT not because it sucked but because I thought it didn’t, so my own poor judgment is the (subconscious) source of my beef.

It is true that pieces written along those lines externalize everything, and are therefore incapable of describing anything but their authors. Yet I think the pieces truly like that are the ones whose authors reduce themselves to gamers and cheerleaders, and who don’t, you know, actually talk about the PT. This characterizes every PT retrospective published by a major site, for my purposes Starcitygames.com, Channelfireball.com, and (what the hell) TCGplayer.com. Here’s a brief review:

SCG: Standard After the Pro Tour, Abzan Control at the Pro Tour, The Good and Bad in Belgium, How to Avoid Being Cheated, The Pro Tour Test Decks

“The Good and Bad in Belgium” refers to Magic cards, not people, events, or experiences; and “How to Avoid Being Cheated” both puts the onus on the individual reader to fix cheating, and glosses over the rich history of cheating at Magic events. I will come back to this second idea shortly.

CFB: Pantheon Deck Tech [several articles], various draft guides

I fear “the Pantheon” is one of those god-awful names we’re getting as desensitized to as fan-service angel art or kindergarten-level flavor text.

TCG: Pro Tour Dragons of Tarkir Archetype Analysis, Atarka Abzan at Pro Tour Dragons of Tarkir, Bigger and Redder at Pro Tour Dragons of Tarkir

TCGPlayer has always had the most shameless shills in the business, so it’s not surprising to see their titles so SEO’d — which other Pro Tour happened in mid-April 2015?

In every single article, the focus is on the cards and not the experience — a lot about the game, but nothing about the metagame, if you catch my drift. The few sentences in each article devoted to the context behind the games are blandly positive and corporate: “It was cool to travel,” “It was awesome to fight against the best players in the world,” “Shahar lost the credit-card game buying this sushi dinner really subsidized by Jacob’s mother,” and so on. All Magic articles are basically the credit-card game — a chance to name- and place-drop, and pretend you’re way cooler and richer than you actually are. This necessitates that the authors avert their eyes from the reality of pro Magic, turn away from the dingy halls, the gross burgers, the poverty and the vile bodies.

They must also turn away from themselves. This is funny because Magic content is supposedly personality-based, yet the game demands its authors have no personality. No one will ever say anything controversial in a commercial. As consumers who buy into those myths, we too are complicit. Only someone who takes Magic seriously would be convinced by the fictions underlying Magic articles. You might think this makes these articles irrelevant to the non-Magic player. Not so! They are much more entertaining if you don’t play Magic. Muggle friends! If you watched and enjoyed Galaxy Quest, you will find these articles to be fine entertainment. It takes years of self-deception, in fact, to not laugh at the fantasies of these latter-day Quixotes.

Some of the funniest picaresques are by Anthony Lowry. Here, for example, exhausted by countless jousts and star-crossed tourneys across the convention centers of Renaissance Spain, he daydreams of life back in La Mancha.

Don Quixote can never win because he can never know why he loses; Lowry bemoans his paltry laurels, self-justifies by saying “other people win with my decks,” and publishes Temur Dragons lists even worse than mine three weeks too late. He would have appreciated my PT slot a lot more than me. But he would not have written about the Pro Tour. Maybe word of the great defeat of Sarkhan at the Battle of Brussels will reach his ears when the steamer of Antwerp arrives in New York, and that plus store credit will be enough to make him feel a part of it all.

11.

To get better at Magic is to realize that average Magic writer is not someone worth listening to. To go to the PT for the first time is to realize how bad most everyone else is, and how bad you are, too. It may not even matter if you’re good — you’ll usually do badly. You likely tested with two or three other people in the same position and thereby ceded a massive edge to the big-name teams. You probably didn’t have much time to draft online or in paper and thereby made a bunch of Limited mistakes you’d eliminate with practice. You might have left your best cards at home when you wanted to audible, or you might have gotten in the day before to fight through jet-lag on the order of a Jäger-bomb hangover.

The prizes are tiny. Only 18 percent of competitors cash. The cash often takes months to arrive. If the standings were randomized, your expected payout would be a hair over $600. In practice, it is much lower.

In six rounds I played one Latvian, one German, one disconsolate Korean, and three Americans who’d arrived one, two, and three days before. One of them was to fly back Monday morning — “Work,” he explained. Our conversation was as abortive as his trip. Even if these people were interesting, were worth making friends with, sleep-deprived and stressed in a tombal convention center while playing a competitive card game for some stakes was not the right place to do that. The established-pro articles gush about “seeing their friends” at the PT, but for the typical PTQ grinder the experience is quite the opposite. Your friends are all at home, and you are unlikely to make more. As for connecting with any of the “celebrities,” forget it — their cliques are the impenetrable cliques of teenage girls, school administrators, and other big fish in a small pond. It can be lonely on the PT, but better lonely there than everywhere else.

12.

Early evening in Brussels. I’d fled Tours and Taxis after I saw my phone was about to die. Walking through an Anacostian wasteland of light industry, garages, rowhouses and a rivulet — for Brussels really is the D.C. of Europe — I’d tried to sleep at the hotel. It made more sense to drink instead. My phone had revived.

I Ubered down to an Irish pub, ordered a duvel, sat in a recess, and scribbled misanthropic mottos in my notebook. Shortly thereafter, Evan arrived — the only one of us to make it to Day Two, at 4-4.

“How’d you find out about this place?”

“Rob went to it last time he was here. He said there were girls.”

Evan pretended to look around. “Are there?”

“I don’t know. Remember what Rob said when he got back from PT Dublin?”

“What?”

“That it was a miserable experience. That he saw this room full of Magic pros, and realized he didn’t want to be anything like them.”

“I remember that,” said Evan. “It happened to me too. And it happened again. The same thing. At Valencia.”

“And yet you’re here.”

“I am. Well, what else am I going to do?”

I swigged my beer.

Evan said: “Was that the first time Rob quit Magic?”

“It was.”

“How many times has he quit Magic?”

“Like a dozen.”

We laughed and I felt human again. For there was precious little laughter on the Pro Tour. Don Quixote will never laugh at himself.

“I feel like every time I’ve come to the Pro Tour,” said Evan, “I haven’t wanted to play for at least a month afterwards. I’ve talked to more people like us, and I feel like they always say the same thing.”

13.

We spoke and drank more. After tagging Chapin with a game loss, the judges had found two of the real killers. Jeremy Dezani had been disqualified for being French — a good enough reason for me — and some fellow had been caught palming his opening hand. “Who was it?” I said. Evan told me. It was the guy who’d had Orator of Ojutai into Assault Formation every game. We hadn’t had a clue.

A night on the town in the traditional sense was out of the question, so we went back to the hotel and I had one hit of the joint I’d bought in Amsterdam. Soon I was way higher than I wanted to be. I splayed out on one of the narrow beds and had Evan scour YouTube for videos of card cheats. The first showed some deck-stacking techniques. They looked a lot like what we’d seen at the Pro Tour — and nowhere else in our Magic careers.

There are a bunch of reasons Magic doesn’t have real pros, even though real pros would be good for Wizards and good for their player-base. I can cite the atrocious coverage, the general unsuitability for spectators, the specter of lawsuits, and so on, but the baroque rules are also at fault. It is as easy to cheat at Magic as it is impossible at League of Legends. The rules, like tax laws, are too complicated to be fully enforceable. I’m no victim of it, but I’m fully convinced the Pro Tour is full of cheating.

The easy fix would be to play the Pro Tour over Magic Online, but that would require Magic Online to be a real program, and would be a bad advertisement for paper cards besides. The physical reality of Magic cards creates high transaction costs, which limits profitable speculation to psychos and established businesses. Cardboard is a pain to keep track of and assemble into decks and bring to tournaments in Vancouver or Portland, much less ones halfway across the world. And paper cards can be manipulated to advantage at high-level events, making comprehensive enforcement impossible and coverage difficult.

Compared to eSports, the Pro Tour plays to a tiny audience, so why spend more money on the event? Wizards employees say privately that the PT is just the advertising budget, and marvel at the tiny wages the pros will fight over. But what a sad advertisement pro Magic players are for Magic. An acquaintance once said, “Magic pros are pro at nothing but Magic,” which means “Magic pros are pro at nothing.” Like the content they produce, Magic pros are devoid of personality, the ability to laugh at themselves, or socialize with anyone who has nothing to offer in terms of status or money or sycophancy, and it is the very notion of “professionalism” that ensures there are and never will be any Magic pros. Even as eSports have grown exponentially all around us and revenue from Magic has in fact grown in the same way, the Pro Tour is still nothing to the world. What could be further from a football stadium full of screaming League fans than the small dark room where they held Pro Tour Brussels, with Marshall Sutcliffe chiding Chapin like a middle-school teacher’s pet prefect?

But the paper cards are also vital. In the era of e-readers, they are beautiful. They are also part of the reason I traveled halfway across the world. At the very least, they were a pretext for my three-and-a-half week trip to Europe, which was among the best experiences of my life. They are also the reason I have made friends from this game. Having a group of friends in adult life, a sense of community, is no small achievement in America. In the final analysis, these friends are the only thing that’s made the time spent playing worthwhile, worth the sweat and potbelly.

14.

It’s always hard to come home from a trip. Any joyous experience provides context that should make you question your life choices. I’ve been home for a week now and I still have no idea what to do with my main hobby. Now that I’ve been to the PT, there is, in a real sense, nothing more for me to discover in Magic.

The point of travel, of any recreation, is to find new ways to take pleasure in yourself. There were none to find at the PT for me, maybe none still in Magic. It seems likely I’ve already made my best friends in the game, and some of them don’t want to play anymore either. I’ve also seen the limitations of many of my Magic friendships, and I’ve been more bothered by that disconcerting feeling of losing all my conversational vigor when I shuffle up and sit down across from an otherwise interesting person. I have no real desire to compete on the PT again, insufficient incentive to get good enough to make it worth my while.

In retrospect, it was childish I had expectations of something better. My Magic career has been a long and vague arc of disillusionment. There is a purity and transparency to Wizards’ fables that make them an ideal way to learn about corporate culture: manipulating nerds requires no sophistication. Since I’d left my room and shut down Modo and gone out to tournaments and met people, in late 2012, I’d deciphered all the Wizards myths to the point they annoyed me and made the major sites unwilling to publish me.

I began by alienating SCG when I saw this rabid article. The exclusionary small-mindedness, the jealousy masked as meritocracy, are a great deal of what’s wrong with Magic culture. No one wants to hear it. This goes for writers, players, Wizards employees. The insecure will always fear negativity more than they fear bad things; they will always prefer mistreatment to contradiction. The blind, narcissistic rage at any criticism is the obverse of the insipid salesmanship of the TCG article — and, when you criticize one of these articles, a “pro” will invariably respond this way, as Cedric did. Attacks on major-site articles are attacks on the authors’ honor, and are thus unforgivable. The ethic of corporatism has replaced the ethic of chivalry. A fantasy-themed card game is a great way to make money, so long as you’re OK with a feudal economic system with one king, a few knights, thousands of peasants, hundreds of itinerant wizards.

But it was popular and effective: Cedric got promoted, exemptions are gone, and the PT is about what it was a few years ago. My best article for TCGPlayer depicts a similarly dull vibe at the Players’ Championship: pro Magic in person is as dreary as the coverage suggests. Reality becomes as shallow and Manichaean as laughable fantasy writing.

Pros must read Wizards’ mythos literally. I cannot. Here’s my best shot at interpretation:

The PT can only seem great in the context of a life that has little else. You must have no regard for real eSports, a bad memory, a worse sense of self-awareness, a big idea of yourself as exceptional, and a complete ignorance of sales tactics. For the millions of words that have been written about Magic since then, all the psychology of people with low self-esteem boils down to one maxim — pretend to like them, and you can treat them however you want. The Pro Tour is someone’s ill-imagined attempt at a big nerd event, a child’s sword-and-sorcery-themed birthday party: why spend more money and effort on the Pro Tour when you don’t have to? Why not treat the players like children? This is the true meaning of the platitude “Magic is a children’s card game.” The players you might want to spend money on would show up anyway.

As for what everyone else writes about. I cared about the tournament itself a fair amount leading up to it, but not afterwards. It’s true I’ve noted the rise of the Temur Dragons lists with some schadenfreude, and felt a frisson of vindication when I saw Huey Jensen would too pick Roast over Blood-Chin Fanatic pack one, pick one. Yet less than three weeks later, my performance has faded in importance, and the event, the cultures within cultures it suggests, have loomed larger. I cannot or do not want to fathom the mindset where the bad PT performance became, as in certain articles, an occasion for self-doubt and self-loathing, worsened by the euphemisms self-improvement and self-motivation; I do not want to forget this culture and this context.

It was the lack of context — the pointlessness of the PT, Magic for Magic’s sake — that drew me to it in 2011. Now that same void makes it easy to set it aside. I could enjoy my trip to Europe, before and after, because the PT no longer mattered — I could not convince myself it was worth it again, could not ignore what I had seen.

15.

I should have stayed in Europe longer, maybe another week or two, but I flew back because there was a regional PTQ I wanted to compete in. When I told everyone why I was coming back so early, even the Magic players thought I was nuts. But the RPTQ was fun. Even getting up at 6:30, driving three hours to and from Portland in a single day, was better than being on the PT. The experience of playing a tournament with friends is so much better than not that I kind of wonder how I ever got into tournaments and made friends in the first place.

I didn’t like my deck at the RPTQ, and, after going to 2-2 after round 4, I didn’t much feel like playing Magic. One of the great thrills of Magic is beating someone who cares way more about the game than you do, and I had no interest in becoming that person. Magic cannot bear the weight of too many expectations, and expecting to win is the most unrealistic of them all. What happens when you play for fun, and it’s not fun anymore?

I am in the process of preparing for a Standard Open in Portland, but I’d rather hang out with my Magic friends at home and drink and talk about things that generally have nothing to do with Magic. This is, of course, impossible. I met these people playing Magic and I will still probably play Magic with them and I will even enjoy it.

I do not regret aspiring to the PT, nor do I regret the experience. It wasn’t miserable so much as it was nothing. The Magic-writing logic might go, “Because the PT is great, the fault must lie with me.” I have little interest in that solipsism; I have seen the Pro Tour. This is what it was like for me, and this is what it may be like for you. For me, the endgame of Magic isn’t the Pro Tour. It’s doing something else. How many Magic pros are lucky enough to have that option?

CML