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I had a magic turtle and mystical hawk in my hands when I saw a woman in a white crop top walking by through the window. I was in The Uncommons, a game store café in Manhattan’s Greenwich Village, playing at a pre-release event for the collectible card game Magic: The Gathering’s newest expansion set, Kaladesh. It was 2 a.m. Saturday morning, and the café was full of people making their first plays with cards inspired by a fictional land whose cities run on “aether,” the preferred electricity-with-benefits of sorcery engineers.

The woman looked in at us at cramped tables set along an entire wall’s worth of board games. Was she sneering? Her body language might have had nothing to do with us. Shoulders sagging, arms crossed, she was probably heading home, let down by another expensive night at one of New York City’s bars for cool kids.

Man, have I been there... In fact, I’d only just left. I showed up at The Uncommons just before midnight, after spending the prior five hours drinking beer at The Scratcher, banking on gamer stamina and coffee to get me through the night.

I normally avoid mixing booze and Magic, but I was glad to hear a loud talker going on and on about all the Maker’s Mark he’d downed before coming. I was not alone.

A pre-release takes five hours or so, and this one started at midnight. You buy a sealed box containing six booster card packs and one special rare card. You take about a third of the box’s cards and make a deck to play four best-of-three sets.

As packs were distributed, I counted about two dozen people during deckbuilding, three of them women. I had met one at a Bushwick Magic Meetup the Sunday before, the first day she’d ever played Magic. I guess we sold her.

In Magic, you’re a wizard casting spells and summoning creatures from mythical lands with which to battle another wizard doing the same. The Kaladesh set imagines the wizards drawing resources from a world where people power mechanical vehicles with enchanted energy. This new feature allowed me to make my magic turtle more powerful by putting it in steampunk tanks, for instance. Which was clearly awesome.

I crafted what I guess you would call an aggro deck, one that summons a mess of weaker attacking creatures to assault my opponent as quickly as possible (rather than saving up to send big hits). I played a mix of white cards (plains) and blue cards (islands). My aggro deck was long on lower-cost flying creatures and shiny new transports. I also couldn’t resist throwing in my pre-release pack’s obligatory rare card, a Cataclysmic Gearhulk. The Gearhulk turned out to a lackluster draw that only helped me in one game.

My weak-but-effective Eddytrail Hawk proved the workhorse of my first set against a guy named Ignacio from Chile. He was in New York studying English. I took him out handily in two games, with my hawk letting me spend aether energy to make other creatures fly my attackers up and over his defenses.

The Uncommons’ management had promised free booster packs to the first player to pilot a vehicle in an “interesting” way. Ignacio had crewed Aradara Express with another vehicle, and we realized that had been the combo the judges had been looking for when a guy playing next to us won packs for the same maneuver a game later.

My second set pitted me against Joe from the East Village. We were evenly matched, which might have been because we both spent the hours before play getting our drink on.

We each played the Ovalchase Dragster, a 6/1 (attack/defense) vehicle that can be crewed by basically anything, and it defined our three games. The card reminded me of Arc Runner, a 5/1 11th Edition bull made of lightning that lives for one turn.

I won the first game fast but lost the next two because my mana just didn’t flow (mana powers spells). Despite giving up cards to re-draw my hand twice at the second game’s start, it might have ended differently. Early on, Joe only had one creature on the field when he dropped that dragster. I had the Instant spell Pressure Point in my hand, which lets you prevent one creature’s attack and draw a card. But it didn’t occur to me that I might have been able to use it to stop the dragster’s pilot, which might have bought me one more turn. That’s all I would have needed to hit him hard.

Still, I was one-for-two at 3 a.m. and having a great time, but Magic is not some perfect alternative to the lumpen’s nightlife. There tends to be one bummer set. That night, it was my third.

I still need to work through plays slowly, and my third opponent made fidgety “hurry up” gestures with his left hand every time I moved. If I attempted to explain a turn, he made it clear that he already knew the mechanics of every card. Fortunately, our games were over quickly, and I quit him.

The only time I enjoyed that set was around 3:30 a.m. when some guys passed outside. One looked right in at me and mouthed “Magic?” through the window. I nodded and smiled, and he slapped his uninterested buddies with pride.

Players started dropping out early once they knew they didn’t have a shot at winning free packs of cards, and the room got a lot thinner between set three and the last. Still, I stayed, managing to close the night with a victory. I took the set by winning games one and three against Christian from the Bronx. His grand, mountain-dominated shots lacked answers to my deck’s many little questions.

Christian had shown up with a bunch of friends who kept interrupting our final contest to show him card combos, and we barely finished in time. By then, I was ready to head out. My dragster won me that last game, and I left the store 2-2 overall, better than I expected.

I rode an A train running local home. My elation after spending a night playing in a dream city of mystical robots was tempered only by a lack of sleep. My eyelids felt like barbells when I reached my bed in Brooklyn at 6:30 a.m..

You’re not likely to leave a Magic pre-release after 5:00 a.m. with the disappointment I saw on the woman in the crop top at 2:00. But you also can’t go into it with the same sense of potential she must have started her night with. Still, I paid my $28 all but guaranteed that I would go home thinking about going back to do it again.