Control: Magic: the Gathering

I, Dalton Lewis, play Magic: the Gathering. It’s a card game in which each card has different ways of affecting the game in which both players start with twenty life. The goal is to get the other person down to zero life. Sound simple? It isn’t.

I remember the summer after sophomore year of high school when I went to North Carolina to meet the cousins. My cousin Evan showed me a game of Magic: the Gathering. We sat down and drafted his cards and got a few games in with his cards. I immediately loved the game, but we thought it would be a fad.

It wasn’t.

There are five colors in Magic: the Gathering. White cards provide protection and dispel enemy enchantments and artifacts and gain you life. Blue counter spells, fly, and draw cards. They control the game with defense and responding to one’s opponent’s spells. Red do direct damage and are offensive. Green have the best creatures and buff their creatures. Black cards do damage to opponents, make them discard cards, and sometimes have deathtouch — they kill any card they fight.

What began as a complicated game with lots of strategy became something very simple to learn but difficult to master. I remember playing this game during high school with Sal and Simon. Simon had an unbeatable 42 card deck with quick and unusual creatures and spells that one wouldn’t expect to be effective. He suggested half of the deck should be land so that one would have enough resources to cast one’s spells. He was right.

As an adult we didn’t stop playing the game. Richie and I played for countless hours during our time in Tucson, Arizona, and Las Vegas. We played for entire weekends at a time with a friend of ours.

Now they have a computer game version of the game — so I can play all day and all night against random people across the country and the world. It’s strange that you can’t chat with your opponent — you just have half a dozen options for emotes. The game has a ladder to test one’s skill at — a ladder in which I am at platinum. There’s bronze, silver, gold, platinum, diamond, and mythic. I very much want to get better on the ladder.

I remember in high school someone asked me if they should invest in international Magic: the Gathering. I certainly said probably, yes, and it would have been a solid investment. The creators of Magic: the Gathering even bought Dungeons and Dragons and helped it to become something great again.

I think that mentally ill people need something like this — a mental challenge to test one’s self at. This is something that can make me pay attention to the world around me. This can be something that helps me to focus my mind and make me a bit smarter.

Thanks, and take care, friends.