Magic: The Gathering

Take the Magic: The Gathering 'What Color Are You?' Quiz.

I found this quiz on The Eleventh House. I decided to take it in honor of my kids who are very much into Magic. I think green truly is my color although the quiz is a bit random. I also doubt it is the strongest color in the deck.



It is hard to explain Magic to people who don't have experience with the trading card games. Anyone with kids, especially boys over the age of 8 or so, probably has encountered Pokemon or Yugioh. Magic preceded these. It is a bit of an offshoot of Dungeons and Dragons game but played as a card game. Imagine the game of War but with complex cards and rules.



It is actually a quite challenging game. Players collect the cards which are issues in a series of releases, sort of like the new season on TV. One can buy preformed decks of cards or small assortments of random cards known as booster packs. The booster packs contain a mixture of common, uncommon and rare cards (proportionally of course) with the common being needful but not powerful and the rare conferring often powerful abilities to a deck. The better players design their own decks to take to tournaments.
A few weeks ago I drove my sons to a Magic tournament. It was an interesting sight. It was held in a conference room in a hotel near the airport. It looked like any other conference room I have been in except for the attendees. Imagine a room full of boys and young adults. Sort of like a poker tournament with hushed voices, people leaning over cards, except younger, and definitely geekier. This is the jeans and t-shirt set. I noticed a few bald heads and beards and a few men closer to my age than my kids.
The room smelled of too many male bodies. With some effort I spotted two brave young women. I admired them for being willing to compete in a nearly all male domain. Talk about social pressure!
I scanned the crowd and couldn't find anyone else as young as my younger son (who is 10). Because he follows my older boy into everything he does, younger son is used to hanging out with the older players. I overheard a discussion between two fellows. One said to the other: "You lost to a 12 year old!" Pipes up my son: "I'm 10." He was rightfully proud of himself.
Older son won his tournament and left with a grand prize of a number of cards. He happens to be a brilliant gamer. Got the math/science genes that run on both sides of his family. (I'll brag a tiny bit. He's doing Calculus at 15). Fortunately, he also inherited a tiny bit of social skills or he'd be totally weird, like, ahem, some of the gamers I saw.