I guess this is my midlife crisis? Maybe I’m desperately trying to convince myself that I’m still hip, still with it, after working and falling into adult life. As a kid I had entire storylines for my Ninja Turtles and later I loved to collect Star Wars and Magic cards. A friend of mine pulled a foil Millennium Falcon in like, 1999 and I don’t think I ever really got over it.
But life moves on and we all grown and change. Sometimes for the better!
As I grew up, I put the Ninja Turtles away and the cards went into a box to not be thought about for years. I was an adult that had moved out and I had bigger things to worry about than a shiny cardboard picture of a fake spaceship. Adulthood is like that though, it has us look back on the things that actually brought joy with contempt and this vague sense that we have “moved past that”. Did I really though? I still have story lines in my head now and I’d be lying if I said some of my characters wouldn’t fit Ninja Turtle archetypes. Being a big boy with a big boy job had me burying my head in books to study and so wrapped up in big boy problems that by the time I took a moment to look up and breathe I had lost all of those.
Take away the job and the reason to study and what did I have left? I never learned to knit and piano is still beyond my meager abilities. I didn’t have any hobbies, I had convinced myself that obligations were they same thing. I had a bit of time this winter where I might have got just a touch crazy, I had lost my career and the big driving force in my professional life, without that I didn’t think I had a whole lot on the “adult” front. I didn’t really have any hobbies to fall back on and its weird being the unemployed guy bugging your friends with jobs to go hang out on a Tuesday afternoon -sorry guys-.
A popular thought now a days is the media consumption is a hobby. It’s not. Sitting in front of Netflix and just going with it for awhile is not the same as something that keeps your stupid brain meats from turning to jelly. I never found the end of Netflix but it wasn’t hitting the same after awhile and my second favorite thing, reporting Christian iconography as self harm on Pinterest, fell off as well. So as we were moving things into the new house I found those old Star Wars cards.
Now this game was unnecessarily complicated and all I remember was that when we played in school we cut out about half the rules that we couldn’t figure out. I still had my deck wrapped in rubber bands in my backpack until about 10th grade though. Some high schoolers did cool things in those days but I had to send fools to the shadow realm.
So now all these decades later I dust them off and remember looking through these same cards as a very different person than I am now. Older, hander hands found there way to the things used to mean so much to me. They hadn’t changed, they just had a lot of time in the basement.
These old Star Wars cards where fun. They got pretty deep into the lore that I used to know and used to seem so important but now I chuckle at how serious we all were about it. Still, I called up my high school friend that used to play and set up a play date, bro-dates are an important part of any friendship. He is of course a contributing member of society and I had to wait until he was available so more nostalgia was in order.
I’m pretty sure this was my deck’s starting position but I also haven’t looked at it in forever.
It turns out that I wasn’t the only person missing these old cards because there is a thriving online community that has updated these things and made virtual cards through all the media that has happened between 1999 and now. Fun group and I could see myself figuring out these game all over again to be able to be a part of this community that this dumb kid from the Midwest could only have dreamed of when these cards went out of print.
If anyone is looking to see how far things have come, this is the new hang out on the information super highway and they can walk you through getting started again. Plus they have tournaments! Crazy world.
In the larger world though, Star Wars was second fiddle to the big boss. Magic the Gathering has been a force since the 90s and I don’t think it ever really stopped. I didn’t play back then but I was reintroduced to it in an “Any Soldier Care Package” on a deployment. These things swept through the tiny base and everyone was playing with the same deck of cards. It was nuts. People playing over chow, cards getting swept away in the wind from outside, one time my commander asked me if I had brought my deck. Anyway, I looked it back up and low and behold these things have a new hook, they call it “Universes Beyond” and I am here for it.
Like all things that are fun some people started taking it too seriously and now cards are worth thousands of dollars, the barrier to entry is low-ish but the sky is the limit on how much you want to spend on this thing. The universe beyond is used to bring different properties under the magic umbrella, Dr. Who, Sonic the Hedgehog, Spongebob, its all in there.
What I am here for though and also throwing big boy money at are my eternal friends, the Ninja Turtles.
They were gifted an entire set of cards in the game walking into my local game store had me giggling over the entire situation. If you’ve never been to a friendly local game store (LGS), they are certainly an experience. Mine is situated in a strip mall in the middle of town and the sign is a florescent moose, I’m interested before I even walk in, but the people populating once you get there is a slice of humanity that I was not prepared to meet.
Three connecting rooms of tables and glaringly bright desk lamps of people painting their tiny toys on one side, ripping through dozens of packs of cards on another table, and me walking in and buying a “Heroes in a Half Shell” preconstructed deck that would have made 8 year old me jealous.
The story isn’t about the pictured child mainlining caffeine, this is just the picture that I took.
I sit down and start tearing into this primary colored box of cards like it was Christmas of 1993 when I am stopped by a stranger. “You must be new.” He opened with and invited me to play with his “pod”, a group of 4 players that are all playing against each other in a style of magic that I had never seen before but seems to be the main way people play anymore. My new friends all seemed to be about my age and we were all about the same round shape of human. Its nice to find my people.
The guy that had invited me over explained that his name way Eddy, not Edward and all 3 of them held my hand as they walked me and my brand new deck through getting stomped into the ground by very expensive cardboard. I had performed a classic blunder because I brought a deck of cards that where chosen for me and at a price that I bawked at but still paid. These gentlemen had decks that cost more than my first car and it showed when I could barely get a turn finished. Still, I had fun and laughed at the silliness of it. I am working on my all or nothing thinking and I will never be the Greatest Magic Player Ever nor should I be, I am a terrible influence on young minds. It was fun to be a teenager again and play with my shiny ninja turtle cards.
Of course I am trying to improve myself but I have fallen down the magic card rabbit hole and my Leonard deck was just the start so buckle up in case I start writing more about it. I’m not at the LGS every week or most weeks even, but I am stretching out into some old hobbies and making new friends.
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