Magic and Regret

In books and movies, regrets tend to center around a single decision, an instant, something that can be summed up in a sentence or frame that comes back to haunt the characters in flashback. That makes for good storytelling, but I’m not sure it reflects life all that well. When I look back at the choices I regret, most of them are little daily choices that built up like plaque, that I only realize are mistakes years later. But maybe I’m being melodramatic about all this, given that I’ve lived a safe, protected, and therefore am mostly regret-free life. Case in point, three of my top regrets from high school seem pretty petty when I write them out: not socializing enough, not reading enough on my own, and spending way too much time and money on Magic: The Gathering. 

If you haven’t spent enough time around nerdy high schoolers, Magic is the first and most popular collectable trading card game. It has a massive community; even a town as small as Grinnell has its own game story that survives mostly on Magic products and weekly Magic tournaments. The rules are so arcane that it took me a full year of regular play to figure out the most obscure of them, and the cards are so expensive that they drive otherwise worthless cardboard up to obscene prices. 

The complex rules and high prices scared me off at first, as did the general vibe of obsession that the game seemed to breed. But a few people I wanted to be friends with in middle school played, so I bought a deck and learned a passing familiarity with the rules. Middle school turned to high school and one by one my closest friends became hardcore collectors who would spend two hundred dollars on booster packs in one night. I never spent that much, but I had to spend something to maintain my collection and keep up a deck that could be competitive. I’ve never added up how much I spent, but if I did I think I’d probably be more than a little shocked at how much I’d lost.

The problem, I think, was that I was never all-in with Magic. I liked it well enough to learn the rules and play if someone had their decks out, but not enough to ever get really invested in it. Which, being surrounded by true obsessives, meant that I was always just a little bit behind, hoping that we’d find something more interesting to do or talk about. For me, Magic was just a way to make and maintain friends, but when most of what those friends did was talk about Magic, I felt a little bit lost.

An odd thing has happened to me over the last month or so: I’ve gotten back into Magic. The lore, which once seemed so dense and meaningless, now fascinates me in how overcrowded and bizarre it all was. The convoluted rules have a sort of legal elegance to them that I didn’t take the time to appreciate when I was first learning them. I have a special appreciation for how each of the colors has its own personality and philosophy, and how those interact when mixed. I’ve even considered getting back into the Magic community, even though that’s basically impossible now that social distancing has shut down all competitions. Really, I want to go back in time and choose a side. If I’d been really indifferent, then I should’ve found different friends, different interests, and built something that would’ve served me well through the rest of my life. Or I could’ve gone all-in, memorized the terms and watched the matches and learned to love it. I could’ve gotten a lot out of it. But I didn’t choose either, and now I feel like I paid the price and got nothing for it.

But, when we remember things, especially things we regret, we tend to simplify what should be complicated. The friends I made playing Magic are real friends, even if there was a consistent disconnect between us. The thrill I felt constructing my own halfway decent deck for the first time was real too. I got a lot out of it, if never quite what I wanted. And the memories that I have left over from it all aren’t just regret; there’s happiness there, real happiness that I should value.