#34 - Goodbye
Thank you, but goodbye.
There’s no fanfare, no obituaries written, no “In Memoriam” for washed out content creators in Magic. How brave is it, then, for me to write my own? For me to put down my thoughts about the last couple of weeks, in particular, that led to this very post?
Because I've been avoiding Magic. I've been avoiding you.
I've been avoiding myself.
Orlando, June 4th, 1998
She’s a particular kind of fuming right now. This is the kind of central Florida motel that is booked by people from flyover states who promised their family a Disney vacation they’ll be able to afford in a month’s worth of paychecks from now. Everything is dripping. I see a variety of spider species as we haul our borrowed suitcases to the room. We’re sharing a bed that’s doubling as a witness stand.
“You don’t have cards?” she asks, the exasperation as thick as the humidity in the room. She tries to understand the game as much as she can. She’s been cleaning houses and picking up wallpapering work to afford all of this. Had some flight credits on Allegiant Airlines from a friend who’s still in the air, that never escaped the big tube in the sky. She doesn’t have time to get it.
But she knows I need cards.
I’m avoiding eye contact. I’m prone to magical thinking, that the world will sort itself out and the universe will conspire to make things happen for me. This often just means my problems become the emotional labor of someone else. Like my mom, right now, who is clearly in the “Not Mad, Just Disappointed” phase of coping. I assure her there’s a vague plan, that this will all get worked out, and that we couldn’t afford a deck good enough, anyway. Sligh wouldn’t cut it.
I’m meeting up with a kid from one of the big IRC channels. Up until this point, we’ve been screennames. He has the curtains hair like Shawn from Boy Meets World and wears new clothes and, of course, has extra decks. I don’t really know what any of them do. I’m a limited player. He’s telling me this one deck is hot on The Dojo. “Okay.” I’ll use Tradewind Rider to bounce things after they’ve dealt damage and generate tons of value with ETBs. I guess? I’m grateful but lost, in a strange hotel room, in central Florida, at 15-years-old.
Because tomorrow, I’ll play in the first Junior Super Series Worlds.
Instead of attending my grandfather’s funeral.
I’ll barely remember any of it 30 years later.
Denver, January, 2002
I’m hearing my father’s voice for the first time. The woman at my tech school financial aid department needs to verify he’s going to pay my tuition, which was arranged in lieu of back child support and not of a generous spirit.
“Can I call your dad?”
Of the dozens of times I’d been asked this in my life, this was the first time I could definitively say, “I guess?”
You could tell why he was a DJ earlier in his career; he had a way of making everything sound important. Everything that was said about him made him seem important. He was the tall, handsome VP of a communications company that owned a variety of TV and radio stations. He had a problem with drinking that made him charismatic and unpredictable.
He’s unaware I’m in the same room as he gives some fairly mundane approvals over speaker phone. 30 seconds later, it’s all over.
“Okay, I just need you to sign a …”
This poor part-time college admissions person is plowing away with her spiel, not realizing that I’m probably having my first anxiety attack and processing however best I can this massive life moment. I’ve spent years wondering what this man was like without any reference point beyond what little my mom wants to volunteer. This is my first peek.
We talk again a year later because I find his screenname on AOL Instant Messenger. He’s online and I ambush him, which he handles well, asking what I’m up to. Desperate for approval, for some connection to this man, I proffer the manliest thing I can think of: I have a girl coming over to my apartment.
“Better make sure the place can pass the white glove test.”
He quickly signs off. He dies on January 4th, 2023. We were never in touch again.
I tried. Would send him occasional messages on Facebook. Try to tell him about his grandson. Ask him questions. It became this void I could post into. The ocean I could throw my bottles of booze-filled messages into.
July 12, 2013
Hey Mike,
Hope all is well and you're having a great summer.
I'm 30 now, have my own life with long term girlfriend (soon to be fiance) and a dog and a house and a career. I'm hosting an internet radio show - I think my mom said you did radio for a while? I have a son I haven't seen in years, too. I'm not sure why I'm telling you all of this. It's not like we're college buddies that need to reconnect. Sometimes I wonder if you're wondering, though.
I wonder about you on occasion - probably for my own selfish reasons. I see a lot of my mom reflected in me, but other times I'm inexplicably different. I wonder if I'm like any of my half-siblings, if we share habits or mannerisms or sense of humor. I tried reaching out to them a few years ago but nothing came of it. To be honest, they don't interest me as much.
I wonder what your parents are like. Or were like. My grandfather passed years ago and my grandmother is struggling with dementia and endless knee and hip surgeries. I think about how I'll tell my kids about their grandfather. I don't have anything negative to say, really. In all reality, I should have been much more grateful for the opportunities you afforded me, like debate camp or college. Thank you.
But I can't really build a person out of that.
Just know that I wish you the best in life and love, and if you ever want to talk, we might both get a lot out of it. I imagine you're a pretty interesting guy.
Jake
Denver, May, 2021
The pandemic affords me too much time to play Arena and I’m not complaining. Draft is getting pretty easy against the bots, so I’ve been infinite for weeks or months at this point, chaining top Mythic finishes into invites without having to touch my government cash. I’m “applying for jobs” in a tab on my other monitor to keep my PUA assistance alive when my opponent is taking a little long to decide their blockers.
The internet of Magic is Democratic, but nowhere is this more true than Reddit. With this new 17Lands data tool, I learn a little about stats every day and observe trends in bot behavior. No shade, but Redditors who write about Magic are dryer than the Devil’s dusty ding dong and I’m carving out a little niche in /r/spikes writing about how to game the AI draft system. A thousand words here or there. Data rich. Well-formatted. A bad joke here and there. A reference to my absentee dad.
I live for the comments.
Shit is bad around here. My son hates me, hates living here, much more than he resents his mom for sending him to live with us. We’re not connecting at all. Sam and I are keeping each other sane but I can see it drags on her. She wants this fixed and there’s no way to snap this decade plus of father-son issues away. No one leaves their rooms.
The comments make me feel whole.
I left The Denver Post a few years ago. Wanted to shed the skin of being the cannabis critic because I resented it. Resented how it didn’t lead to my Big Break, resented how well my peers that had moved on were doing, resented how it got me the wrong attention from people I didn’t like yet left me as a novelty act for people who I craved approval from. I had to leave.
But I miss being someone.
Writing about Magic is a putty in those cracks forming around my ego. No one cares about who I am, but what I can give them in the form of gems, gold, and trophies. I oblige because all I want from them is to be told that I did well. I make mistakes but never take the L. I turn them into manifestos. I build scaffolding around my flaws so no one else can touch them.
NOW
I don’t know if Andrei Klepatch has quit Magic.
I think about the car every day now.
“Sir. Imagine you are in the driver’s seat of a car. You have been sitting there so long that you have forgotten that it is the seat of a car, forgotten how to get out of the seat, forgotten the existence of your own legs, indeed forgotten that you are a being at all separate from the car. You control the car with skill and precision, driving it wherever you wish to go, manipulating the headlights and the windshield wipers and the stereo and the air conditioning, and you pronounce yourself a great master. But there are paths you cannot travel, because there are no roads to them, and you long to run through the forest, or swim in the river, or climb the high mountains. A line of prophets who have come before you tell you that the secret to these forbidden mysteries is an ancient and terrible skill called GETTING OUT OF THE CAR, and you resolve to learn this skill. You try every button on the dashboard, but none of them is the button for GETTING OUT OF THE CAR. You drive all of the highways and byways of the earth, but you cannot reach GETTING OUT OF THE CAR, for it is not a place on a highway. The prophets tell you GETTING OUT OF THE CAR is something fundamentally different than anything you have done thus far, but to you this means ever sillier extremities: driving backwards, driving with the headlights on in the glare of noon, driving into ditches on purpose, but none of these reveal the secret of GETTING OUT OF THE CAR. The prophets tell you it is easy; indeed, it is the easiest thing you have ever done. You have traveled the Pan-American Highway from the boreal pole to the Darien Gap, you have crossed Route 66 in the dead heat of summer, you have outrun cop cars at 160 mph and survived, and GETTING OUT OF THE CAR is easier than any of them, the easiest thing you can imagine, closer to you than the veins in your head, but still the secret is obscure to you.”
How did a prerelease every once-in-a-while with my buddy Cory turn into all of this? Every aspect of my digital life, from my Google News feed to social media to the game I turn on to tune out, all of it is saturated to the core with Magic.
A game I increasingly feel very bad at.
Orlando, ‘98
The hall smells vaguely like youth athletics, plastic and rubber, and trade show supplies, not the vague gaming smell you get when adults play Magic. I put on a hat they give me. It has a ring of sweat around it quickly.
It seems like all of these guys know each other and none of them know me, the kid from Iowa who doesn’t know how to play his deck and has bright red lips and Disney eyelashes. I’m a young 15. Fucking soft. I pretended to take a sip of Jack Daniels in Kate Doyle’s basement last year and faked being drunk. I quote a lot of Monty Python.
My opponent has a wispy mustache and is dressed in mostly black. He’s playing Rec Sur, a deck with all the questions for my deck with all the answers. Unfortunately, my deck preys on aggressive decks that want to run me over. My answers fit a different set of questions. I have the cheat sheet for the wrong test.
Recurring Nightmare is the bane of my existence. I can’t interact with it. It’s cheap and brutal, where my answers are all complicated. I tap a bunch of things for Tradewind rider, pay a bunch of mana, try to come up with solutions. He pays 2B and Recurring Nightmare.
Nekrataal. Recurring Nightmare. Firestorm my board. Recurring Nightmare. Orcish Settlers away my lands.
Recurring Nightmare.
Denver, April, 2025
I’m skeptical about the Canadians.
Spotlight Denver is in a few days and I’m filling a spot in a ramshackle testing team. Three slots are active Pros, four slots are friends of a Pros from Alberta, and then there’s me. I’ve spent the last week pouring over spoilers, then the full set, then the data that trickled out. I’m not particularly interested in dragging along some moderately invested weekend warriors looking to leave the big testing meeting early to catch a Nuggets game.
I’m sure they’re nice and all.
I picked up a case of TDM Play Boosters yesterday because there’s a rumor of a run on them around town. Between those and the cost of the meeting space tomorrow, I’m 1K into this event. It’s my hometown GP. How could I not go hard?
It’s the day before they land and we’re at the Renaissance downtown, in the lobby, but the opposite of a Lobbycon. It’s bright on a seasonably warm Denver afternoon (they’re two hours late) and it’s empty as we crack packs. The “Team Lead” lays out pools in a way that I’m completely unfamiliar with and it starts to feel like he’s the kid with the controller while the rest of us watch him beat the levels. One Pro grabs a Modelo and is cracking jokes.
I’m irritated but will look back and see that he was the only one who got it.
We repeat this process and we’re finally playing some games. None of it feels particularly instructive or efficient. The Lead declares a card is “better than I thought” because it performs situationally well, all while glancing at very recent data between takes to reinforce his opinions. As a process person, there’s frustration leaking in. What are we doing?
They’re going for dinner. I’m going home. I’m spent and want to write about how to play sealed for you, the dear reader.
But I can’t. I’m falling asleep. Gassed from the new job and the hectic testing day. That article is never going to happen.
The Team Meeting space is my buddies’ comedy room/podcast studio that he’s giving us a deal on. All the Liquid Death and Coors Original we can drink. An activist friend down the street lends me a second 8’ table her husband never gave back to his Vape Pen job when he left. I set out a land station with assorted sleeves from collections I’ve picked up over the last year.
One of the pros is 30 minutes late. The first thing he says to me: “Where’s breakfast, Jake?”
In my head I say, “Get fucked.”
Ironically, the thing that saves the day is the group of homies from Edmonton. They’re funny and curious and ask me questions about myself. They smile. They crack jokes during the draft that aren’t about Magic. They’re out of the car.
I thought I wanted to get back on the Pro Tour, to get back to greatness, that testing with Day 2 Dudes would feel like finding my people.
Instead I found a mirror.
NOW
It’s been a weird week since then.
I had a weird pool at Spotlight Series. It didn’t really matter. I started 0-2 for all manner of reasons that didn’t really matter in the end.
I was still in the Recurring Nightmare of 1998. It wasn’t the card that beat me. It was the model.
Sacrifice what you have, bring back what you miss.
Repeat until it’s all over.
And then it became crystal fucking clear. I went to see Jeff Laubenstein, then I walked out alone to the attached parking structure and cried a little, total silence except for the hiss of my nicotine pen and deep breaths of sad acceptance.
I never wanted the grind or the day two or the min cash. I wanted to matter. I thought the Pro Tour would make me matter.
I’ve been writing about Greatness. About the dog trying to catch the car. About legacies. I couldn’t see I was writing about myself the whole fucking time. That the PT was the sedan I was mashing my paws into pavement trying to catch. But it doesn’t love me. It doesn’t bark back.
It just drives off, leaving me barking in the road, wondering what the fuck I was chasing in the first place.
I’ve tried it all. Video editor for your Favorite EDH Show™. Twitter micro celeb. Early Access Streamer. Content guy for the Top Website. Finance personality.
Every new identity brought me a few more weeks or months of belief that I hadn’t wasted my time.
Look at me! Look at me.
Look at me the way I looked at my dad.
Mana Club was supposed to be my big escape, a chance to put some jumper cables on my writing career. I dove all the way in. I still haven’t written a page of my book.
The book was supposed to be a series of personal essays. About not having a father, then not being a father, about manhood and identity and never really feeling all that manly.
I wrote about Magic because I didn’t know who I was. I’m writing this because I do.
Bonus Seymour of the Week
Epilogue
That’s a wrap on any plan for Mana Club. My new job keeps me pretty damn busy and I don’t have thoughts about Magic right now. A lot of what I’ve written can be applied to the thing of the day:
Stop being so cruel to each other, especially for the sake of entertainment.
A lot of the people at Wizards have great hearts and are asked to make impossible choices.
It’s just a game. Try to remember that, for all of the invites and cash and clout, it’s just a game.
I think that’s where Arena and MTGO got my ass. I spent years of my life as a fucking videogamer. I lied to myself! “Gotta do this Arena event because it’s work” or whatever is the lamest excuse to play video games I’ve ever heard. I wasn’t a good partner! I couldn’t just sit and watch something without having a draft running or answering a Discord message. That’s habitual behavior! Sam has been seeing a lot more of me. I’ve been seeing more of her. It’s nice.
Hard pivot but I also need to acknowledge that I believe AI is going to fundamentally change our way of life in the next few years, whether we like it or not. I have a lot of dread around this. I need to center my life around something more meaningful than a game that I play. The game can still be a part of it! But it can’t be the juicy center.
If you’re a creator, oof. I think my good friend and confidant Dan Sheehan said it best in his goodbye from Pie Break and content, broadly:
Be careful who you entrust your joy to … there is obviously an inherent risk to taking something you love and trying to turn it into a product that people can consume but there’s also a risk in trading participation for consumption.
And what I mean by that is taking something that you used to actively participate in and turning it into something you passively consume. The implicit or explicit goal of all of these platforms is to take everything and reduce it to content. To take all joy and enthusiasm and make it a repeatable, interactable experience.
And it’s not good for you.
I understand that none of us get to engage with our hobbies as much as we want to as adults. It’s one of the most annoying parts of adult life as you finally have autonomy and money and then suddenly all these responsibilities get dropped on your head and you can’t just post up and play Magic with your buddies every night like you always dreamed.
But I dont think its worth it to take something that brings you joy and pacify yourself within it just so you can experience it more often.
I finally got around to reading Jonathan Haidt’s “The Anxious Generation” and the idea that the stories we heard for generations were based on morality hit me hard. Outside of news, the things we read or watched had a greater moral lesson to them. Now, we regularly consume things that are at best amoral or sometimes awful. Maybe this is what I was bitching about when it came to pack cracking as a genre of content here.
Anyway, I don’t have any plans for more columns. I’ve opened up the archives, paused billing, and am figuring out how to return any money I’ve collected for people who paid their year in advance. I’m legitimately unsure if I’ve collected that money or if Substack pays it out over the longer term. I’m terrible with this stuff.
I’ve pooled together all the stuff that I’ve promised for giveaways (and that was generously donated by Propaganda MTG, who you should buy/sell stuff with) and done a giveaway where only subscribers were entered. I’ve emailed the winner. Congrats to JDB. If he doesn’t want it, it’ll pass down to the next of you.
Here are some MTGO codes, one per person, don’t be a dick:
CG25-SGMI-QSEJ-RDBJ-NL4O
CG25-LVNF-X7E7-8HCF-CNVF
CG25-VBQA-YPEI-MLQA-QOGR
CG25-OOFT-NJHV-4NF7-FKL3
CG25-MAGF-7WIM-GJMO-MQNS
CG25-FLEI-MMRF-FRXC-QECU
CG25-VNBN-TOIP-9KQX-ARIL
CG25-OXVX-74AU-P7ZM-ALUT
CG25-V7Q4-UXH4-BF4X-BBDP
CG25-QIRS-V3RY-43KX-XUDA
And if you live in Denver, reach out: I’m having a garage sale this weekend to get rid of stuff I no longer have the time to sell. Sealed, binders, playmats, singles, so much stuff.
Thank you for being here. Goodbye.
Favorite writer’s favorite writer is Jake Browne.
I’ll hit ya up when I’m in town.
Good close.
Good stuff dude. Thanks for writing.