Magic

There’s a group of fellas and one gal at the Institute who play the extreme nerd game, Magic: the Gathering. It’s some sort of card game and from what I can gather you buy decks, or build decks, or something, and then you battle each other with your own decks. And it sounds as if there are myriad decks and countless cards to put in those decks. It also sounds like you can spend an insane amount of money on this stuff. But we all make silly purchases from time to time, right. Each card has some sort of power or trick or weapon or person and that’s where my knowledge ends. They play some days, but every single day they talk about it. For hours. And hours. And hours. Oh, the hours they can talk about Magic. If they spent half that amount of time on, say, doing their homework or bringing me a Slurpee, I wouldn't worry about them so much.

These conversations and games happen right outside my office so I hear it all.  And it's all very charming and nerdy.  The only real issue (besides the fact that I'm not kidding about the hours part) is that I literally only understand half of what they're saying.  You know how when you listen to people speak a foreign language and you can pick out words that sound familiar?  This is how their Magic talk sounds.  I think they're nearly speaking some form of English but I'm not entirely sure.

This morning I mentioned to a couple of them that I was going to start recording their Magic conversations and blog about it.  They gave me full permission to do so.  Here are just a few snippets:

You snatch an artifact from the graveyard and put it up front.

There’s all the different gollums you can put out. A two two Gollum. Two splicers.

I have a hero blade hold.

Desperate ravings is all crap.

There’s molten psyche. But there are a lot of colorless draws.

Tap four, he’s now five five.

It’s sitting in a pool of manna.

You sacrifice Balthor and every player brings red and black.

You have 4 nine nines.

Star Stars are equal to all creatures.

I blink lots of stuff.

Barbarians are awesome.

You swing with her first. Second combat phase you swing with him.

If you have Aurelia in your hands you can pull off 5 combat phases. Cloud shift her at the end of the 2nd combat phase. If you have Odric because it’s a red white deck you can get 4 more combat phases. I looked it up.

It implies your only other creature is a one one which is most likely not the case.

I was about to freak out because for a minute I thought that was a badillian click.

She’s a hilarious card. No she’s an awesome card.

Plus one plus one.

That's just the stuff I vaguely made out.  The rest sounded like the desperate ravings of a Badillian Click.

The part that I truly love about this whole thing is that when I was a student at this very institute, lo these many years, guys were playing Magic.  I wonder if we could round up some of the old gang of nerds and bring them out to meet the new gang of nerds and have some sort of Magic Summit.  I would have to lock all of them in the game room of course because I can't handle too much of the gibberish. But that would be epic.