You pull your Ford Explorer in to the long row of apartment complexes, just like you do every Tuesday evening. There is a long carport over a row of parking spots, mostly filled with tenants’ older cars. The building is a two-story combination of off-white paint and spots of exposed wood siding. The cars range from a fifteen-year-old, rusting, dented heap to the neighborhood drug dealer’s gleaming new Mustang.

This is where you play Magic.

The front door is painted the same way the rest of the building is painted: badly. You grab the wiggly door handle and note that the thick, shiny deadbolt is the only thing that really keeps the door shut. Not surprisingly, the door is mostly open on this unseasonably warm October day. You give the door two quick, hard raps and step on through, returning it to the same position it was in before you arrived.

“How you doin’?” Shane asks. It is less a query and more a greeting, so you treat it that way.

“Fine,” you respond, not feeling fine at all. Breaking up with your girlfriend of five years only two days before will do that.

The memories from the last forty-eight hours ago race through your head in the blink of an eye: another phone call from the mortgage company wanting to know where this month’s payment was; another deep breath as you promise to come down to the bank tomorrow to fix the problem, knowing there wasn’t any money left to fix the problem. It was the same problem five months before and several months before that.

You put her in charge of paying the bills initially because someone had to be, and you knew you were lazy and would probably mess it up. You didn’t realize that she would take the mortgage payments and hide the money. When they called the first time about being more than two months behind on a mortgage the two of you took out for a house you never should have bought, you had the first fight. The money went into the account, the money went out of the account, and there was never enough in the account when the bank would try to withdraw for the mortgage. You wanted to believe the pathetic lies she came up with, and you convinced yourself they were true. You found a way to squeeze larger payments for several months out of the already tight budget, and you got all caught up again.

You thought.

When the bank called the second time, you freaked out. You warned her that this couldn’t ever happen again, but you left her in charge of paying the mortgage. You found out other bills weren’t being paid either, but you could never figure out where the money was going. There were no drugs or alcohol or wild shopping sprees. The money just wasn’t there.

Every drop of joy you had for the last month came out of those cards. Writing about Magic, building decks, organizing cards, and the Tuesday-night games provided an escape from the ugly reality that your life was about to change from a twisted version of normal that you could barely tolerate into something completely unknown. The anxiety of the pending change was enough to make you sick.

Thank God for Tuesday Night Magic.

You flop down on the folding chair you like. It seems to be the most solid of the chairs available since it doesn’t sag when you lean back like some of the molded resin lawn chairs or rickety kitchen chairs that are available. Small talk ensues as you open your bag, asking about Shane’s work. He was recently promoted where he works, building log homes. He professes to hate the promotion. He prefers to actually build the homes as opposed to telling everyone else how to do it. You pull your box of decks out of your bag and pause for a second, looking at the box.

She had it made for you.

You take a deep breath and tell yourself you aren’t going there right now, and you slide the lid off the box, looking for a deck to use in the first game. You pick something at random and shuffle up. It looks like that Flagbearer deck that crashed and burned from last week, but what the hell. You toss your $5 to Shane¹ and start to mindlessly shuffle your deck.

“I come around a left curve in the highway at about 130 clicks², and there’s this huge fuckin’ moose standing there, right in the middle of my lane, looking at me. He isn’t surprised or nothing. He’s just lookin’ at me, roaring down the highway. His big moose face is just saying, ‘Dude! I’m standing right here! Go the fuck around!’

“If I hit the brakes now, I’m just going to fly right the fuck off the goddamn road, so I try to finish the curve a little tighter, cross the double-solid, and pass him in the other lane. Not like there’s a fucking car coming, right? I mean, I’m in the middle of butt-fuck nowhere! I know if this moose starts movin’, I’m a dead man, but he hasn’t budged an inch so far, so I go for it. I luck out and blow right past him in the oncoming lane! I swear the moose was watching me the whole time. As I go past him, I can almost see him look into the car. He either said, ‘Nice driving,’ or ‘Slow the fuck down, asshole.’ I’m goin’ with ‘nice drivin’’ since he seemed like a pretty chill moose.”

Of course, when Darren tells the story, it takes fifteen minutes and way more “fucks” and “shits” and “goddamns.”

You reach into your bag of goodies and pull out a Coke, crack the can, and get started. The game is nothing particularly special. Darren and Colin start out quickly—Darren with a Sneak Attack deck and Colin with a bevy of small, annoying black creatures. You are playing attack-left as always, and thankfully, neither of them is directly behind you. Shane is behind you, and he is playing control, as he often does. This is a good thing for you since your defenses are a little slow to hit the board, but you are soon in the thick of things.

Darren’s Sneak Attack is wreaking havoc with the board. Already, Dave is out of this game. He didn’t expect to stick around too long with his Kobolds, but even a theme deck likes a little time to show off the cool cards and how poorly it can deal with most any threat! Darren was now causing problems for Colin. While Colin had been doing good work attacking Shane, he really didn’t have much for defense, so it looked like Darren was going to fold him up quickly as well.

You had hit Darren a couple of times with the Angry Mob and expected he was looking to stop this soon. This seems like a good time for Standard Bearer to get involved. You add the Crimson Acolyte for good measure and wait to see what happens next. Darren has a look at what is happening and just grimaces. After a couple of turns, he’s barely hanging on at 3 life. Now he uses Sneak Attack to bring out the first nonred creature you’ve seen from this deck. He blocks the Mob and kills it, losing his own creature in the process.

On his turn, Darren attacks with the Dragon he chooses to Sneak Attack into play, finishing off Colin. While it doesn’t make sense to for Darren to leave himself wide open, you jump at the opportunity, and you kill him. It turns out Darren had only red creatures and no way to stop you from killing him, so he killed Colin, hoping to hurry the game along. Only you and Shane are left. Shane’s creatures, to this point, have all been fairly small and somewhat ineffectual as far as attacking an opponent is concerned. Your Crimson Acolyte is useless against Shane’s black and blue creatures.

After the game, you shake your head and smile to yourself. Again and again you have preached the importance of saving your spells and abilities until the end of the game. You have talked about laying low and avoiding everyone’s attention. Yet, here you are, playing a Flagbearer deck while Shane laid low and saved his Drain Life so he could win the game with it as opposed to killing off a mostly meaningless creature. You need to listen to your own advice!

The next few games are more of the same. Your decks are solid, but a little underpowered against this group. You rely on guile, deception, and careful use of your limited resources to win games. In spite of the deck being stacked against you, you still manage to win more than your fair share of games this night (and most nights). Several more Cokes, some shared bags of chips, several laughed curses, and plenty of stories later, the night winds up.

The end of the night just seemed to arrive out of nowhere for you. Everyone had a great time enjoying a night of Magic with the guys. It isn’t until now, the end of the night, when you realize you hadn’t thought about her all night. Magic wasn’t going to make the pain and anxiety go away forever, but for the last few hours, when you really needed the respite, Magic took it away.

When people ask you now, more than ten years after that night, why you still play Magic, you think about that night and so many of the other nights in between—the breaks from the strain of law school, the release of a bad day at work, the moments during a night of Magic when you can feel the tension fall away from you—and you know why you still play. You remember the opportunities to build friendships and share the excitements in your life, and you know that you still play because life is just so much better with a little Magic.

Bruce Richard

¹ Everyone who comes to play throws in $5, and the winner of each game gets a pack of Magic cards that Shane has picked up. It is always interesting to see who wins what!

² That’s about 80 mph for the metrically challenged.