1.

The Reading Terminal Market rests one thrown battery away from the Philadelphia Convention Center. Tourists and office workers alike, enjoying a brisk autumn day, the kind Ron Jaworski used to make a living on at Veterans Stadium, take no notice of the weird Magic: The Gathering signs on the convention center windows, nor do they think about what might be going on in those vaunted halls.

Luminaries such as The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, and the 1936 Democratic National Convention (You’ll Go Far . . . With FDR!) have walked these vaunted halls and perhaps even ordered a cheesesteak from one of those weird borderline-Amish families at the market.

For these next three days in late October, however, the Philadelphia Convention Center has a very different purpose. The 5,267-year-old (rough estimate) establishment will play host to the Magic: The Gathering Grand Prix of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and with it, a vast collection of every kid who’s ever simply read a book at a family reunion in lieu of engaging socially with loved ones.

Over the next three days, these social misfits will battle in what Forbes magazine calls “a trading card game.” When the dust settles, the winner will take home just enough money to break even after travel and hotel costs. In the growing world of Magic: The Gathering, a Grand Prix is like The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, and the 1936 Democratic National Convention all rolled into one.

Yup, I can’t do this anymore.

2.

Anyone who’s anyone reads Natasha Lewis Harrington’s articles, and anyone who’s anyone knows that they are great and especially proficient at illuminating some bit of Magic culture and explaining the nuts and bolts of it in such a way that makes you sit back and say, “Holy shit, she’s right!” I would guess that I do this about three times per Natasha Lewis Harrington article.

Specifically, the article of hers that comes to mind the most now is The Magic Ritual, which is about how ritual acts bind us and how playing Magic counts as such an act. From the article:

Works of fiction are generally told from the perspective of an outsider coming into a new world. The process of assimilation and its ramifications can be seen in almost everything, from The Great Gatsby to James and the Giant Peach. This reflects the human condition: We’re born, and we don’t know anything, and then throughout life, we begrudgingly learn stuff. What I’m wondering is if a story can be told from the perspective of an insider.

For whatever it’s worth, Rounders says yes.

It’s worth noting that from the perspective of the insider, when an outsider starts talking about whatever collective identity you identify with, it really serves to piss you off. For example, I was watching Day9 (or, as he’s known in my apartment, the boring Starcraft guy) and his recap of his first Grand Prix in San Jose. About two minutes into the first (of three!) half-hour videos of JUST HIM TALKING (spoiler alert: I did not make it through them), he takes it upon himself to try to explain Magic: The Gathering:

Discovering just how much of a geek you are is never easy. It never comes on slowly; it just hits you one day like a jackhammer to the face. One could say I discovered how alarmingly geeky I was when I watched this juvenile, overly simplistic explanation of what Magic is, parroted by this Starcraft person, and was instantly incensed.

Seriously, does anybody play Magic because he wants to feel like a wizard? Because I would posit the idea that any trading card game, even Magic, simulates the act of being a bearded, medieval wizard pretty poorly; I’m sure you could probably find something better suited to sate your want for pure wizardry than Magic.

My problem with Day9’s explanation isn’t that the whole wizard thing is dorky; when trying to explain Magic to people, I basically tell them that it plays like a cross between chess and poker. You would think that this would really get the women I meet in bars all riled up. It does not. My problem isn’t that wizards are uncool or whatever; my problem with it is that it is comically disconnected with how every person I’ve ever discussed Magic with (Nate “Walking the Planes” Holt is a glaring exception, but I love him anyway) actually sees Magic. The Grind, Parts 1 and 2, by Jeff Cunningham, is a constant point of reference for me, and if you haven’t read them, I suggest you stop reading this and go do so because it’s the most important Magic article ever written, and that is not hyperbole. Jeff’s view of Magic, however cynical, taken from Part 2:

Jeff goes on to note that it’s important to be careful when pursuing mastery of a game with such a high opportunity cost and low payout (if you’re looking to be paid to play games, perhaps you should be playing poker instead), that it may be best for some to abandon the game altogether, and that while the game has allowed him to meet and create unique relationships with people, he is deeply conflicted about Magic’s role in his life so far.

Such strong feelings would be possible if Magic weren’t such an elegant, addictive game. Anyone who has spent an extended period of time with Magic feels this ambivalence. This is why selling Magic as “wizards fighting each other” is such an insidious crock of shit.

3.

I have a lot of scrub tendencies, one of the most offensive of which is that I keep my play mat from every Grand Prix I attend. At GP: Baltimore this spring, I shelled out $60 for the dueling Akromas playmat from GP: Massachusetts in 2007 that I had unwisely sold, probably in order to do another Time Spiral/Time Spiral/Future Sight Draft, whereupon I almost certainly first-picked a Nightshade Assassin over an Errant Ephemeron, forced B/R, and did not win the Draft. In my defense, though, the mat looks pretty damn cool.

As it turned out, I did not score the Grand Prix: Philadelphia Barnyard Orgy of Death play mat; Hurricane Sandy did not deter attendance at all. 1,986 players was the final count, which effectively meant that I got to see my friends extremely sparingly over the course of the day. Of all the bummers of such a big tournament—the fact that the prize remains the same tiny amount despite such a massive amount of cash put in, the logistical impossibility of finishing on the right side of the money, Pack Rat—not being able to see all of my friends as much as I like was the biggest dagger for me.

4.

Is there anything worse than waking up hung over? What about waking up hung over on a twin bed inexplicably tilted downward? What if that bed was in a freezing Philadelphia hotel room, and it was 7:00 A.M., and you’d gotten to sleep just five hours earlier?

If you’ve never been hung over, I’ll try to explain it. Every single outside stimulus hurts. That’s probably difficult to imagine, but I’m not exaggerating. Your head weighs a thousand pounds, and you can feel all of your heartbeats throbbing inside it. They hurt, too, because they make your head move, however slightly. It feels as though your stomach is in the process of digesting a live animal, which is probably just your liver doing whatever your liver does to alcohol. I’m not a doctor; I’m just trying to describe the sensations best I can. The inside of your mouth tastes like tires smell. Seeing things hurts. All you want to do is die—or even curl up in a ball and go back to sleep—but you can’t because Ryan’s in the shower and Jeff is snoring intermittently and Emily has been steadily pushing you off the twin bed all night, unbeknownst to her, but still.

I frustratedly got dressed in the pitch darkness of the hotel room, quickly chugged a Gatorade out of the hotel’s mini-fridge like it was my last day on Earth, and grabbed another one to bring with me to the event hall, along with a couple things for a couple people: comic books for my friend Aaron and half a box of Return to Ravnica, which my friend David left in the hotel room the night before.

My frustration stemmed mostly from the fact that, since I had three byes, I paid for the sleep-in special. Telling people I had three byes sounded pretty cool until I was forced to tell them how I got them: by winning a twelve-man Standard Grand Prix Trial. I had my concerns about it being Standard, and I voiced them on the Facebook page for the event:

. . . And then twelve people showed up. But what the fuck do I know, right?

Anyway, I was awake at 7:00 A.M., and I ended up leaving the hotel room with Jeff and Ryan, but not before everyone vocalized the same sentiment: “Didn’t you pay for the sleep-in special? That was twenty bucks. What a waste of your money!”

I assured them that I had every intention of coming back to the room and going back to sleep.

5.

Grand Prix venues smell terrible. It’s really a shame, but there’s also no real way around it other than simply not having Grands Prix anymore. I always wonder about the halls Grands Prix are in and how they clean that smell off the walls. Because that smell, that heavy, musty gamer funk . . . it lingers. I like imagining people in hazmat suits power-washing the walls after Grands Prix, muttering “I don’t get paid enough for this shit,” as the smell visibly comes off the walls and settles to the floor. You see, it’s funny because the people who make those smells possible are the same ones I sat next to all weekend!

6.

After meeting up with Aaron, giving him his comic books, and bullshitting about Walking Dead (I still haven’t read it) and Saga (one of the top five books out there right now, but there hasn’t been a new issue in a month, and since it’s Brian K. Vaughan, the ending will almost certainly be shit), I got a text from Adam Barnello and went over to where he was sitting.

The ensuing conversation:

Adam: “Who’s over at the Jupiter [Games] booth?”

Me: “Uhh . . . Ryan McKinney, Kenny Adams, and Dan Rae.”

Adam: “See if they’ll give me a deck box.”

Me: “Give you a deck box?”

Adam: “Yeah.”

Me: “They’re not gonna give you a deck box.”

Adam: “Yes, they will.”

Me: “Adam. You’re decked out in ChannelFireball shit. Why on earth would they give you a deck box?”

Adam: “Just ask Ryan!” He pulls a $10 out of his pocket. “For if they don’t give me one. But ask for a free one first.”

So, I walk over to the Jupiter booth.

Me: “Hey, guys. Barnello’s over there, and he wants to know if he can have a deck box for today.”

Ryan: Thinks for a bit. “Sure. But take one of the purple ones. He has to use a purple one.”

I could not believe it worked. Apparently, all that’s been standing between me and heaps upon heaps of deck boxes is a healthy sense of entitlement. Why, I could’ve been ROLLING in the deck boxes!

I left the event hall shortly after that to go grab some sleep.

7.

The people staying in my hotel room were as follows:

• Me
• My girlfriend Emily
• Her sister Sarah
• Sarah’s boyfriend Jeff
• My and Emily’s mutual friend Ryan

Ryan and Jeff were down at the site registering their decks, so I figured catching some shut-eye wasn’t out of the picture. Then, I walked into the room.

It was pitch-black. Emily and Sarah, who I assumed would have gone somewhere for breakfast or something (it was 9:00 A.M. at this point) decided instead to crank up the heat in the room and go back to sleep. Sarah was on her bed, and Emily was sprawled out on our little twin sleeper, and not wanting to share a twin mattress with a human space-heater in an already sweltering room, I grabbed a spot on Ryan’s makeshift bed (two sofa cushions on the ground) and settled in.

Just as I was on the precipice of sleep, Sarah’s phone would ring. This happened about fifty times, and it reached the point at which I said “fuck it,” threw on some gym shorts, and decided to go down to the hotel’s pool and see what was up.

8.

Thanks, byes! #gpphilly twitter.com/feb31st/status…

— jon corpora (@feb31st) October 27, 2012

When you’re a lower-middle-class kid, it’s a given that you’ll appreciate swimming pools an inordinate amount. Then, you’ll invariably get one all to yourself at some point and realize that there’s not actually too much to do in a swimming pool, especially when you’re all by yourself, which I was. Sure, I was able to relax a little bit, but I grew bored pretty quick and winded up being pretty disappointed with the whole thing.

9.

This was the deck I registered for Grand Prix: Philadelphia:

"B/G/W RTR GP Sealed"

• Creatures (14)
• 1 Axebane Guardian
• 1 Azorius Arrester
• 1 Azorius Justiciar
• 1 Bazaar Krovod
• 1 Keening Apparition
• 1 Risen Sanctuary
• 1 Selesnya Sentry
• 1 Seller of Songbirds
• 1 Slum Reaper
• 1 Sunspire Griffin
• 1 Trestle Troll
• 1 Vitu-Ghazi Guildmage
• 2 Sluiceway Scorpion

• Planeswalkers (1)
• 1 Vraska the Unseen

• Spells (8)
• 1 Aerial Predation
• 1 Eyes in the Skies
• 1 Golgari Charm
• 1 Launch Party
• 1 Coursers' Accord
• 1 Arrest
• 1 Knightly Valor
• 1 Stab Wound

• Lands (17)
• 3 Swamp
• 4 Forest
• 7 Plains
• 1 Golgari Guildgate
• 1 Temple Garden
• 1 Transguild Promenade

Buy This Deck

Deck-building was fairly straightforward; there were no other colors to play. In this Limited format, you ideally want to play a base of two colors and splash a third. My pool of cards did not offer me that luxury. That mana split is probably incorrect. I had a second Transguild Promenade I could’ve played, but two of those plus the Golgari Guildgate—on top of my fairly low creature curve—made playing two Transguild Promenades . . . undesirable.

As always, I’m probably wrong about all of this.

10.

After winning my first round handily (resolving Vraska the Unseen in two out of two games makes things pretty easy), I found myself sitting between Jon Finkel and Chris Pikula in Round 5. My opponent, a name I didn’t recognize, put up a good fight Game 1, but I was able to stabilize until Vraska the Unseen showed up and put the hammer down.

It would be the last game of Magic I’d win in the Grand Prix. I mulliganed to five in Game 2, and here’s how Game 3 went:

My last two matches of the day were uneventful for both my opponents and me, and my sixth-round opponent was Brad Nelson, who saw my Subway sub:

“Dude, what the hell is that? A Subway sub? You know there’s a market across the street with the best food in America in it, right? And you have a Subway sub. You’re the worst fat person alive.”

All of that, before I could even get a word out. It’s worth noting Brad and I have never met before; I could’ve told him my girlfriend, who is very claustrophobic, bought me the sub and that the Reading Terminal Market on a Saturday, no matter how delicious the food inside, is a no-go for her, but I didn’t want to make him feel bad, so I didn’t. I don’t hold it against him; he had no idea. It’s worth noting that there isn’t much that makes you want to hit a cigarette-and-water diet harder than Brad Nelson calling you fat.

I promptly mulliganed to six both games, kept two hands that needed a little help but were otherwise better than going to five, and was summarily smashed in about six minutes.

My next match was against a kid named Ronald. Our first game, had the semblance of closeness, especially after I resolved a Stab Wound on his Lobber Crew and passed the turn with a bunch of Birds in play.

“Uhh . . . sure.” He drew his card. “Uhh, you take 2.”

“You missed the trigger.”

I called a judge, just to be sure it wasn’t one of those lapsing things or whatever, and the judge ruled in Roland’s favor, as he should’ve. I ended up missing another trigger along the way, and the game ended with me having two Bird tokens and a Sunspire Griffin in play, with him at 9 life with the win onboard next turn in the form of a Soulsworn Spirit and a pair of Lobber Crews.

If I hadn’t missed those two triggers, he’d have been at 5, and I could’ve attacked him for 4 in the air and had him die to the Stab Wound trigger on his upkeep. At that moment, I hated everything about Ronald—his stupid name, his stupid glasses, the smug bullshit smirk on his face, the cadence with which he announced everything, the four-dollar, button-down, short-sleeved, bright orange, Chaps shirt he was wearing with no undershirt—and all I wanted to do was die as I shuffled up my deck.

No one ever remembers how they pull themselves together. I mostly just assume that good people don’t have to pull themselves together in the first place, that they don’t just fly into irrational fits of apoplectic, blinding rage, directed at their opponents, when what they’re actually pissed about is simply the fact that they fucked up.

I took a few calming breaths and got my shit together, just in time to mulligan to six, get pinched on black mana (yeah, I’m pretty sure that mana base is grossly incorrect, looking back), and die to a pair of uncontested Lobber Crews. I shook his hand all the same, animosity gone, wished him good luck, stumbled around some joke that had to do with siding out Stab Wound and how bad I suck, checked the drop box on the match slip, and slunk away.

11.

It had been a year since I’d been to Eulogy. That’s way too long to go without Eulogy. Three blocks away from Independence Hall, Eulogy is a pub specializing in Belgian food and drink. Some might call it cramped. I call it cozy, and I’d like to think our table of nine would’ve agreed. We got drunk very quickly over dinner and discussed the finer points of a lot of gross stuff that I'm told I'm not allowed to write about here or anywhere else on planet earth. I have no idea what it is about trips away from home that suddenly make everyone so much more vulgar all the time, but I like it. I got to order my favorite beer—a Belgian trippel aged in bourbon barrels—and squeezed into a cab and went back to the room. At some point during dinner, I got a text from noted Pack Rat lottery winner Adam Barnello, letting me know that he made Day 2 and would be needing a floor to crash on, which led to this exchange:

Good times.

12.

I recently made the executive decision to get a Magic tattoo of the Coalition symbol. Here’s a picture of it with blood coming out of it still. A lot of people have asked me why I got it, and the answer doesn’t really lend itself to a small explanation.

The Coalition symbol is basically a symbol of the Dominarian resistance, led by Urza and the Weatherlight crew, against the invasion of the Phyrexians, led by Yawgmoth. It’s what the expansion symbol for Invasion was based on, and I have no shame saying that it looks pretty sweet. The release of Invasion was right around when I started playing in tournaments (Invasion was my first prerelease), and while that’s part of the reason I wanted the Coalition symbol on my body forever, that’s certainly not the whole reason.

When I was really young, I cruised through school with ease. This did not help me to develop a decent work ethic at all; it all came so easy that by the time I had to try, I had no concept of what the process of “trying” even entailed. By the time junior high rolled around, I was squarely out of all the accelerated classes, save English. At the same time, I discovered Magic, and with it, all the people in my school who played it, who were (not unexpectedly) in all the accelerated classes I’d just been bounced out of.

Before Magic took root in my life, I was in a weird middle spot socially. I didn’t have very many close friends, but people knew who I was because I was obnoxious and liked attention and knew how to get it and how to make people laugh. Still, the fact remained that I had no real close friends, just a shitload of acquaintances. I made them laugh, but no one was asking me to hang out after school or anything like that. And then one day in 2000, Magic happened, and with it, I made friends I’ll have for the rest of my life. Friends who get me better than anyone else, and understand me, and dig me, even for all my flaws.

The fact that I was able to meet these people through Magic is an almost eerie coincidence to me, as if the game values something intangible that binds like personalities, however inexplicably. I owe so fucking much to this game, and I guess I just wanted my first tattoo to be a reflection of that, albeit an abstract one. Even now, after moving to Syracuse, I have a tight-knit group of friends whom, though I’ve only known them for about a year or so, I’m really close with and who get me on a deeper level than just a chance encounter could offer. I don’t take that for granted for a second.

Also, I’ll never be able to quit the game. I definitely came to terms with that a while ago. Drafting is just too good. Seriously, how did they make drafting so good?

Jon Corpora

Pronounced Ca-pora

@feb31st