Do you ever feel like you don’t have time for Magic?

The clock radio buzzes into life at 7am. It’s not quite 7am at the radio station, and the first thing I hear for the day is the last thirty seconds of a song from the sixties before the familiar, reassuring voice of the newsreader. There’s been a flood, or a fire, or an explosion in a mine on the other side of the world. Politicians are arguing about immigration/climate change/taxation/whether the lawnmowers on the roof of parliament house are too loud (It’s an Australian thing). A national sports star is involved in some public lewdness. Information floods my extremely limited awareness before I’m fully awake. I drag myself out of bed and walk to the other side of the room where the alarm clock is strategically placed to force me into conscious ambulation.

I perform my morning ablutions, get dressed, spread some peanut butter on two bits of toast, pack my lunch – a ham roll – into my bag, and put the morning news on the TV while I drink a cup of tea. Soon enough it’s twenty past eight and I get in the car, and my fiancée drives me to work at the university in the next suburb. I settle in for 8 hours of processing paperwork, talking to students, whinging at systems support because their database software has crashed again and other such banalities. Three cups of tea later 5pm rolls around, my fiancée picks me up and we head home for dinner. After the evening meal I get down to study and more tea – I have three hours of lectures and a half dozen journal articles to get through this week, and I’d better start planning that essay. Damn, I forgot it’s our sprinkler night tonight. I rush out and put on the reticulation system. Suddenly it’s 11 o’clock. I brush my teeth, recline in bed, read a bit more of this interminable novel – The Bonehunters by Stephen Erikson – and fall asleep.

The clock radio buzzes into life at 7am…

If you are anything like me – and I suspect you might be, since you are reading ManaNation - you love this game. I’d be perfectly happy living a cloistered existence in the Wizards of the Coast Magic Monastery ™, under a vow of poverty – Jaces and Titans allowed - just playing magic all day. Unfortunately life has a tendency to take up most of my waking hours, and I have to squeeze magic in the nooks and crannies that remain. Today I’m going to share a few ways I’ve found to make time for my favourite hobby.

Idle Moments

The first and easiest way to fit magic into your busy life is to fill the idle moments. No matter how busy you are, everybody has some spare time each day – perhaps it seems too short to achieve anything worthwhile in, and so it goes to waste fidgeting, or watching TV, or thinking about what to have for dinner. Any amount of time can be used productively thinking about magic. Grab a card – any card – from the current draft format. Thank about what the card does in a vacuum, then think about what sort of things you can do with that card in the format. Can you think of any old cards that were like this one? Were they good in their formats? Are they better/worse than this card? Why? What would have to change about the decks you are drafting to make this card good? Build a deck where this card is good, inventing cards if you have to. Is that possible in the format? Is it possible in constructed?

Aside from being fun and interesting in and of itself, this sort of thinking can improve your card evaluation skills and your knowledge of the format, and it might even uncover some hidden gem of the set, giving you an edge in your next draft. Of course for every hidden gem you will find a hundred stinkers which are just as worthless as your snap judgment or your peers told you they were, but it is worthwhile knowing exactly why.

Another way to profitably use those idle moments is by reading articles. Some articles only take a few minutes to read but can still hold a kernel of knowledge or entertainment to keep your appetite for magic sated. Even longer ones can be read a bit at a time. Keep an article open in a tab while you’re studying/working/whatever and when you need a coupla minutes break flick over and get stuck into it. This isn’t the greatest way to study the game due to the obvious lack of focus, but it will help keep you up to date with metagame trends and the latest tech, as well as keeping you in touch with the game. Even when I can’t find time to play for a few weeks in a row I can still feel involved with the game and the community when I’m reading an article.

Take Magic with You

When most of us think of magic in our own lives we probably picture the kitchen table with our friends, the crowded town hall of our last PTQ, or the bright glow of the monitor on our desk covered in pizza boxes and crumpled cans of Red Bull as we fumble our way through a draft at 3 in the morning on Magic Online. Unfortunately all of these events are time consuming and require our full attention – and our attendance in a particular place – for hours on end. One handy way to fit in more magic is by taking it with you.

The most obvious way to do this is by sticking a couple of decks in your bag or your car, just in case the opportunity arises to play a couple of games with a buddy. I wouldn’t recommend you carry your fully foiled RUG deck everywhere with you for obvious reasons, but a couple of casual decks are perfect. The easy way out is the Duel Decks official product – Wizards have tried to match these up fairly evenly, though the general feeling is that some of them are a bit unbalanced – Jace has the upper hand over Chandra, and the Demonic deck struggles against the Divine army’s protection from black creatures. Akroma vs Lord of the Pit is an especially insulting juxtaposition. In any case the duel decks offer some pretty fun magic and can be modified as you like to even out the matchup.

The advent of smart-phones is also a tremendous boon to the time-poor magician. While you can’t – yet – actually play magic on your phone, there are plenty of apps that can let you brew on the go. I get a lot of mileage out of iGather, a straightforward card database along the lines of Gatherer or magiccards.info. When you absolutely need to know the precise wording of Quest for Ula’s Temple, or you’re waiting for a bus and you want to find every creature in standard with an “enters the battlefield” ability, this little app – or one like it – has got you covered.

Twitter is another excellent way to get some of that tasty magic goodness on the go. There have been a couple of articles recently on the usefulness of twitter to magic players and I won’t rehash them, but suffice to say most of the ManaNation writing crew are only a tweet away. I follow just over 150 twitter accounts – for the most part magic players, writers and wizards of the coast staff. Every few minutes I can read something new about somebody playing in a Daily Event or a PTQ, or asking for suggestions for their new Commander deck, or discussing card spoilers. It’s also a great way to get feedback on my own ideas – just stick them out there and people are only too happy to weigh in with their own thoughts.

Making Time

Of course, none of this really measures up to actually playing a few games of cards. When it comes to fitting magic proper into my schedule, there are two main ways I do it. The first is Magic Online, described by Magic’s poet laureate Geordie Tait as “like an old prostitute with a glass eye. It isn't much to look at, and at times you might not feel like you're getting your money's worth, but it's always there if you need to feed your primal urges.” Always being there is the important part for the time-poor player. At 10:30pm on a Thursday after just finishing an essay, or putting the kids to bed, or whatever your own particular time-consumer is, it’s a bit late to round up 7 friends for a draft – but Magic Online is there. They already have seven waiting in the SOM 8-4 queue – won’t you join us, friend?

Paper players, unfortunately, are just going to have to put in the hard yards to make time. Whether Friday Night Magic at the local store or another evening that works for your casual magic friends, having a regular magic night is a tried-and-true method of forcing more games into your schedule. Despite what you may think, you probably can spare a night for cards – you just need to get organised. There is a whole industry dedicated to helping you milk more quality time out of your waking hours which I won’t delve into here, but one tool I’ve found very helpful is http://workflowy.com/ [Trick Note - I love this tool, can't recommend it enough]. It’s a really simple, minimalist site which lets you put together To-Do lists however you like, and it has really helped me be more productive, and by getting the important/boring things out of the way quickly, I can afford to spend my Tuesday nights bashing for two – most of the time.

I hope this has been helpful to you, one of the middle children of magic. Sometimes it seems like there’s no room for this game of ours in the work-sleep-work routine of modern society, but I assure you there is. You just need to know where to look.