Are we having fun yet?

If you were to ask a lot of Magic players that question during a tournament, unfortunately many of them would say "no" if they answered honestly. Or at least, "Not as much as I want to."

That's a real shame. Too often, Magic just isn't the blast it should be, and especially tournament Magic. I'm going to talk about some of the reasons why that is and some suggestions for players, tournament organizers and Wizards to help bring the fun back in.

First up on the hurdles to fun: Magic players themselves.

In my experience, the overwhelming majority of Magic players are amusing, intelligent, easy-going and generally speaking cool. Cool as far as we nerds go, anyway. But play enough rounds of Magic or in enough different venues, and you're bound to run into one of Those Guys.

There are many varieties of Those Guys when it comes to Magic.

The dude who goes to a packed, high-stress tournament smelling like he took his last shower during the Bush Administration. (Bush 41, not 43.)

The scrub who makes mistake after mistake after mistake but still somehow mises his way to wins and acts like it was all play skill.

The player who thinks he's the Perry Mason of tournament rules. The outright cheater. The thief. The competitor who's so cutthroat he'd pimp his mom out to win first place in a 4-3-2-2 booster draft.

The loudmouth who reveals crucial information during a game or who just can't stop pontificating, no matter how obviously clueless and wrong he is, no matter that everyone clearly doesn't want to hear him babble, no matter what.

The bad sport. One of my friends told me about a situation that came up at the 2010s. After winning the match, one player wished his opponent good luck in his future rounds. The opponent said something to the effect of, "There's no luck needed when you're going to drop." And then he added something in all seriousness: "I hope you die."

Really? I mean, I can at least understand, if not condone, "I hope you lose." But what could the winner have done to the loser that would be a capital offense?

There's some people who are always one of Those Guys. And then there are nice, normal people who just go from Bruce Banner to Hulk after too many wrong things happen.

I was playing one of my long-time gaming friends a few weeks back in a M11 draft, and he got manascrewed or something while I was off to a quick start. He had a Gaea's Revenge in hand and he got so frustrated with the situation that he literally crumpled it and a bunch of other cards in his hand. (I thought it was wise to not be like, "So is that Revenge for trade?")

I like to think of myself as a mellow person and but a few times I've definitely took a walk on the dark side. In a recent Scars draft, I was the one who was manascrewed with like one or two meaningless guys on my side of the board while my opponent had a bunch of poison creatures. My opponent tanked for like 3 minutes thinking about what he was going to do. And then he finally figured out that killing one of my guys and putting down a hasty Blackcleave Goblin to put me like one or two away from death by poison was an OK play. I lost it a little. I was like, "What could there possibly have been to think about there?" I kept repeating the question because none of the answers he gave were satisfactory to me. Then I realized I should just move on. Another time, my opponent steamrolled me, in part by comboing Liquidmetal Coating and a Mimic Vat set to Oxidda Scrapmelter one game when I couldn't find any of the three or four pieces of artifact removal I had. After he swept me quickly, he asked me if I wanted to play again for fun. I was like, "Nope." Then he asked if I wanted to play Standard with him. I was like, "No offense, but I don't want to play with you right now." That left things a little awkward, as you can imagine. So Aaron and Sean, if you are reading this, apologies for being one of Those Guys.

From my experience, it's not fun to be one of Those Guys, and it's not fun to play with or be around one of Those Guys. So I think people could use an attitude adjustment. I know I definitely can from time to time.

Yeah, it sucks to have to double mulligan for the third time in the tournament, or face an opponent's curve-out, or to be rules-lawyered out of a match win. But there's no getting around that all that's part of the game. So it's a matter of trying to teach yourself not to go on tilt, of being able to shrug off bad beats and move on.

That, of course, is easier than it sounds. But it's still very doable.

It seems strange that you need to calm yourself from your hobby, but sometimes that's true. Just pick up a technique that works in the rest of your life and apply it. Take deep breaths. Smile. Go for a walk or a smoke, if you're a fan of cancer. Put on your iPod. Meditate or pray if that helps center you.

I also think it's important to bring whatever ethical system you strive for in your real life to Magic. For me, that includes the Golden Rule. In this context, that means I try to be the sort of person I'd want for an opponent. Sure, I might grumble a little bit. That's to be expected. But I try to be as cordial as I can.

One thing I'm trying is thinking of happy Magic memories so I don't get it twisted over a bad beat or two. Remember back in the day when throwing Unstable Mutation on some Merfolk of the Pearl Trident was the hot tech? Or when you just felt unstoppable in that booster draft or big tournament? Or even when you got beat, but in a really skill-intensive slugfest? I figure everyone's got enough good memories to create their very own Magic Happy Place.

Another is to try to be childish in the good sense of the term when it comes to Magic. At one of the local game stores I frequent, First Aid Comics, there are a couple of kids who are relatively new to the game. Everytime they play, they get so excited about all sorts of stuff. One of them has an app for his iPhone that generates random names for people when he uses it to keep track of their life and gets a good laugh out of those. They love saying stuff like, "First I'm going to open a foil Primeval Titan, and then I'm going to open a regular Primeval Titan and then I'm going to open another mythic." (And actually, sometimes he comes shockingly close). They're both full of questions and energy. Win, lose or draw, those kids generally have fun. So I'm going to be more like them. At least, in the fun-having department.

In the end, it's important to put things in their proper perspective. Almost all of us have far bigger issues facing us in real life than not being able to find an Island in time to stabilize a game. And if you don't, you should just go out and buy a bunch of lottery tickets because you are the luckiest person on the planet.

Most of us Magic players have roofs over our heads. We have enough food in our bellies every night (and in my case, more than enough food). We have decent educations. We have some spare cash to use on entertainment. And overall, we live lives that are better than 99 percent of all the people who have lived EVER.

When you consider all that, how bad is the worst stuff that can happen in Magic, really? I'll take listening to some smelly guy rules-lawyer me non-stop while I'm mana screwed over most real-life woes, any day.

The next big factors that sometimes stop tournament Magic from being as fun as it should be are the structure of tournaments and the lack of desire to experiment. As long as there are prizes that center around winning, and as long as the tournaments tend to be all about certain formats, there are going to be people who are going to get super-intense and times when things become too routine.

So the main method to attack that problem would be to change the prize structure and to push additional formats. More formats=more fun.

It would be an interesting experiment to see if people would still come out for store tournaments where everyone got a prize and first got maybe one or two packs more than the rest of the players. Or if they would pay, say, $20 for a booster draft where there's the normal prize structure but also prizes to award good sportsmanship or other virtues. I bet they would, and that such tournaments would cut down on scumbaggery a whole lot.

Some enterprising store owner might want to try awarding prizes based on criteria in addition to or even instead of match wins. EDH tournaments, for instance, allow players to get prizes based on achievements like having huge hands, achieving overkills, or controlling cool sequences of creatures. Importing something along those lines for other types of tournaments would be a neat twist.

And speaking of EDH, it would be awesome if more stores supported a more diverse set of tournaments. It used to be that hardly anyone played EDH. Now, it seems stores are increasingly holding EDH leagues in my area at least. I'm sure if the stores branched out to hold tournaments for Archenemy and Planechase on a semi-regular basis, those would grow in popularity too. And those were definitely enjoyable to play the time or two I tried them.

Back in the day at one of my favorite stores, Collect a Card N Comics, we used to do what was called "Crazy Drafts." Each player could pick up any three packs they wanted to. So while I might have gone for triple Eighth Edition, somebody else might go for Mirage, Mirrodin and Mercadian Masques and still another person might have gone for Urza's Saga block. It made for a lot of random interactions and made it hard for people to take things too seriously.

Another local store, Pastimes, holds triathalons, which feature a sealed component and a draft component over a lengthy day of Magic. Also good fun, and I'd like to see other stores follow suit. But to put a slightly different spin on things, I think it would be awesome if a store held more like a Magic decathalon. Over the course of a week, a month or however long, hold tournaments in a variety of formats: draft, sealed, Vintage, Extended, Standard, EDH, Mental Magic, Two-Headed Giant, team draft. Players could get points for their finishes in each event and the one who ends up with the most points gets fabulous prizes.

Most large prereleases have opportunities for players to go up against pro gunslingers. At a recent PTQ also organized by Pastimes, there was a bounty on three of the pros present: Adrian Sullivan, Gabe Walls and Owen Turtenwald. And for a while now, there have been Magic Cruises. I think both of those are pretty sweet ideas. I'd like to see organizers play around with other stuff in that vein. I'd probably pay some money to go to a Magic Fantasy Camp, where I got to interact with top-flight players in an environment that emphasized learning and fun.

One of the things that's changed for me about Magic from when I first started is I don't build my own decks in constructed. Why learn to fish when there's pretty much an infinite supply of fish on the Internet, right? There's all sorts of people who are just flat-out better than me and who devote more time than me to coming up with new deck ideas and honing them to perfection. And even if I were a great fisherman, it seems suboptimal to fish with my old rod and reel and a rowboat when I know that the other folks will be coming in armed with a dozen state-of-the-art fishing vessels. It doesn't seem to make sense to put myself on that kind of a disadvantage. And that makes Magic a little less fun too. Gone are the days when I would take pride in putting some random piece of tech together.

But if there were a tournament that rewarded people for playing their home brews – even just saving part of the prize pool for the most original deck, for instance, that would revive one of the most fun aspects of the game: creative deckbuilding. And it would change tournaments from being some rock-paper-scissory mix of Eldrazi Ramp vs. Elves vs. UW Control vs. Valakut Ramp.

I'd also love to see Pauper make a comeback. For those unfamiliar with it, the basic rule is that you can build anything you want except cards must be common. (Some groups allow uncommons). I've only played in one Pauper tournament, but I think it was one of the more fun times I've had playing Magic.

Which brings us to yet another enemy of fun in tournament Magic: the price tag. With the introduction of mythics, there's a lot more disgruntlement about the cost of Magic. Granted, it was never the cheapest of hobbies. But mythics are so good and so expensive, a lot of people feel like they will be at a disadvantage if they don't have them. And buying a playset of Jace, the Mind Sculptor costs the same as my laptop. Now I try to be a glass-half-full kind of person, and I think about the upside of mythics. But Wizards has to know that there's a lot of people who fear they are being priced out of the game.

Unfortunately for those people, it seems doubtful that Wizards would move away from mythics, because it seems like Magic has – at least for now – seen a surge of popularity because of them. Which leaves it to players and store organizers to take steps to make mythics less of a drain on fun.

One way to do it would be to run tournaments (unsanctioned, naturally) where people could proxy mythics. Then anyone who wanted to play with Jace or Primeval Titan but who couldn't get their hands on one could live the dream.

Another means would be coordinating cardpooling. If Magic retains its popularity, someone will figure out a model that would make renting or lending cards profitable. But in the meantime, just creating a community where someone is willing to lend out Elspeth 2.0s for tournaments will have to do.

Quickly, I have a couple of suggestions for Wizards to bump up the fun level some. The first would be to come up with another Un- set. It's been way too long, and there are lots of new cards to riff off us. I, for one, would welcome my Un- planeswalker overlords.

Second, you know how you can cash in a set of cards from Magic Online for paper cards? I would love it if Wizards figured out a way so that you could redeem sets of paper cards for Magic Online cards. It wouldn't be that hard to do and it would get some people who don't bother playing online to go digital and start buying tickets.

Third, I'm surprised since Magic and Dungeons & Dragons are under the same roof, I'm surprised that there hasn't been a D&D-themed expansion. There's a whole bunch of flavor that players would appreciate if it were brought to bear.

And finally, you know how great players Jon Finkel and Kai Budde and Chris Pikula got to turn themselves into cards? Not only should there be more of that, but also, it would rock if Wizards gave the rest of us a chance to get there. The vast majority of us aren't going to get a chance to go to an Invitational, and even if we were, we probably wouldn't win. But I'm guessing a lot of us have pet cards up our sleeves and we'd love to see ourselves featured in the art for it. With half of each core set being new, it would be simple for Wizards to take submissions from anybody who offered them and to give the good ones a chance to be honored by having themselves depicted on their masterpiece. How cool would that be?