The 🪖💅👊🐌 Dispatch

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All's well here at The Dispatch. The snails are only eating salad this week. They said that they needed to start working on their beach bodies. We're trying to make sure that they have a positive self-image, and that they're not trying to live up to some kind of unobtainable standard. But we aren't sure of the culture norms or honestly the nutritional needs of snails, so we're all going to be reading up on that. Overall we're proud of them for trying to do something healthy.

Magic Prerelease Event

This week, I'm going to highlight a cool experience that I had playing Magic: The Gathering at a local bar / game store.

This past Friday, I went to a local bar called The Gathering Place, that is effectively a game store running out of a bar that also happens to serve alcohol. They don't serve food except for some bags of chips and candy bars, but the beer is on draft and the overall vibe is wonderful.

I discovered The Gathering Place after getting recently obsessed with Magic and looking up different local game stores to go and check out. I visited on a Sunday afternoon, and ended up talking to the owner, who was very chill and cool and helped me to pick out some rad older decks that they had behind the bar. We've made friends in town who also happened to be regulars at the bar and now we play a D&D campaign there with them some weeks.

So, I was excited to do a prerelease event at this cool, homey place that I was starting to also feel like a regular at. I had never done a prerelease, and didn't know exactly what to expect (although I had done my first MTG draft there a couple months before). There were tons of people at the bar when I got there around 7pm. There were 60 or so folks there to play in the prerelease and maybe 60 more who were just there playing casual Magic or other board games. I didn't know anyone there, but got a beer and sat down next to a couple guys who were sitting at one of the reserved tables. One of them was playing in the event and the other had been playing Magic since the 90s but was just there to spectate and give advice.

The event was a great way for me to be able to socialize. Because of how crowded it was, it meant that it was less awkward to sit down at a table and talk to folks. It also meant that I could fade back into the crowd when I was ready to disengage. I mentioned that to a few different people throughout the night, because I thought it was funny and also sort of sweet. The kind of people that attended the event were mostly introverted guys in their 20s & 30s that did not initiate conversation but who were generally receptive to someone talking to them, and especially receptive to talking about Magic.

The gameplay itself was wonderful and super gratifying. I had been listening to some podcast episodes (Lords of Limited; Limited Resources) about the new set and had a strategy in mind going into the night. I knew which cards would be good to build decks with and generally what each color was trying to do. For the prerelease event, you get a box with six booster packs of the new set and you make a 40 card deck with whatever you open in the packs. I built a black-green deck around a new mechanic of "toxic" creatures that "poison" your opponent. I had been bearish on this new mechanic, because it was the flashy thing everyone was focused on. But the cards I got were all about it, so I went with it. I was already having a ton of fun and I hadn't started playing yet.

I won my first round against a guy that had beaten me the last time I had come to do a draft a previous night. That made me feel a little cocky, although he had drawn some bad hands. The second and third rounds I lost, but did manage to win at least one game in both rounds, so I didn't feel completely out of it. It was nice to feel like I was good at this thing that I've been obsessing over so much in the recent months. And it was nice to talk with the guys that I was playing against. Everyone was very chill and very happy to just be playing Magic. I left around 11pm with a couple extra packs I got for my single win.

There's a lot more I want to say about Magic, but the in-person event was particularly notable because of how rejuvenating it felt to be out by myself at a bar meeting new people and playing a game I love. I had a ton of fun and Magic was the facilitating factor in that.

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