So, how many of you play card games? I’m not talking about Go Fish or Rummy 500 or Poker. No, those games are for sissies. I’m talking about Children’s Card Games! Like Pokémon and Yu-gi-oh and Magic the Gathering. Yeah, those kind of card games.
I was never big on Pokémon cards. I was in second grade when they were really big and it was one of those things that my brother had to explain to me why they were cool. I thought they were cool for the soul reason that he thought they were cool. He had a bunch of cards and what not. I had a grand total of maybe twenty and I thought that was pretty good. I didn’t have any rare cards or anything. I didn’t do the battles or whatever. I didn’t even understand how the battles worked. But I would watch the movies and the show when I could and collect the toys from Burger King, naturally. I was always more into Digimon than I was Pokémon, but they didn’t really have Digimon cards. Not real ones at least. They can make trading cards out of pretty much anything.
My brother, in the other hand, has pretty much always been into cards. He has never been a big sports fan, so baseball cards were never anything special in our house. However, he did have a somewhat impressive Pokémon card collection. He didn’t battle with them, not often anyway. I’m sure he knew how, and probably did every so often when he was playing with his friends. But I don’t really remember him playing very much. Then again, I was in first grade or so.
After the big Pokémon craze died down trading cards all but disappeared from our house for a while, leaving playing cards unchallenged. Sure, there were a few stray power up cards laying around that we somehow hadn’t managed to get rid of, but nothing terribly impressive, or important. Then came the Magic cards. It started with then my brother downloaded a Magic the Gathering video game on the Xbox 360. It was a fairly dumb simulation of a real match that you played against a computer. Nothing terribly mind blowing and it was only mildly interesting for a rather short time. Then we started hanging out with people at CCBC. Nothing good comes from socializing, of this I am convinced.
It always starts out so innocently. A bunch of us sit at the same table. This guy knows that guy; that guy knows this girl and pretty soon we have a group formed. Then someone brings in a box… This isn’t a normal box, mind you. It’s a Magic box… filled with Magic cards. And while he’s flipping through his cards another guy says ‘hey, are those Magic cards? I used to play magic all the time!’ and the next day he brings his cards in. Now we have two guys with massive decks of Magic cards and they start to play. The other boys say, ‘hey, that looks pretty cool. You should teach me how to play.’ And thus it spreads. No one is safe from it, no matter how much they try to resist. It infects the entire group until everyone is broke from buying Magic card Fat Packs and every lunch hour is spent comparing cards and making decks and every day after school you all go down to the local café and play for hours and hours an- *breaks record.*
So yeah, that’s how it goes. The sad part is, it doesn’t just take over your life it takes over your sister’s life as well. I used to go home occasionally. I used to spend some real time in my house, I really did. Not anymore. Brother goes out with his friends now and plays magic until all hours of the night. *sigh* I miss my life.
Down The Rabbit Hole 