“I Summon The Winged Lava Avenger Of Death!” — A Love Story

And now, dear readers, I’d like to share a story with you. A story that may be part of an ongoing series on this blog called How To Be Married To A Nerd. Today’s topic — how to survive his birthday party.

 

“But Amy,” you say, “what could be so dangerous about a nerd’s birthday party? Correct me if I’m wrong, but nerds aren’t into extreme sports or other dangerous hobbies. What could be so rough?”

 

I’ll tell you, my friend, in three simple words: Magic. The. Gathering.

 

For those unfamiliar with this phenomenon, Magic is a popular card game. The object is to see who can sit at a card table for the longest amount of time without taking a bathroom break. (My husband’s record is five hours.)

 

Okay, that’s not what the game is really about. That’s just what it felt like to my poor, tired brain. The actual object of this game is to make your wizard kill all the other wizards on the table by summoning an army of human soldiers, trolls, demons, fairies, werewolves, unicorns, slick lawyers, and any and all other elusive, magical entities you can round up. The wizard himself doesn’t do any of the killing. He just sits back with a cold one and watches all the fighting take place. Or maybe he doesn’t. Come to think of it, he may not even be there. The wizard is supposed to be all powerful, but he doesn’t really do anything. He might be sitting on a couch binge watching the Harry Potter movies for all I know.

 

I know what you’re thinking: “That seems like a pretty simple concept. Why do you think it’s so complicated?”

 

To answer that, let me tell you a little bit about my card playing history. I grew up playing various card games. Sundays in my family were spent going to church where we would repent of last week’s card playing. And then we’d get together after church and play cards. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not one of those who thinks that playing cards is evil. But we believed that playing cards wouldn’t be any fun without talking smack about each other. 

 

Anyways, the point is that I love playing cards. And I figured I could handle playing Magic because I played plenty of other games that were complex (or so I thought).

 

Here’s the difference between those games and Magic, though…all those other games I played have actual RULES.

 

I decided to surprise my husband by secretly learning how to play Magic and inviting all his card playing buddies to the party. So for a few weeks leading up to the surprise party I went over to a friend’s house to learn how to play.

She told me about the wizards and the army and showed me the many-sided die to keep track of your life force. I was following so far. But then she started breaking it down further. Now, I’m sure that my friend was doing an excellent job of explaining the game. She is an expert player who has been in many a tournament. But to me, it sounded like this:

 

“Okay, so your wizard has to build his army to defeat the other wizards. So the army gets sick every time they get called into battle by his magic, so they can’t really do anything once you summon them.”

 

“I can’t use them once I summon them?” I said.

 

“Well, you can, once the sickness wears off after a turn.”

 

I nodded. “Okay.”

 

“Well, except they can get over their sickness if they have haste.”

 

“Haste? Like they move fast?”

 

“No,” she said, “haste means they don’t get sick coming into battle.”

 

So then I wanted to know how they had haste. And then she starts explaining how all my little minions work.

 

“So you see these things at the top? That’s how many manna it takes to bring them into play.”

 

Now, having been raised reading the Bible, I hear “manna” and think “bread from heaven.” So I’m wondering how and why I’m supposed to feed these things magical bread.

 

“Manna is land,” she said. “And there’s lots of different types of land, see, look at the cards.”

 

And then I see a bunch of different icons that look like something out of a Wing Ding dictionary. I’m starting to get in over my head, but I’m determined to keep going. Then she explains about how much damage they can do to the wizard and his army…or maybe it’s just the army…or maybe just the wizard…at any rate, all I know is that I’m supposed to kill someone if I want the game to end.

 

“Now we talk about enchantments,” she said.

 

And this is where it all went downhill for me. Again, I’m sure what she was saying made perfect sense, but in my head it sounded like this:

 

“Okay, so your Winged Lava Avenger of Death warrior guy here? See how he takes four manna? Well, if you have this enchantment card you can bring him out for three. And then this enchantment gives him fire throwing powers. But then your opponent here can throw out this other enchantment that makes him unable to fly. So then YOU can counter with your own enchantment that causes all your opponent’s flying army people to get motion sickness and throw up. But then he could have a dramamine enchantment. So then you can take your Disposable Goblin Guy and send him out to eat the puke, because according to the flavor text on his card eating puke will give him double damage powers and you can wipe out half his army. But then your opponent can play a poison puke enchantment that will cause the goblin to start vomiting uncontrollably and lose three damage, which will send him to the graveyard.”

 

“The graveyard,” I said. “So things can actually die in this game?”

 

“Well, sort of. In your next turn, you can bring him back to life if you have a resurrection enchantment. But then your opponent can throw out an enchantment saying that none of your cards can come back from the graveyard, which you can counter with…”

 

“Okay, so how do people actually die in this game? Does the battle ever stop?” I said.

 

And she explained that yes, things actually do die and get killed once you do all the math and sort out how all the enchantments cancel each other out. My husband, I learned later on, can do this math instantly. He can easily keep track of how his guy dealt two damage to the other guy before the other guy blocked and dealt three damage but then his guy countered with one healing and then the other guy blew everything up and killed everyone but then he played a resurrection enchantment and brought his army back to life with minus one life token and then he pushed the other guy down and made him grumpy enough to suffer three damage. Whereas I was hung up on “how the hell did my Winged Lava Avenger of Death guy lose the power of flight when he has freakin’ WINGS?!?”

 

While I was daunted by all the rule-changing enchantments, I still felt mostly prepared to play. And I knew my husband would be excited that he would get to play with me, and I would ride high on the happy emotions of being The Awesome Wife. But then there was another twist.

 

No one told me about Deck Building.

 

In all the card games I had played before, there was a standard deck that everyone played with. It had fixed amounts of each type of card. Each card had a fixed value. When you wanted to play, you got out the deck and started dealing.

 

Not so with Magic. See, to keep things interesting for the fans, the makers of the game release new decks all the time. The cool thing to do is to mix and match cards from different decks to build your ideal arsenal.

 

This process took two hours. TWO HOURS. My husband and his friends were eagerly poring over the various cards, building their dream arsenal of manna and enchantments and army minions. Whereas I was just hoping to get my Winged Lava Avenger of Death, since I had finally kinda sorta figured out what he does. The Husband, sensing my confusion, attempted to help me build a deck.

 

“Should I take this guy?” I asked. “He looks kinda scary. I bet he could do some damage.”

 

The Husband frowned. “Yeah, but if your opponent has the frownyface enchantment, it could totally incapacitate this guy, and you don’t have the always sunny antidote enchantment. So you’d probably be better off using this guy, because (insert long, rational-but-confusing-as-hell explanation here).”

 

“Um, okay, I’ll take that guy,” I said.

 

Thankfully, it was decreed that since we had six people playing that it would be best to pair up so we didn’t have six individual couch-sitting wizards to slay. So I got paired up with my husband who was happy to handle all the battle decisions and damage math, and I focused on what I do best: talking trash. Five hours later (yes, really) we managed to get killed off. By this point, I was ready to keel over and go to bed. I prayed I wouldn’t dream of wizards.

 

So there you have it, all. Now you know how nerd birthday parties can be dangerous. Should you decide to plan a birthday party for the nerd in your life, I hope my experiences will be helpful to you. If you must play Magic, I’ve heard that you can make your own cards. That may be what I do next time. I’d like to propose an enchantment card called Your Wife Is Tired. When played, it puts an immediate stop to the game. Or at least gives me the opportunity to duck out and join the wizards on the couch to binge watch some TV.