I love board games and card games, particularly Magic the Gathering. I love the community that content creators for Magic the Gathering wish to foster. From the Professor, to Loading Ready Run, to the incredible cosplayers, the community the content creators and designers wish to foster and grow is the kind of community that I want to belong to. An open, affirming, and diverse community with people across numerous cultural groups. However, my experience in real life has not been the same as the community being fostered by content creators.
It has been hard for me to go to any larger events like a Grand Prix or Magic Fest in the past five years. For the majority of that time I worked in a hospital where making it to an event like this would have meant my vacation, because often the nearest event was 300 to 500 miles away. I have seen from content creators that these events are (mostly) worth it. I have never been able to attend.
The bulk of Magic the Gathering communities, the heart of the game, is the local game store. Before getting into my experiences in my state, Nebraska, I think it is important to say that local game stores operate on razor thin margins, with changes from Wizards of the Coast changing the security of a location at any given moment.
I have been to a total of three (four if you count different locations) local game stores where I, as a cis-gendered, bisexual, white man have felt remotely comfortable to be myself, the Game Shoppe, Krypton Comics, and Legend Comics and Coffee. The majority of my cultural identity is deeply privileged, I am aware of that, but the rest of the nearly twenty game stores I have been to have had cultures as a store that have made me uncomfortable in some way.
Around April of 2017, I had to replace the motherboard on my primary computer, and then reinstall the OS because the motherboard was defective and dying. When I said at commander night that I had to go home early to check on my Windows reinstall update, someone at the store who did not even know my name said "because you watched to much porn?" Some staff members gave slight chuckles.
That made incredibly uncomfortable. Pornography and a person's relationship with it is a personal issue that is incredibly complicated and tied up in gender studies and equality, and making a joke about it to someone whose name you don't even know is a sign that the culture of the place you're playing is broken.
The store would later close, and had more offenses beyond that one, including someone remarking that the story team at Wizards of the Coast is a bunch of "SJWs", with SJW said in a tone to emphasize that he saw it as a swear word.
Shortly after the sexual harassment allegations against Owen Turtenwald were substantiated, I attended a different store (that would also later close). When I talked to a friend about Owen Turtenwald being banned from Hearthstone and Magic for life because of it, the staff member present said, "well my opinion of the #metoo movement is that we should be case by case, because I have a friend who was falsely accused and it ruined his life and I don't think it's that big a deal." A guy, literally mansplaining to another guy.
At another store where I attended a prerelease when I was out of Omaha, the store owner was bemoaning Wizards of the Coast cutting ties with Terese Nielsen, and that her incredibly hateful and transphobic views didn't matter because her art was good and she "only retweeted some things." When that is not the actual case. She actually has gifted multiple alt-right podcasts printings of her art. When I pointed this out, the store owner said "what is the alt-right anyway?"
My relationship with Magic the Gathering leaves me at a very weird impasse. I can honestly say I owe some of these content creators my life. The time when I worked at the hospital was some of the darkest in my life and I was close to suicide attempts multiple times. But the professor's next video, the next Friday Nights, or the next Command Zone podcast was enough for me to wake up and keep going. But the Gathering experience I have seen in my personal experience has been such, mostly due to circumstance and schedule that is inherently different from the community that Wizards of the Coast and the content creators wish to foster. And I will most likely be moving 1600 miles for a job later this year, if I wasn't I would be attending Krypton when COVID blows over for FNM every Friday.
Krypton, Game Shoppe, and Legend announce at the beginning of FNM that they will disqualify or ban you for comments like what I've experienced in other stores. It's why I list them as the ones worth it. My schedule had not always permitted attending those stores and forced me to go to the ones that did not have a good environment.
And that sucks. My experience with the Gathering is so disparate. Fostering the Gathering to be a truly welcoming place requires work on all of us. It requires calling out behavior we don't like, and if a store refuses to change their culture, taking our business elsewhere.
When COVID is over, I cannot wait to see some of my favorite content creators and thank them for their content and what it meant to me in dark times. I cannot wait to draft Commander Legends, and then build a cube with it, and add custom Wheel of Time cards to take to Magic and Wheel of Time conventions.
