• 2025, Nov 8 *

I’m a habitual dabbler. My studio apartment is decorated with books with crisp worn pages or glossy littered with withered leaves from the plants flanked by open windows. Opposite the windows are vivaria, stacks of video games that would appall the modern pixel purist, organized to minimize the clutter of the mismatched plastic cases, and all the paraphernalia that accompany them. Along the walls are guitars, corpses of computers replaced, headphones that I swear vibrate better, debris from my fantasies of being artist or writer, and a clutter of bits and bobs from one-off ideas that I never followed through. Recently I’ve been enabling my hermitude with singleplayer tabletop RPGs and thinking about setting up a small slice of reef for soft corals and macroalgae, maybe some shrimp.

My apartment is filled with product. Half used stationary, chocolatey coffees I can’t drink fast enough, niche electronics for turning a sine wave into a better, more beautiful sine wave all lend credence to my hobbyist virtue. My headphones are Audeze, an unused Aurora Hastil sits in my pencase atop a stack of Tomoe River, and I have it on good authority these things have granted me authority to speak on the quality of others opinions in each of their respective domains. Niche cred abounds. If you don’t know the value of the things that I have thrown money into, how dare you speak upon my decision to do so.

Next to my Audeze headphones are chi-fi in-ears. The Hastil sits at home, broken and unused, replaced by Chinese-made Jinhao 82 pens (I carry four of them with me, inked with different colors). They cost me 4$ each, while the pen they simulate – the Sailor ProGear Slim – retails for about 300$ new. I brew speciality Ethiopian coffee, grinded in a 26$ hand grinder from some nameless company. I prefer the still-Japanese-but-more-modest Midori notebooks to the glossy and luxurious Tomoe River. In all things, I have found that finances have little to do with the quality of my experience. Yet, hobby spaces are dominated by seeming merchants and speculators looking to assure you that their (expensive and prestigious) product of choice – one they don’t themselves sell – is vastly superior.

I try to empathize. I find this pattern a bit disconcerting but it’s not malicious. The culture is, in many ways, just a natural extension of hobbyists lobbying for others to experience the joy they’ve experienced. If a friend comes to me asking after notebooks to take on their trip to Europe, house plants to grow on their kitchen windowsill, how to build a keyboard that clacks the way the one their coworker’s does, I become a lobbyist myself. Often what I lobby for isn’t the cheapest option. It often isn’t even the cheapest good option. It’s what I enjoy most and what I hope they’ll enjoy most as well.

There are caveats, of course. Recently I’ve greatly enhanced my tech chic by installing Linux on my laptop. Best as I can tell, no two Linux users agree on what distro is best. I spent a frankly exhausting bunch of hours trying to understand why the fuck Arch users hated Ubuntu and why Fedora users thought Arch users were sociopaths. In the throes of my research, I found that often the distro any user swears by isn’t actually what they recommend. Arch is seen as flexible and powerful for those who are familiar with the idiosyncrasies of the operating system, but Mint is much more intuitive if you’re coming from Windows. The Linux evangelical empath thinks not just of their usecase, but of the struggles they once experienced in learning. Just so, when someone tells me to buy a Sailor pen, they’re often doing so because they recall learning to write with poorly tuned cheap nibs and the relief and joy they felt when their Sailor nib glided so smoothly so as to disappear in their hands. Even if I disagree, and the quality of cheap nibs has improved enough to be more than enough for me, I understand and am thankful for their willingness to share expertise. Often there’s a bit of snark, sometimes there’s breakdown in communication, but there’s usually good intention.

Most of the most egregiously consumptionist hobbies are focused on the utility of a thing. Keyboards, pens, speakers, cars, coffee accoutrements are all products with enthusiast hobbies behind them obsessed with the experience. However, recently I’ve been spending a fair bit of time with something different.

Card games have their product discourse split haphazardly between players who see each card as a gamepiece, and those who see them as valuable artifacts. For many collectors, cards not for their value as art pieces or memorabilia, but rather as speculators looking to sell to other collectors or competitive players as the second hand market for cards ebbs and flows. But Magic the Gathering’s quality is truly arbitrary. Yes of course there’s subjectivity as to what makes a good cup of joe, and some prefer a bit of tooth in their paper, but there are some broad understandings of what is desirable and the hobby is malleable and eager to change as new experiences are shared. Those hobby spaces exist at all because there is a desire to hone and understand those qualities and to proselytize. A nice thick piece of boutique paper is a joy to paint on while an A4 sheet of printer paper will reduce to sludge under the weight of gauche. A chocolatey light roast will appeal to someone in a way that burnt blends just won’t. For a Magic card, it’s just cardboard.

There’s no material difference between a Great Henge and a Llanowar Elves, and yet one can be worth a few pennies and another over 100$. While Jinhao can clone a pen and create something with most of the utility, even the best proxy Black Lotus is only worth a few dollars. Where audiophiles quibble over the most desirable way to amplify, Magic purchasers quibble over estimated value, whether you ought to buy your singles early or wait for prices to drop. Will the draft format be good? If it is and people want to play it, will there be enough packs for people to do so? If not, will prices drop? Fuck knows, and I can’t be bothered to care. Magic’s monetary value is determined by so many factors, most of which are beyond my sphere of interest, that it feels entirely divorced from the experiences that I use to weigh my other hobby’s expenditures.

Recently, Magic has added the new dimension of using outside IP to increase value. Aragorn, Vivi Ornitier, regrettably Sonic the Hedgehog and Spider-man now compete with Bitterblossom and Craterhoof for Magic shelf space. For some, the references to iconic moments in their favourite shows and games are reason enough to shell out cash. I’ve found the opposite, and its given me some pause as to my relationship with Magic as a hobbyist.

As I write, Magic the Gathering’s Avatar the Last Airbender set is being previewed, with release on the horizon. After a few months of derision and apathy towards Spider-man, there’s fatigued enthusiasm for Avatar. As game pieces, Avatar compliments the broader history of Magic. Avatar’s art slides more gracefully into the fantasy planes of Magic’s in-universe sets. Wizards of the Coast has managed to (mostly) avoid shoving every tedious meme into the game. That said, its also made baffling decisions. Continuing a trend that started last year, fancy cardboard for collectors with frameless designs using source material from the show have been a loud talking point. Accusations of art created by generative AI (or at least made by someone who sings its praises), and the use of extremely similar art for two very different cards have also caused some buzz.

My dog in this fight is old and tired. She can’t be bothered. I’ve never seen Avatar and don’t feel any strong desire to, but I do like and care about Magic. One of my goals for the last couple years has been to start going to locals to play (though various factors have waylaid that plan), and so it matters to me as hobbyist where Avatar finds itself in the greater ecosystem of Magic. Some of these cards will certainly see play in the Magic formats I play most often, Standard and Pioneer, and many of my peers will purchase copies to put in their decks regardless of whether they like Avatar. I’ll certainly be tempted.

In the end, however, I doubt I’ll ever buy an Avatar card. I haven’t bought a Final Fantasy, Lord of the Rings, or any other crossover IP product yet and don’t see that changing. Yes I’m grumpy about crossovers, and some of the sets have been junk, but more than that, they don’t give me any of that hobbyist joy that I get from typing on a keyboard I built myself, or watching plants I bought bloom. I’ve been told that not every product is for me, and of course in essence this is both true and acceptable, but as noted Magic cards are more than subjective collectibles. If you’re playing a game, competing, inserting yourself in the broader discourse of what is powerful in a thirty year old game about slinging spells, it is difficult to afford yourself the luxury of taste. Yet, faced with Magic cards without an artist line, blurry and out of place in my grip, I am deflated.

Many times I’ve found myself rolling my eyes at the game pieces that I force upon myself. As I ride across Azeroth on a Kodo, I would prefer the black furred Tauren I pilot to don blue robes adorned with baubles and fetishes, not the remains of dead bug-zealots. And yet I wear the orange carapace instead because reducing the cast time of Chain Heal is very powerful, and it’s a compromise I’m willing to make – however reluctantly. Having picked up Magic fairly recently, it’s been disorienting to burn out so quickly on the back of what is essentially the same decisions. I still play Pyroclasm despite Fire Magic eating its lunch. My Gruul Prowess deck contains four copies of Light Up the Stage, despite Heroes’ Hangout being demonstrably more powerful. I’m not doing so in an attempt to prove my cards are best. They’re not. I’m doing so in hopes that just as I chose to grow ferns and Philodendron instead of lilies and orchids, I look at my things and feel joy.

Magic the Gathering is not cheap. There are cheap cards, and if you have friends to play with it’s not too much effort to limit yourselves to a modest budget, but if you’re playing a formalized format signed off on by the corporate powers that be, your money will be spent on what the community finds to be the most winning cards. Purchasing a chess board with only one queen would be laughable, yet Magic creates this tension between money and your play experience constantly.

Avatar may end up being very powerful. Maybe even fun! I genuinely hope it does. Perhaps that will make it easier to forget the ways in which its existence frustrates me. The shallow attempts at creating expensive collectibles to drive interest, the higher price to buy packs, the willingness to print only enough product such that prices are always a bit too high.

In other hobbies, I am always doing the calculus to decide whether the expensive luxury is worth my pocket change. Often it’s not, but sometimes it is. It’s fun to discuss that calculus with fellow enthusiasts. As I look to the future of Magic, the calculus becomes less experiential and more about participation at all. I want to draw seven and feel excitement for the possibilities – a glimpse of future joy – yet I find myself trawling previews and forgetting the experience of the thing. The veneer of Magic as a portal to worlds beyond, expressed as a gathering of friends, has been wearing thin. I worry that these cardboard representations of spells and worlds will begin to remind me only of their existence as a crutch, holding up the rotting corpse of Hasbro. I worry my apartment full of things each with their purpose place and time, will have a binder filled with things that no longer do.

#MTG