01 September 2011

A Mox On Both Your Houses

Normally I'd let this pass as it's obviously designed to get geeks in an uproar: Alyssa Bereznak's Gizmodo article bashing Jon Finkel, a former Magic: The Gathering world champion, after they went on a few dates. However, it's been a few days and I still feel the need to talk about it.

That plus I had the article sent to me by quite a number of people. Apparently my friends associate me with magic. Awesome!

There was a time in my youth when becoming a pro MTG player was a life goal. Hell, what am I saying. That's still on my goals list. Maybe I still have some decks hanging around. Maybe one of my friends has the Power Nine locked up in his safe, next to his gun and important documents. (I ogled the cards, avoided the gun, and photographic memoried the documents) Maybe if you call and say you're looking to play some Magic, I'll be right over.

The one girl I liked in high school was reasonably adept at Magic. Let me rephrase that. This one girl in high school was reasonably adept at Magic and thus I liked her. It saddens me to think that people would get shunned in the dating world simply because they were really great at something dorky. In today's culture, everyone is into something nerdy, as Patton Oswald argued. How you gonna hate on Magic when you obsess over _____?!

In support of Finkel, I'm going to change my OK Cupid profile. The section for what I'm doing with my life will now read "aspiring Magic the Gathering world champion." My six things I could never do without will be red, white, blue, black, green, and colorless mana. I hope nobody takes that ironically because I won't be replying if they do. In addition, the next girl that says "phelddagrif" to me I'm going to propose to. I hope she'll agree that our budget wedding should be MTG themed.

Apparently in 2000, ESPN2 televised the Magic World Championships between Finkel and Bob Maher. Where was I when this was happening? Finkel has won hundreds of thousands of dollars playing Magic, was immortalized in a card, took Vegas for lots of money playing blackjack, and is now a managing partner at a hedge fund. How you gonna reject a resume like that?

The whole time I was reading about Alyssa's article and its subsequent fallout, I kept thinking about the line Fred Waitzkin delivers in Searching for Bobby Fischer. When his son's teacher disparages chess, Fred says, "[Josh's] better at this than I've ever been at anything in my life. He's better at this than you'll ever be, at anything. My son has a gift. He has a gift, and when you acknowledge that, then maybe we will have something to talk about."