The Cards I Was Only Ever Allowed to Borrow

I never owned a single one of them. I want to put that down first, because everything else here rests on it.

There was a boy in my class who had Magic cards. Actual ones, in a deck box, which to me at the time was roughly equivalent to arriving at school with a small private museum. And I did the only thing a child with no cards and no money can do, which is ask very politely and very often whether I might hold some.

He always said yes. I want that on the record too, because it cost him nothing to say no and he never did.

─── ✦ ───I Did Not Want to Play

Here is the part that I think is genuinely strange, and that I have never been able to explain properly to anyone who played: I did not want to play. I am not sure I even understood that playing was the point.

I wanted the pictures. That was it. That was the whole of my interest. Somebody had painted a dragon on a piece of cardboard the size of my hand, and it was good — properly good, the sort of thing I had only ever seen on the covers of books I was not allowed to buy — and then somebody else had done it again on the next one, and the next one, several hundred times, and a boy in my class was carrying all of it around in his bag next to a squashed sandwich.

So I would take three or four, prop them behind whatever we were supposed to be working on, and simply look. Not read. Look. I could not have told you what a single one of them did.

›Eyes on your own desk, please.

That happened more than once. I would put them down, wait a decent interval, decide that a decent interval had elapsed, and have another look. I was not a difficult child in any other respect, which I think is why I kept getting away with it.

❝I could not have told you what a single one of them did. I could have told you exactly what they looked like.

Then school ended, as it does, and the cards went wherever his bag went, and I did not think about any of it with any seriousness for a very long time.

─── ✦ ───Then I Got Older and Had My Own Money

Which is, I am told, the entire mechanism behind most of what adults do.

I would like to tell you that I approached this carefully. That I bought one pack, to see. I did not do that. I went absolutely feral in a way I am still slightly embarrassed about and would do again tomorrow.

• ✦The Hobbit Bundle.
• ✦The Hobbit booster box, because apparently the bundle had been a warm-up.
• ✦The Tarkir: Dragonstorm Bundle.
• ✦And the Final Fantasy Chocobo Bundle, which was never in question.

The Chocobo bundle deserves its own sentence, because I am quietly pleased with myself about it. Somebody had bought two. They did not need two. I got theirs for a good deal less than every other seller was asking, which given that I had turned up late to this particular party was more luck than I had any right to expect.

─── ✦ ───Opening Them

I was not ready for how that would feel.

I thought I was buying cardboard. I had a whole sensible framing prepared about it being a reasonable hobby for a grown man with a job. And then I opened the first pack and there was a dragon on it, and I was eleven years old, sitting at a desk I have not sat at in thirty years, holding something that belonged to somebody else.

Except this time nobody was going to ask for them back. Nobody was going to tell me to put them away. They were mine. I could look at them for as long as I liked, which turned out to be a considerable amount of time, and then I could put them down and pick them up again an hour later, which I also did.

I got a bit emotional about it. I am not going to dress that up.

─── ✦ ───The Part I Did Not Plan

I went into this as a collector. That was the deal I made with myself: I like the art, I have always liked the art, I am buying the art. No rules to learn, no decks to build, nobody to lose to.

That lasted roughly as long as it took to lay a few of them out on a table.

Because they do things. Each one does a specific, deliberate thing, and the things fit together, and somewhere in the middle of reading a card I had picked up purely because it was pretty I realised I was reading it properly — and that something had started burning that I had not asked to light.

So now I am learning. Badly, slowly, from the beginning, in my forties, the way you learn a language when you already know what you want to say and have none of the words. I am going to turn up to one of the local meetings when I am less likely to embarrass myself, and I am going to lose a great many games to people who have been doing this since they were the boy in my class.

I am looking forward to it more than almost anything I have looked forward to this year.

─── ✦ ───Two Things I Have Decided Are Omens

First: there is a card in the Final Fantasy set called A Realm Reborn. I pulled it. On a blog that exists more or less entirely because of A Realm Reborn. I am aware that tens of thousands of other people also pulled it and that this means nothing at all, and I have chosen to ignore that.

Second: two of the Hobbit cards I like best are painted by an artist called Irvin Rodriguez. Not me, obviously. A considerably more talented Irvin. But I turned the card over, read the small print along the bottom the way I have been doing since I was eleven, and found my own first name sitting under a picture of Gollum.

The small print along the bottom is the bit nobody reads. I have read it my whole life. It is the only part of the card I ever had a use for.

─── ✦ ───Nine of Them

These are not the valuable ones. I checked, and then I stopped checking, because that is not what any of this was ever about. These are the nine I keep going back to — three from each box, chosen the same way I chose them at that desk.

His name was Raul. I have no idea what became of him — where he went, what he does, whether he still plays. That thread went wherever school threads go.

But I know exactly what his deck box looked like. And I know he said yes every single time, to a kid who was never going to play, who only ever wanted to hold them up to the light for a minute and give them back.

Raul, wherever you are: I have got my own now. Four boxes of them. You would laugh.

I hope life has been good to you. I hope it is still being good to you. And I hope that somewhere there is a table with your cards on it and people around it who are glad you turned up.