I’ve been thinking a lot about cards. I’m nostalgic for all sorts of stuff, but I’ve been thinking especially about cards, and I’m trying to figure out why.
Most recently, I’ve been thinking about Pokémon cards. Way back in the second grade, I picked up a paltry few of the most basic Pokémon cards for a dime each from my neighbor, and brought them to school with me. Within days, I had taken my eyes off of them for a moment and they had been promptly stolen by a classmate. I never found out the culprit or recovered the cards; I wasn’t all that attached to begin with. But the experience soured me on pursuing that particular hobby.
In the last few years, my spouse and I have gotten interested in Pokémon again—mostly the games, starting with Legends: Arceus. Just this month, Heidi expressed some desire to own physical Pokémon cards, and we quickly discovered that they are at a several-year high in popularity, making them extremely difficult to source. There’s a sort of paradox here: the popularity that puts them in high demand also drives one of the primary appeals, at least to me personally: being a part of something big. Cards are hard to come by right now because everyone seems to be interested in getting them, and there’s something cool about that, the same way it was cool to be playing Pokémon GO back when everyone was playing it.
Because I didn’t know much at all about Pokémon in second grade, I have to imagine this was the only appeal to me at the time, which makes it all the more disappointing and poetic that I immediately learned a tough lesson about material envy. I assume it’s the exact same people who stole my cards in elementary school who grew up to be the current scalpers for the newest Pokémon cards, buying them in bulk and reselling them at a huge margin. That’s one potential drawback of a shared interest, and it’s a pretty discouraging one. Nevertheless, I’ve been getting nostalgic about those cards I had.
I’ve also been thinking about Magic: The Gathering cards. Heidi and I visited a local game store to inquire about Pokémon cards, which we were told they had been consistently sold out of for the last six months. But there was still an abundance of Magic: The Gathering cards, and I have a lot more familiarity with those.
I was first introduced to MTG at a music camp in middle school, and I was enchanted by the gorgeous card art, the long history of the game, and the seemingly complex mechanics of playing it. Over several years, I dreamt often of success in MTG—both in terms of competition and just in collecting the cards themselves, neither of which I managed to actively pursue. I had my small collection, but I spent many hours crafting theoretical decks on web-based digital deckbuilders, getting lost in obscure rules interactions and in the sheer number of card options, or listening to hours-long YouTube breakdowns of every single card in a set and what made it good or bad. Like Pokémon, Magic had this broad societal appeal, but this time I was much more interested in actually engaging with the game itself, so much so that I lost sight of how you are meant to apply all those theoretical gameplay ideas: in real games with and against other people. In other words, I was so caught up in the Magic that I neglected the Gathering.
To be fair to my past self, my few experiences trying to play with adults were pretty unfun—it turns out that Magic, like many other hobbies, is plagued by insecure adult men who often ruin the experience for anyone who isn’t exactly like them. I was a kid, and that was enough to forfeit any welcome; god forbid I had been a girl or a person of color. But I certainly had friends my age who played, and I suspect the juvenile social ambitions I had in early high school (wanting to impress people who already didn’t like me) majorly got in the way of gathering with people who already played the game; a truly embarrassing failure of mine, in retrospect. Still, I’ve been getting nostalgic about Magic.
Finally, I’ve been thinking about playing cards. More precisely, I’ve been thinking about a card game called Wizard, which uses a mostly traditional playing card deck, adding four copies each of two extra cards: the Jester and the titular Wizard. Later on in high school, when some of those misguided social ambitions of mine had died down more, I actually started making friends, and I found myself gravitating toward a particular classroom during lunch breaks where a recurring cast of characters gathered to play Wizard nearly every day. I suppose this game had less of the broad cultural popularity of either MTG or Pokémon, but people were actively playing it right there in the building during school hours, and I was welcome to join. Plus, there was no shortage of competitive spirit among the players.
Intermittently over the last several years I’ve tried to come up with ways that I could recapture the magic of these lunchtime Wizard games. I could certainly gather friends now and teach them to play for a time or two (and maybe I will). But the consistency of playing for nearly an hour every single weekday, plus walking only a few minutes from where I was already having lunch, is logistically impossible. That convenience was an underappreciated luxury of the high school setting, and it ended as soon as I graduated. Ever since, and especially recently, I’ve been feeling nostalgic about Wizard.
So, what’s happening? Why have I been feeling so nostalgic about all these card games? Is it because of the endless morbid churn of devastating news, both domestic and abroad, which makes me long for a simpler time when less was going on and less was going wrong? Sure, I think that’s part of it.
Is it because as a kid I looked forward to a day when I could pursue hobbies on my own time, with my own money, and without the constraints of school to keep me occupied all the time; and now here I am as an adult, discovering that the longing was actually part of the magic, and that I’m busier now than I’ve ever been before? Yeah, I think that’s a factor as well.
Conversely, is it because I’m finding a newfound adult freedom in pursuing hobbies, both in what I’m able to appreciate and in how specifically I might choose to appreciate it? Yup, I think that’s relevant too.
But I suspect that the best answer may be as simple as the word community. To me personally, all three card games represent some aspect of community that I’m lacking today, and that I had at least a glimpse of at an earlier time in my life.
Pokémon cards represent a massively communal common interest. As awful as Nintendo can be, the charm of Pokémon is undeniable, and there’s something simple and pure and sort of spiritually connecting about delighting in the same thing as someone else, whether it’s strangers or friends.
Magic represents the friendly competition that takes place in a healthy community—and how community can come about as a result of that competition. Winning and losing and having setbacks and getting better, all in a high-engagement but ultimately low-stakes environment with people whose company you enjoy is some of the most gratifying stuff you can do on the planet.
Wizard represents the practical convenience of being physically near a familiar community space, and the consistency of communal organization that ensures things happen no matter who might be present or absent on any given day.
It’s not news that I have much less access to community now than I did as an adolescent. In fact, it’s also not news that a lot of people in the country are having the same issue. The card game nostalgia is bittersweet, then; it reminds me of these particular aspects of community that I didn’t know I had until I lost them. But it also helps me imagine how I might rekindle the presence of community in my own life, in practical ways, one piece at a time.
I’ll have to get back to you on what that might look like, but in the meantime, Heidi and I have picked up a few used Pokémon cards (pictured above), and second-grade me is healed just a little bit.
Phil Rienstra (they/he) (‘21) studied writing and music, and since graduating has developed a deep interest in labor rights. They currently work at a unionized Starbucks and volunteer with Starbucks Workers United. They’re an amateur chef, a perennial bandana wearer, and an Enneagram 4. He lives in St. Paul with his spouse, Heidi.
