Gina Venturino recalls that when she started out playing Magic: The Gathering in high school, when her family owned the former NuGames in Eureka, “I was often the only female in the room and it took me a really long time to ever actually start becoming comfortable just going to a game store and playing Magic with strangers.” In the beginning, she says, “It’s just like this intimidating world when you step into it because it’s like a foreign language. It can be hard to get into when you have, if you have, one negative experience.”
At Magic in the Redwoods, Humboldt County’s first ever Magic: The Gathering convention, Venturino, who’d been contracted to organize the event, wanted to provide a space for players to feel comfortable playing with strangers and for new players to learn. Still new to the game, I was ready to test my skills and the welcome.
Magic in the Redwoods took place the weekend of March 21 to 23 at the Arcata Community Center, attracting some 700 people over three days for various playing formats along with board games and introductions on how to play the card game, a cosplay competition, local vendors and artist signings. The event, hosted by North Coast Supports and Rec, LLC, obtained grant funding from the Humboldt Lodging Alliance in hopes of attracting tourists to stay in the area. In the final tally, out-of-town visitors purchased nearly 63 percent of the 221 presale three-day badges.
There were two main competitions: modern, in which players used pre-built card decks; and sealed, in which competitors open and register six packs of cards (90 total) to open and choose 40 to play with. The total prize payout at the convention was $10,000, split incrementally among the top eight players of two tournaments.
Fifty-eight players competed for the prize for the modern competition, and locals Daniel Cole and William Judson stood out on top. The pair split the prize money to walk out with $1,600 each, with Cole taking the winner’s spot and an invitation to Regional Championship Qualifiers in either Minneapolis, Minnesota, or Hartford, Connecticut. “I had some lucky match-ups but I was focused, so I feel like I played well,” says Cole.
Having only recently started to learn how to play Magic: The Gathering myself last August, I decided to dive headfirst into the fire by participating in the Sealed Tournament. This format relies on luck and skill to build and use your deck properly, making it pretty entry-level friendly. As a bonus, competitors also get to keep the cards opened. The competition consisted of seven rounds to determine the top eight.
During the weeks leading up to the tournament, I sought out help from my friend Ariel Kimmok, who introduced me to the game and has competed in regional qualifiers in Oregon and North Carolina. He created a comprehensive list of cards in Aetherdrift, the latest set that would be used for the competition, for me study. I also practiced with the website draftsim.com to simulate the deck building process.
Amid the sea of mostly testosterone, I was focused and ready for the day’s eight rounds. My goal was the sweet, sweet cash prize for the top eight players.
My first round was rough as my opponent steamrolled me 2-0, destroying my spells and life points with his March of the World Ooze card. I fared slightly better on my second match, which ended in a draw when we ran out of time.
This left me in the risky spot, as I was now 0-1-1 and losing one more round would kill any chance of making it into the top eight.
Entering the third round, my opponent Joshua Nolan, who had traveled two hours from Mendocino County to the convention, won the first game. I rallied to defeat him in the second game, but down to the wire in the third and final game that would make or break my chances for cash and glory, I blundered.
In Magic: The Gathering, players can mulligan their starting hands. A player can continue to mulligan until they are satisfied with their hand, but they must add an additional card to the bottom of the deck for each time they do so.
My starting hand was horrible, as I had none of the land cards that would allow me to cast spells. So, according to the rules, I chose to mulligan, reshuffling the hand back into the deck and drawing another seven cards, placing one card at the bottom of the deck. Now with six cards, my hand was still poor with only one land card. I could have tried again, but as I had never done it more than once, I second-guessed myself and kept the hand. I had nothing on the board as I faced my opponent’s barrage of attacks, nor did I get lucky in any draws.
Knocked out of the cash prize and a chance to earn an RCQ invitation, I pressed on as there were still four more rounds I could participate in. All that was left was the desire to keep playing and the need to score at least one win in a round. That and an opportunity to score a Mayhem Devil promo card by placing in the top 64.
Locking in mentally, I scored my first win in round four, beating my opponent 2-1. My winning streak continued in rounds five and six. By the end of round five, my brain, which had been running off of a single cup of coffee, started to lose steam. The exhaustion from playing from 10 a.m. to 6:30 p.m. finally got to me and by round seven, I started making simple mistakes.
On my last and final round against Andrew Nelson, who traveled from Trinity County for the competition, I lost.
“I thought it was a great match,” Nelson said. “I could tell you were thinking hard but also tired at the end of the day, being the seventh round. But that’s Magic — there’s so much to keep track of. It’s really hard, even if you are at the top of your game.”
For the top eight, the format changes from sealed to draft, where players must construct a new deck from three packs given to each player, taking one card from each pack and passing the rest down to the others.
The sealed tournament ended with the top four players splitting the prize for $1,050 each and battling it out to determine the true winner. Former local Christopher Keyser and resident Paul Mullan emerged as the top two and received the RCQ invitations, but Mullan took the final. Keyser says he was surprised to make it to the top two, as he did not practice with the Aetherdrift set, only having played it once at a prerelease.
“Honestly, my goal was to go 0-3 drop this morning,” Mullan says. “I had a few friends who were going to this pop-up German place having schnitzel and German lager … I was going to hop over there but I just kept winning, and then I top eight-ed, and then I won. Then we split and then I won. This was not my plan at all.”
The second day of the convention and my first ever Magic: The Gathering competition closed out at 9:30 p.m. While I didn’t make it as far as I had hoped, I did place 44th out of 102 players.
“Competitive Magic is really fun, playing with stakes, even small stakes, just makes things funner to a lot of people,” says Charles Ferguson, head judge of the sealed competition. “If you’re ever having a bad day when you’re playing Magic at a pro tournament, just go — you’re not doing it right. As a new player, if you had fun, it doesn’t matter what place you were, you did it right.”
Editor’s note: This article has been update to accurately reflect the roles of North Coast Supports and Rec, LLC, and Gina Venturino.
Anne To (she/her) is a California Local News Fellow placed with North Coast Journal, Inc. Reach her at (707) 442-1400, extension 312, or anne@northcoastjournal.com. The California Local News Fellowship is a state-funded initiative to support and strengthen local news reporting. Learn more about it at fellowships.journalism.berkeley.edu/cafellows.
This article appears in Portrait of a Prairie.