David Greenwald, a Magic: The Gathering player in the 1990s who gave it up in high school before returning to the fold as an adult, wrote about playing with 11,000 other people at the world’s biggest Magic: The Gathering tournament, in Las Vegas ‘natch.
From Rolling Stone:
Magic draws all kinds: in our event, there’s a man with pink hair wearing a Gerard Way shirt, a Detroit Tigers fan, a woman with a Rogue-ish blonde streak in her hair and a menswear blog reader with a Herschel backpack and a collared shirt, alongside the usual abundance of doughy white guys who look like they spend their free time prepping for the next Grand Prix. The game’s cardboard, IRL success recalls the rise of vinyl: there’s something to collecting and caring for a physical product, and the human interaction that comes with it…
The day’s first two hours are about as fun as an IRS audit: to prevent cheating, we open our packs and catalog them on a 250-card checklist, so each player’s pool will have a record in case other cards manage to sneak into our decks. We pass our piles to the right and double-check the new one we’ve received, expecting that we’ll pass them once more – nope. “Make your decks,” an announcer says.
“Inside the World’s Biggest ‘Magic: The Gathering’ Tournament” (Rolling Stone)
Photo above from Grand Prix Las Vegas Photo Essay (Magic: The Gathering)