How I fell in love with cardboard collecting again, and the warning signs for the future of my MTG deck building career.
Hello! Welcome to my new and improved Sunday Mini Stackin’ series, where I’m gonna try to post once every month about something I’m interested in or something that’s been heavily on my mind all month, but doesn’t really fit in with the rest of my Substack posts!
Today, I’m going to yap about my new obsession, Magic: the Gathering. I don’t think it’s going to become something I write a lot of blog posts about, since I don’t really know what I’m doing and I’m kinda just winging every deck I build, but either way, congratulations! You won! My yapfest on MTG!! Yippeee!!!
In January of this year, I had a realization that a lot of my friends and my brother were interested in MTG. My brother had attempted to get me interested in the series back in like 2018 or so, but he went off to college and I was left with a lot of cardboard I didn’t know anything about. Throughout 2018-2022, I would pick up a couple of packs I found interesting, but the interest never really sparked.
In 2023, I decided I wanted to do something with the cards. A high school friend of mine was interested in MTG, so I made a 60-card deck because I thought that was the standard format people were playing. It’s what I remembered the deck sizes were for Pokemon, so I assumed the format transferred pretty seamlessly for MTG. Which, I was more or less correct about for Standard, but I knew nothing of Commander.
I went to campus with my 60-card deck, hoping to meet new people who would teach me how to play, and what I ended up leaving with was a new friend who only knew Commander. A format I knew nothing about.
I experienced the hellscape of the last few years of my degree, continuing my game collection and reigniting my passion for reading, not giving MTG a second thought. It wasn’t until the end of 2025 where I learned my brother had gotten back into MTG that I even considered making my own MTG deck again. I showed him the 60-card deck I made back in 2023, and with an approving nod, I was off to the races.
And in January, I had the reignited realization that a lot of my closest friends were already in the MTG mines.
I built my first commander deck with Shalai, Voice of Plenty. It was a card in my 60-card deck that I really liked, so I essentially just took out the doubles in the 60-card deck, added a bunch of other cards I already had and thought worked well together, and put it into Moxfield to share with my friend, who then returned an updated version for me.
My brother forced me, my mom, and his friend to play a game of Commander one night after I had picked up a couple new cards for the deck, and before long, I realized my deck was heavily flawed. I needed to build something much stronger, much more coherent. With more time spent at the card shop, eventually my mom started becoming interested in the game more, and both my brother and I built her a deck that we thought would make the most sense to her.
Before long, I started building a second deck—a token-heavy deck where I make just so many bunnies with Baylen, the Haymaker as my Commander—and a third deck, where I essentially play the card game That’s Not a Hat instead with Marvo, Deep Operative as the Commander. I made edits to my Baylen Deck after seeing my friend’s Ojer Taq deck with 30 Hare Apparents. My friend sends me more cards that have the “clash” attribute on Scryfall for my Marvo deck.
Eventually, I buy my first pack of cards again after a while of debating, mostly because I really wanted to see the Avatar cards. Being one of my favorite series of all time, I knew there would be references in the cards that I just had to have physical copies of. And the pack I grabbed ended up pulling some phenomenal cards. I got Iroh, Grand Lotus in that pack, and decided to build a deck around him as well. That’s how it goes, isn’t it? You make a couple crazy pulls in one pack one time, and suddenly you can’t stop buying the packs because you want to relive that crazy experience again.
Though, since then, I have bought packs with really shitty pulls, and I’ve come to the conclusion that I’d rather just buy singles or proxy cards instead of dealing with chance. Especially when packs are like $7.99 for whatever godforsaken reason.
Ultimately, I’m fully hooked into the hobby now. I have people in my life keeping the interest alive, and I want to be able to compete with them. And in doing so, I’ve somehow stumbled across a very vibrant and expressive community. Sure, I’ve got a long ways to go in understanding the mechanics to the level of my friends, and I still don’t really understand a lot of the balancing required for deck-building, but I’m having a good time. And also spending just so much money on cardboard.
Is it a little embarrassing to be so heavily interested in cardboard past the age of 20? Maybe, but I don’t think that really matters. I think what matters is that I have something to connect with my brother about, and something to yap to my friends about. And somehow, against all odds, something to connect with my mom about, which I think is the strangest outcome of this new obsession. Never thought I’d see the day that my mom was actively interested in one of my hobbies.
Um, so, moral of the story: to be cringe is to be free. Also don’t fall for gambling schemes when you can just buy what you need.
And that’s about it! Thanks for listening to me yap about MTG and how it has taken over my brain in the last month or so! I don’t think I could’ve predicted any of this to occur when I started building my first deck a month ago. It’ll be interesting to see where the hobby takes me in the coming months and/or years.
This is essentially what I’m going to use my new Sunday Mini Stackin’ series for: rants about things I’m interested in and general updates that don’t really fit in my main series or my backlog series. I’ll probably yap about my language learning efforts, writing updates, game hardware collecting, and all of the things in the “Other Interests” category on my Carrd. And, of course, this will be a monthly series as well, posted on the last Sunday of the month like today around 7 PM EST.
Next post will be March’s Backlog Update, up on Tuesday at noon EST, followed by a main series upload on weird DS games the very next day at 3 PM EST. All usual schedule stuff, just weirdly placed due to how the month laid out. Very busy week ahead of me, apparently!
And as always, see you next time!
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