A strange tale of Magic and mushrooms

A few years ago, someone won a $5,000 Magic tournament while high on mushrooms. Then they wrote a highly entertaining article about it. I missed the article when it first appeared, but caught up on some talk about it recently.

The article is written with the kind of tongue-in-cheek honesty – both about the writer and magic tournaments generally, that I found very readable.

Magic game is popular enough that the competitive circuit is well-developed, and the games are often incredibly complicated and strategically rich and completely inaccessible to laymen. To be fair, the coverage team does a thorough and accurate job of describing my games, if you play a lot and have kept current with popular cards and “metagame” trends. But what outsider would care enough to decipher the Wizard language? The World Series of Poker this is not. I share coverage’s despair at communicating the strategic depth and excitement of Magic to a commercial, laic audience. Hence the advent of League of Legends as spectator-friendly, ersatz Starcraft, and Hearthstone as spectator-friendly, ersatz Magic. I guess you’ll have to believe me when I say I played brilliantly.

Along with that snippet, here’s a picture of the Top 8 players from the tournament in question. See if you can guess which one is our author here…

He also wrote what is probably the most honest look we’ll ever see about the experience of qualifying for and attending a Magic Pro Tour event. That article is linked to in the one above, but fair warning, it’s published on Tumbr, which is a very poor format for long articles.

Pro Tour events (at least ones organised by Wizards) are mostly likely going to stay in the past. That’s not necessarily a bad thing.