Magic cards belong to a certain class of nerdery that I’ve always felt was a little beyond me. Okay, to be honest, a little below me. The game just seems a bit too close to that realm of supreme geekdom occupied by live action role-playing and medieval faires.

Not that I’m a snob—no, I fully admit that I’m a nerd. These days, it seems there’s a certain prestige and cool attached to the term, but beyond the typical attributes cited by nerd wannabes—reading for pleasure and enjoying a game of Risk here and there—I’ve been known to enter the deeper levels of the nerd hierarchy. I’ve attended comic conventions and I live for Battlestar Galactica marathons, but I’ve never deigned to acknowledge the game called Magic: The Gathering.

Then I met Nate. A friend of a friend who would become one of my best, he’s an Ivy League graduate and an award-winning author who dresses better than most girls I know, so I was surprised to discover that he often spends his weekends slinging spells at a comic store down in White Rock.

I guess that after a few months of listening quietly while Nate recounted epic Magic battles, my politeness was misinterpreted as genuine interest, and he invited me to the Magic Grand Prix at Canada Place, in Vancouver. In a grand gesture of supportive friendship, I agreed. I packed my notepad and my tape recorder, and prepared myself for a day of anthropological adventure.

On the big day, we met for breakfast at the food court across from the tournament site. Nate showed me how to spot the Magic players: they were the guys carrying backpacks. Inside their bags would be decks of cards printed with the images of mythical creatures and conjurers’ spells, just waiting to best the wizardry of the competition.

Our disappointing egg sandwiches devoured, we enjoyed a minute of February sunshine before forsaking it for an afternoon of sorcery in a windowless ballroom.
I’d been warned about the smell. “Wear perfume,” Nate had said. He thought it might give me a bubble of fragrance in which to navigate the stench of the tournament hall.
It hit me before I’d even reached the door into the site. A smell that’s not quite hot dogs or chicken noodle soup. The odour of hundreds of bodies that somehow implies inactivity rather than exercise, that stems from closeness and warmth and is somehow so different from the smell of the locker room after a hockey game.

Among the crowd were some pretty extreme forms of humanity, uber-nerds that wouldn’t be out of place at an audition for Beauty and the Geek. Lots of long, stringy ponytails atop t-shirts straining to contain the Claus-esque belly within, and patchy beards not quite fulfilling their purpose of masking the acne beneath.

But there were also guys with highlighted hair and Lacoste shoes, and even one skinny hipster with a pencil moustache and a striped cardigan. Later in the day, I’d notice Nate playing against a guy who looked like his other interests included bodybuilding and the human growth hormone.

The vast majority of Grand Prix attendees were, however, united by one common feature: the ability to pee in a urinal. In the four or five hours I spent at the tournament, I counted only eight other women in a room of more than two hundred dudes. All but one were there with their boyfriends, watching but not playing.

I sidled up to Grace Ruth, a very made-up woman I noticed standing at a distance from the tables. She was there to support her boyfriend, but told me it was her first time at a Magic tournament. When I explained that I planned to write about the event, she turned to me with a spark of hope in her eyes and asked, “So, do you get the game?” Apparently, I wasn’t the only clueless female in the room.

The only woman participating in any sort of game play was Jessica Maestaes, a 23-year-old from Salem, Oregon who could have passed for 15 or 16. She told me she’d been playing Magic for a couple of years, after her older brother introduced her to the game. “Every once in a while, you see a few girls at tournaments,” she said, but all of the friends she plays with are boys. “They’re like big brothers.”

I wasn’t the only one to notice the gender imbalance. As I hovered around a feature game, doing my best to understand some portion of play, two writers from vicmagic.com, a Victoria website devoted to the game, pulled me aside. They were taking pictures of all the women at the tournament, and I obliged in exchange for an introduction or two with some high-ranking, very nervous, players from Victoria. One of them, Colin Miller, ended up placing ninth in the tournament, which qualified him for the pro tour – yep, there’s a Magic pro tour – but put him out of contention for the $30,000 grand prize.

I spent the day struggling to understand the game I was watching. I had assumed that immersion would be the quickest route to Magic fluency, and decided to go into the Grand Prix knowing only that players are called planeswalkers and that the card decks they play with are built through buying and trading.

I came away only slightly more enlightened. I now knew that some people are apparently willing to pay $850 for a single Magic card, the Black Lotus, which Nate told me was “the most powerful card ever.” I saw players laying out cards and twisting them at 90-degree angles, without developing the faintest idea about why they were doing it. Something about “manna.” And I watched a teenager named Benjamin Lundquist beat opponent after opponent before losing the title money to Paul Cheon.

It would take an hour of watching instructional videos on magicthegathering.com before I felt confident enough to suggest to Nate that I might be interested in maybe playing a game someday. I’m not sure that I’m ready to invest hundreds of dollars into trading cards, but I’d like a chance to better understand what it is about this game that compels young men to willingly spend their afternoons in airless rooms reeking of B.O.