magic Archives - Behind the Lens

I know this may come as a surprise to some of you, but yesterday was Thanksgiving. I know, I know it came as a shock to me to, but we carry on through these difficult times.

Anyways we, and by we I mean several friends of mine, decided that since many of us had no family whatsoever here in Washington we were going to hold our own Orphans Thanksgiving, and be our own family. Dale and Leanne offered their home for use, and plans started to be formed.

Finally the day came, and I decided to SLEEP IN!!! Technically I should have gotten up and gone running with my wife in the turkey trot 4 miler (She came in second in her age group…go Terra!), but there was snow on the ground, it was REALLY cold, and I had had a REALLY bad day at work the day before and wanted to escape to dream land!

When she got back we packed up the food and headed over. The food was wonderful! Leanne cooked the most tender turkey I have ever tasted, Trish had some really good twice baked potatoes, Leanne also cooked banana bread, and of course all the stuffing, side dishes, and drinks we could handle.

Over dinner I read The Geeks Thanksgiving Day prayer, and then followed the prayer with an intense conversation that ranged in topics from Aliens, String Theory, Government Conspiracies, Zombies, M Theory, and many many more complex topics. Devin has a tendency to do that to us in conversation, and for some reason we all love it!

After dinner I participated in the LONGEST game of Magic I have ever played in my life, and then we headed home to enjoy a nice movie and fire in the fire place.

Overall I would say despite all the crap and concern going on in my life right now, that my first Orphans Thanksgiving was a GREAT one!

Thanks to all my friends!

Tonight I played my first game of Magic The Gathering. I remember when Magic first came out. I was in middle school at the time, and not willing to admit to myself or anyone else that I was a geek. I saw the other kids at school playing and I remember desperately wanting to ask someone to teach me, but I never did. Over the years as I became more and more comfortable with myself and came to understand that being a geek is not a bad thing I started getting more comfortable trying all the things I had always wanted to. Magic sadly was never one of them. One of the things I have loved about my group here has ben the ability to try new things, and tonight I got to try Magic.

Magic is basically set up as two magicians battling each other to the death. You can play with more then just two (we played with 5 tonight), but a standard game is two. As I understand the rules there are three types of cards. Land cards are played at the beginning of each turn. Each land card represents mana which is the energy you use to cast spells. Without enough mana or energy you cant cast a spell. The more Mana you have the more spells you can cast, and the more powerful you become.

The second kind of card is a spell card. Spell cards generally deal damage to another character or enhance something. These are generally very useful cards to have. I didn’t run into many of these cards tonight, but am told that there are some very powerful spells out there. There are even spells to counter other spells, so if you can imagin the scene from Harry Potter when Dumbledore and Voldemort duel, thats what playing spell cards is like only with cards.

The third type of card is a creature card. You use these cards to attack other players. There are so many different types of creature cards, and each one has different abilities and strengths.