While shoppers perused the booths set up along Second Street last Saturday for the Main Street Fall Market Festival, a group of 12 players sat in Level Up Games trading blows and casting spells in the Regional Championship Qualifier for the trading card game Magic: The Gathering.
“Magic Players welcome to our final round of Swiss. There are 50 minutes on the clock,” said Alex Nelson, the Level Up employee who ran the tournament.
For five hours, players competed across three rounds of a Swiss tournament with decks of 60 cards that can cost hundreds of dollars.
Magic: The Gathering, or often simply referred to as “Magic,” is one of the most popular card games in the world. It was created by famed game designer and Professor of Mathematics at Whitman College Dr. Richard Garfield  in 1993 when he was a doctoral candidate at the University of Pennsylvannia.
The game has players posing as wizards, casting spells and summoning creatures in order to bring the opponent’s life total to zero.
The game’s popularity forms the economic backbone of many game stores across the Twin Cities. While the Hastings Level Up location sells video games, board games, and comics, and even hosts events for numerous other card games, “Magic is the foundation of this company,” said Nelson.
For Joseph Peo, one of the players in the tournament, the game is a “mix of social and competitive” impulses. Some at the tournament had ambitions of using it as a stepping stone to larger events, while others are there to spend time with their friends while slinging spells.
Regular grassroots tournaments like the one in Level Up are the first step in a massive tournament system that goes all the way to global championships, which last year were held in Las Vegas with a prize pool of $1 million.
Level Up Games has its own professional team, whose green jerseys can be seen in winners’ galleries for tournaments across the state and even country.
“You qualify for bigger tournaments if you keep winning,” said Nelson, who is also a sanctioned Magic: The Gathering rules judge.
Magic: The Gathering is famously complicated. The game consists of tens of thousands of cards, with hundreds of new cards created each year. Decks can range from throwing lightning bolts at opponents to kill them as fast as possible to arranging a set of cards that combine to create infinite loops that win the game on the spot.
To arbitrate disagreements between players and to parse the 304-page official rules, judges take tests and pay dues in order to take up the title of judge, which Nelson has held for the last seven years.
Even during the tournament, several players flagged Nelson down with questions mid-game.
That Turing-complete-level of complexity has historically created a high barrier to entry for new players, and that issue was the topic of the day for both players and Level Up staff at the event.
Magic: The Gathering is more than rules on cardstock. The game features a 30-year running narrative that has spanned dozens of novels, hundreds of worlds and thousands of characters. From mind mages to melomaniac artificers to Lovecraftian nightmares, the story and characters woven by the game is sprawling and closely followed.
Increasingly the game has been turning away from that legacy towards adapting other pop culture characters and settings in order to bring new players into the game. Recent adaptions have ranged from Marvel superheroes to Lord of the Rings to the video game franchise Final Fantasy. The results have left many players and even game stores scratching their heads.
The adoption of outside properties has brought in droves of new players to the game. Despite those new players, however, “the competitive player base is shrinking,” said Nelson.
Many, especially those in the competitive scene, have been turned off by having Spiderman fight Frodo and SpongeBob SquarePants like a child turning over a toy box.
Because Magic: The Gathering is such an important part of game stores’ financial models, the rapidly changing landscape of the game can be existential for some stores.
“It looks really bleak for a lot of stores out there,” said Nelson.
On the other end of the spectrum of this new paradigm is higher pricing for magic cards.
Using other properties incurs a higher price for cards, which players can be leery of paying, but collectors are all too happy to scoop up.
“Scalping is a massive issue,” said Nelson.
Recent sets have sold out even before officially releasing, making it hard for casual players to get their hands on cards. Many stores are now caught in the bind where it can be difficult to keep shelves stocked but at the same time, enrollment to events is declining.
To combat this trend, Level Up Games imposes strict buying limits in order to stop collectors from scooping up a store’s entire inventory and reselling cards at higher prices. The move also seeks to maintain the local community of players who actually spend time at the store.
“We want to cater to people that are actually playing,” said Nelson.
Even the 12 attendees at the tournament is low for Level Up, said Tay Adams, Marketing and Event Coordinator for Level Up, with players preferring older formats of the game over new ones: “We have to go back to that format because no one wants to play it.”
Record-breaking sales are a strange bedfellow for a community seen by many as in decline.
While Nelson is open to the changing face of the game he has helped steward for the last seven years, “There’s an overwhelming sense of dread in the community right now.”