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Jesse Dana

About Jesse Dana

I started playing Magic during Revised and played regularly until Tempest.  I then played off and on until Alara block and now play regularly.  I try to play as much as possible, or as much as I can without having my girlfriend break up with me.  (She is, however, supportive of the hobby) It would be great to qualify for a Pro Tour one day, but that is wishful thinking. Although I do take each sanctioned match seriously, I never drop from a tournament no matter how it will affect my record. I would love to travel to other countries and play. At a young age, I had the chance to play against Rob Dougherty, Darwin Castle and Shawn "The Hammer" Regnier.  My goal is to one day do live coverage of tournaments like Brian David-Marshall.  Since my return to the game, I have become fascinated about every aspect of it, from strategy, to the Pro Tour, to even the lore of the game.

Community

When I first started playing Magic around the beginning of Revised, it was merely a game to me. I didn’t view it as anything different from any other game I played at the time, whether it was a video game, board game or another card game for that matter. It was simply a fun way for me to pass the time. From that time until the first time I quit the game when Mirage came out never did I think that it could be more than anything other than a hobby to play with my friends. Like many other games in my life there came a time when I began to lose interest in Magic and because none of my friends pushed either to continue playing, it made giving up the game that much easier. It even got to the point where I sold the majority of my cards on eBay in order to fund my next hobby. (That was a massive mistake that I am now kicking myself for on a daily basis… but that is a whole other story.) Magic was merely a nerdy trend of mine that faded away much like the way of Dungeons and Dragons. When I ventured off to college I was sure that I would never play another game of Magic again and I would be shocked if the game lasted much longer on the market, considering all the competition for card games that were available, not to mention the fact that video games were getting more and more advanced.

Being a true nerd at heart, I, like most other nerds find it almost completely impossible to not go into a hobby shop if we happen to pass one on the street. For many years during and even after college, every time I happened to make one of these pit stops, it seemed that there were still Magic cards on the shelf and in some cases actually people playing the game. I would think to myself that there is maybe some small niche for this game, like there is for D&D, and that the people playing probably don’t take it that seriously. Maybe some big game company bought Wizards and their other games were funding Magic. I still thought that at some point this game has got to fade out.

Well, I guess I was wrong, really wrong. You can imagine my surprise that at the ripe old age of 29 one of my best friends called me up to have lunch, and the reason he wanted to get together was not to talk about some woman he was interested in or to see if I had any advice on his career, but rather to ask me if I could teach him to play Magic. I said “who the hell plays that game anymore?” He said that there was a work league at his office and that there were at least twenty people there who were involved. I was completely dumbfounded by this idea and of course I had to oblige him, not for his desire to learn to play, but for my own selfish reasons to see who actually played this game anymore. My friend and I bought some sealed decks and packs and began slinging. Shortly after that we attended the regional prerelease for Zendikar and the amount of people there blew my mind. From there on out I was hooked, but how could this be? Here I am an “Adult” with a career and a serious girlfriend, car payments, a receding hair line… and I now find myself enjoying a “game” more than I did when I was an ignorant kid.

For the last few years, I have been exploring this question and seeking out anybody who would lend me their ear. Although I could say that there may be many answers as to why I love this game more now than I did back in high school, there seems to be one answer that keeps coming up again and again. Magic is not a game, Magic is a Community, and more than that, it is a community that I feel I belong in.

For many of us that play Magic it is our means of escaping from the real world, a world that some of us don’t feel like we belong in. When we get together at FNMs or any other event it doesn’t matter what we are outside that arena, we are all there to share in the interests of the Magic community. You can be a student, a carpenter, a lawyer, a man, a woman, 16 years old or 36 years old…regardless of these factors we are all equal parts in the Magic community. Like many communities, ours is one that is ever evolving and it is up to every individual to keep things on the right track. I apologize if I sound preachy, but what I am saying comes from the heart.

Versions:
Mercadian Masques (Foil)

In my time since returning to the game, I have been a part of many great events in our community and have been taken in by some incredible people like the creators of this website for example… but unfortunately, I have been witness to some acts that I would call less than neighborly. I have seen people more knowledgeable about the game than others blatantly rip off the uninformed in trades, I have seen seasoned players degrade newbs because of mistakes that they have made in the middle of matches… For the most part, people outside of our community don’t understand why we play this game to begin with and that the fact that we waste so much of our time with a game in the first place is ridiculous. We have all felt this at some point or another, so why would any of us in our community choose to do the same sort of thing to someone who is, in many ways, bonded with us?

This past weekend at the GP in Worcester, a friend of mine started off the event at 3-0. Considering he had barely touched M13 at all he was needless to say ecstatic with his results in the early goings. In his next round he was paired up against a Pro Player who I will choose not to name in this article. In each of the games that they played, the Pro saw it fit to call out my friend for not being an expert on the rules and each time further escalated the situation by calling over a judge. Now I have known this friend for quite a while and he would never cheat and he indeed does know the rules very well, so I find it hard to believe that there was in fact an issue going on at the table other than that this Pro was trying in some way to psych out my buddy. Well, whatever the Pro did, it worked. I have never seen my friend so frazzled before and the fact that he was even having a hard time describing the situation during the match shows the number that was done on him. My friend lost his next two matches and thus was out of contention. For the rest of the evening he was talking about how all the fun had been sucked out of the game at that point and that he needed a break.

Now I know already that there are some of you out there who will look at this situation and see that whatever the Pro did, it psyched my friend out, and sometimes that is one way to win the game. I won’t sit here and argue with you entirely, as this is a tactic that I have learned from watching many matches at the top tables, but if you are a Pro Player and have been on the circuit for years and write draft articles for a Magic related website, is this really necessary when you are going up against a complete unknown?

I bring this up to you because in our community I believe that we all have roles and obligations within our group. If after this match the Pro had gone up to my friend and said something like “I knew I couldn’t beat your deck so I tried another tactic to help me win” would that have been so bad? I know we are not children, but anytime someone who does something to another player that for even a second has them thinking that they don’t want to play anymore is unacceptable to me. If we do not, for lack of a better term, nurture less experienced players, then we risk the chance of them leaving the game and that is something that nobody wants. I would think that if you are a true competitor you would want more competition, because as it is in everything else in life, you only get better when you are pitted against equal or greater opponents.

These types of issues are to be expected in any community because those of us that make up the collective all have different personalities and choose to play out our roles as we see fit. It doesn’t, however, mean that we can’t continue to improve on them. Aside from writing articles and doing interviews I would find it rather refreshing if there was a Pro out there who was willing to tutor newer players into getting better and not charge them some ridiculous price. I would love to read a series of articles that catalogued a player’s journey from the beginning and see if under the proper tutelage that player could reach the Pro circuit, I mean who doesn’t love a good underdog story?

You might have read this far and said to yourself that Jesse is talking about all these negative things, so why would he love this community so much? The truth is that, yes, our community does have its flaws, but the fact that it is imperfect is one of the most exciting things. We all get to have an influence on making it better where it needs to be, as well as fight to keep the things we love about it intact. WotC in and of itself has made many mistakes over the last year, take Snapcaster Mage for example, how many complaints have we heard about that card or even uttered ourselves? That mistake hasn’t stopped WotC from moving forward and trying to make the game better and at the same time by them admitting to their mistake they have showed that they are listening to our community and that they are willing to do the best that they can to keep things enjoyable for us.

When I started playing Magic back in the day, the internet was in its infancy and most of the knowledge about the Multiverse came from monthly publications, God, looking back it was as if we were living on Innistrad minus the monsters everywhere. Nowadays we are in constant connection with members of our community no matter what country or time zone they happen to be in. There is no question that this connection is one of the reasons that Magic has been able to be so successful and will continue to be in the future.

I really want to see this community continue to grow as it has embraced me with open arms, and I know there are hundreds of thousands of people out there that, if they give it a chance, will be as passionate as we are. Some of my best friends now are people that I met playing Magic and this is when I am in my thirties. Our generation has an opportunity to break the stereotypes and lead the way for our community. I have a feeling that sooner rather than later Magic is going to be bigger than any of us could have imagined, but that can’t happen without each and every member of the community uniting their passion.

--Jesse