The first best-of-three round of the Ixalan prerelease had gone fine. I'd lost both games, but the dinosaur deck I'd built was lots of fun and I was glad I was there. The second round went badly. I lost both games again, and made a couple of major mistakes in the second one. After that I started feeling bad. But it was a familiar kind of bad. It was a mild version of the funk I'd found myself in after losing two rounds of the last event I'd played two weeks ago, when it was so bad I'd had to go to the bathroom between rounds and cry to get it out of my system. The same kind of thing happened at the event before that. And the event before that...probably every one-on-one play event I'd been to since I moved to a new city for work.
Why was this game I loved making me feel so bad?
Here's what I've come up with. For one, I think actually playing the game is my least favorite part of Magic. I love the stories that go with the sets. I love the characters, the art, the worldbuilding; those are what got me interested in the first place. I love drafting and building decks. I like having the cards, up to the point where they become clutter. And I like winning. But I don't often have fun losing at Magic, and I do a lot of losing.
Why don't I enjoy losing? Aside from the obvious. I think there's two sides to this one. One is that I almost never play with friends, because all my friends are in different cities. I go to events and try to make friends, and at Lady Planeswalkers especially the table talk is excellent, but I never feel like I've connected with anyone. The other is that at some point being a Magic player became part of my identity, and when I do badly at something that helps define who I am, I feel like I've failed as a person.
So I think it's time I made playing Magic a smaller part of my identity. I'm gonna stop spending money on it, and stop going to the free playgroup at my workplace where I'm the only woman, and sell all the value from among the cards I've collected over the last few months, and start cutting back on my consumption of Magic technical content so I'm not tempted to try out every new card and mechanic that gets released.
I'm not leaving the fandom. I'm keeping my Commander deck and my basic land collection. I still care who finds the City of Gold first, and how the members of the Gatewatch learn and recover from their recent terrible defeat at the hands of the Elder Dragon. I'm even still looking forward to the release of the parody set this winter. But I'm gonna focus on doing the parts of Magic that make me happy, and not doing the part that makes me feel like less of a person.
I'll go to more knitting circles instead. Read more books. Maybe play Hiveswap.
