Generation Decks – Titus Chalk

That the best times came not in a frustrating outside world, but in trying to create a safe, familiar one suspended in it. The high point really came one long, yawning summer holiday. It was a hot season, like all the best ones in memory are. The sun had baked the local mud into fine dust swirling on the breeze. The nearest anything was 15 minutes drive away. We couldn’t drive. The torpor that consumes teenage souls set in. To fight it, my sister and I hit upon a way of keeping ourselves amused.

For hours on end we would mix the hundreds of unloved junk cards we owned together into big piles, from which we would randomly pluck components for a deck. First some creatures. Then some spells. Then some artifacts. It was a very primitive form of what today gets called ‘cube drafting’, where players assemble their own personal selection of cards to build decks from with their friends.

We didn’t have any clever notions like that. Just stacks of duff cards that we wanted to rediscover in a private space carved out from the sighing stone house we called home. The simplicity of it all let us reclaim the game as something personal even as, in the outside world, it started to grow into something we weren’t able to get a handle on.

That something was more structured and serious. It held no meaning for two deracinated kids looking for a calm centre to the universe in the gentle, repetitive rhythms of play. The sun poured in through an open window. We sat on a thin rug on uncomfortable floorboards, with the sound of BBC Radio Four and my dad’s footsteps coming through the ceiling from his studio above us. And somehow, with communication reduced to sibling code rather than a treacherous foreign language, we found peace.

It took another 15 years or so, but my sister and I did play each other again, in the same house, one Christmas after she had rediscovered the game with her partner. Sitting up on Christmas Eve, chucking down cards on the dining room table, till long past the hour Santa should have visited, we found another moment’s peace. This time though, we were adults bringing our world home, using the game like a trail of breadcrumbs to lives that existed well beyond the length of the driveway, up to the road, leading away from the village we had once hated.

Sitting up, with parents asleep, we were changing the meaning of home with every card we laid on the blue oilcloth, every crunching attack, every laugh and clink of glasses. This was our chance to express identities which had outgrown whatever that place had once been.

No longer were we prisoners of its isolation, escaping it with a game as best as we could one long-lost, weary summer. We were there on our own terms.

First published 2017 by Solaris an imprint of Rebellion Publishing Ltd, Riverside House, Osney Mead, Oxford, OX2 0ES, UK www.solarisbooks.com ISBN: 978-1-78618-067-4 Copyright © 2017 Titus Chalk Cover art by Sam Gretton Magic: The Gathering is a trademark of Wizards of the Coast LLC in the United States and other countries. This book is neither approved by nor affiliated with Wizards of the Coast LLC. The right of the author to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owners. OceanofPDF.com Contents It’s a Kind of Magic Great Minds Meet Kird Ape Testing, Testing: 1, 2, 3…

The Basement Blues The Sub Pop of Gaming Unleashing a Monster We Are One Sermon on the Mount Scriptures and Shrines I’m Bad, I’m Nationwide The Deck Plug Me In Play the Game, see the World Which Way Home? Heroes… …and Villains The Best There Ever Was Gordon, Plum, Spence and Eric “I started at Wizards, I left Hasbro.”

Playing a New Hand Lords of the Pit It’s a Small World He Works Hard for the Money Good Afternoon Sports Fans! Magic’s Missing Tribe Buy Low, Sell High Meeting the Maker The Best Game in the World Acknowledgements and Sources About the Author OceanofPDF.com A note on pictures: I highly recommend using Wizards of the Coast’s official Magic Card Database, Gatherer, to look up the names of any cards mentioned in this book.

There you will find the latest artwork, text and rulings all in one place. Go to gatherer.wizards.com, check the “Name” tick-box, enter the name of the card in question and instantly discover cards from the game’s entire history. OceanofPDF.com CHAPTER ONE It’s a Kind of Magic “SO DO YOU wear, you know, a cape or something?” Poppy asks me. “Because I could definitely imagine you doing actual magic. Like tricks and stuff.” Poppy is trying. A great friend, she always forgives me my eccentricities, but this particular pearl is passing her by.

Talking to her, I can’t help but feel stranded in some humiliating time warp; inside its whirl, I live out the same faintly ridiculous conversation again and again. Yes, I admit, I play a mysterious card game. No, I say, it is not like snap. Yes, I suppose you could call it a cross between stamp collecting and Dungeons & Dragons.

No. You’re right.

This is a short excerpt from the opening of “” by Unknown, quoted for review and introduction purposes. All rights belong to the copyright holders.

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• Title: –
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• ISBN: 9781786180674
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• Language: English (en)

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