House of Cards CHARLOTTESVILLE RESIDENTS ARE CHAMPIONS OF FANTASY by Allison Devers Allison Devers cozies up to Magic Man Mike Long Charlottesville is full of recognizable personalities, from the world-famous to the locally bred. Stories and rumors drip like honey from tongues about the Corner Crazies or John Grisham's last trip to Arch's Yogurt on Ivy. I heard from an overly-excited girl at the coffee shop that Tom Cruise drives around in a white Bronco-like vehicle. She claims she saw him herself. A previous roommate of mine shopped "with" Dave Matthews a few dozen times at Whole Foods (where their carts CRASHed together -- as if their stars were aligned!) and at Bed Bath & Beyond. "He was with a girl this time," she had sighed to me; fate had not been with her. Charlottesville loves its personalities, from famous professors to "that Elvis guy" at The White Spot, these interesting people often fill whole conversations between passive fans. Who else is there in Charlottesville? Running into an old friend at the beginning of last semester, I learned of another eyebrow-raising group. There are wizards in town. I first met Mike Long my freshman year at Centreville High School (he graduated my sophomore year). He was an intimidating person, of average height, but a bulky State Champion Wrestler. Most people bought into his act and stayed away. For some reason I got along famously with this slightly conservative, slightly preppy-attitudinal athlete. He was also co-editor of our humble literary magazine the year he graduated, and I was on the staff. He was an excellent writer with a need to create chaos, which we often did together. To get to the point, he graduated, and as with everyone else in high school, I didn't really think much about him after that. I hadn't seen him for four years, but heard that he was wrestling at James Madison, which was true. But this was early on in his college career. Presently, Mike Long lives in Charlottesville. He is self-sufficient; his friends are self-sufficient. Mike Long is a graduate from JMU with a history degree. He is also the Magic: the Gathering World Champion. When I found this out, I thought to myself, "Okay, just a bit freakish," but he was still the same person I liked four years ago. He lives and plays in Charlottesville with a few other top-ranked Magic Moguls. One can see them playing at Littlejohn's, Espresso Corner, and other sit-down-type places. Magic is a card game with elements of fantasy to it, the underlying setting of all the action taking place is a world called Dominia. I tease him about it. I ask him if he believes in fairies. But he doesn't have a strange name (e.g. Rosencrantz Ironfist) that he uses when he plays. He doesn't dress in black and spend his spare time watching Star Trek re-runs. He and his friends practice with soul; it's a career of choice, and after a few conversations about it with Mike, I don't blame him. I talked to Mike right before he left for an all expense-paid trip to a resort in Rio de Janeiro (an all-star game), and he told me a bit about Magic and himself. AD: A lot of people don't know what Magic: the Gathering is, and I'm sure very few knew you could make a living at it. How would you explain the game? ML: Magic is sort of a mixture of chess, bridge, and a computer game with a little bit of baseball cards thrown in. It's a mathematically-based game which is simple enough to learn in a half hour, but too complex for anyone to ever totally master. It's socially interactive, dynamic, and very fun. It's basically a really cool game. AD: I've read that Magic has a world-wide following. Why is the game so successful? ML: I think it's so successful because of its diversity. It has elements that can appeal to anyone. There are the mathematical, statistical, and social aspects of the game. And the game versions and artists who illustrate the cards have changed periodically. AD: But how did it originally become so popular? ML: As far as how it became popular, well that is sort of a trick question. There's really no way it could be any less popular. If anything, it is just now coming to a point where the masses are discovering it and its popularity is now growing. It's like this, these guys stumble across this really great game (invented by a professor at the University of Pennsylvania in 1993). It's the kind of game that you might read about in a Ray Bradbury novel, this really great game that everyone who plays seems to love. So they know it's a good game but they don't really know what to do with it. These guys just happen to be old-school geeks. They do the only thing that they can think to do with the game, which is start selling it at comic book stores. Comic books are all fine and good and whatever, but there's more to life than X-Men, because of this, lots of normal people never got exposed to the game. In some ways its sort of sad because about one-half of the people who have played the game really really enjoy it. AD: Do you get upset when people equate Magic to Dungeons and Dragons? ML: I don't get upset, but there's no real parallel to the game. There is no role-playing in Magic. It's a card game, a mathematical resource management game, kind of like Monopoly, but there is so much to it that it never gets boring. I guess the first people who tried to sell the game approached D&D players. It's really sort of a shame because D&D has this big stigma attached to it. Magic and D&D would be sort of the same thing if the inventor of pizza had advertised it like: "Pizza! Almost as good as Liver Cakes!" AD: Tell me about your involvement as a top competitive player in the game. ML: I have now been to Hong Kong, Paris, Cologne, Los Angeles New York, Dallas, and Seattle. I'm leaving for Rio on Tuesday. I'm really lucky to have traveled all over the world by playing Magic. The largest prize that I have won is $26,000. Last year I netted about $50,000. AD: Why is there so much Magic happening in Charlottesville? ML: It's just sort of random. David Mills is here, he is ranked #3 overall in the world to my #1 and made over $30,000 last year alone. We met each other at some early tournaments, and we got along really well so we started hanging out together. A lot of people around us were really good too. Charlottesville is a pretty smart town. The people here are rather worldly and open to new things so it's sort of natural that some of them would pick up Magic and play it and be good at it. I'd really like to start seeing even more people playing. I find Charlottesville to be a mythical place with plenty of strange stories about interesting people. I was lucky to run into Mike Long, he's a good kid. Even though Magic is a peculiar way to spend time, I have to say that Mike is the first financially successful friend I have, and he didn't do it in the conventional way, which I think is fabulous.

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