#135. Stinky & Joan of Arc (Saturday, October 12, 2002)

What was your best day…of being at the peak of a friendship without even knowing?

Just based on this ridiculous title, you could probably intuit that this would be another story around my lifelong favorite card game, Magic the Gathering (#20). But no, this was not some ancient precursor of LIBOR & Taxes (#84) that won with poison counters and sacrifice effects. The source for this one is a lot less perfectly coherent, though equally nonsensical.

Following my introduction to Magic in fourth grade, and my using it in fifth grade to become best friends with Derek Dunlop (#103), sixth grade introduced one socially aggressive Steven Fennessey (#17, #51)—who thought it was a game for “big geeks”, and hence so did Derek and everyone else in my grade. So, for a full year, while I still followed the new sets, I was left with no one at school to play with.

But with seventh grade came a whole new cohort to my school, some of whom played Magic, and who had not been indoctrinated by Steven… yet. Namely, Todd Xing (#9), who took the same bus as me and was even more of a Magic obsessive than I was. As well as Aiden Walsh (#2) and Noah Poirier (#51), who were best friends from their previous school and shared a collection.

On this Saturday, Todd has organized a “Magic tournament” at his house, and I’m pretty pumped. At that age, I was the type of kid who never hung out with classmates outside of school.

But it turns out no one else can actually make it for the whole day. So the morning becomes him and I battling against each other and making a few trades. I had three decks at the time: a goblin-themed deck, an efficient (by our low standards) green-white deck, and a five-color deck with cards who. I don’t recall what Todd played, but we were fairly evenly matched.¹

Later that morning, Todd, I, and his mom end up on a call with Aiden and Noah, who are hanging out at Aiden’s place. There’s a lot of back and forth on logistics (don’t know why), with momentary periods of Aiden stepping away and Noah saying he’s “grazing with the cows” (that I do know why—it’s because the street Aiden lives on was Cowley Avenue², but eventually it’s arranged. Todd’s mom will drive us to Cowley Avenue mid-afternoon, and it hasn’t even hit me what I’m about to do. I’m about to go with a friend, after spending the morning at his house, to the house of another friend who has a friend visiting, so the four of us can just hang out and play my favorite game in the world. And with minimal planning and effort. What kind of social miracle was this?

And so, for a couple hours that afternoon, I’m in the basement playing four-way Magic and trade cards with Todd, Aiden, and Noah. What really elevates this, strangely, is that Aiden’s mom makes us a big bowl of popcorn that we consume for our intense Magic deals (“we need that for energy”, Aiden tells us), and that just gives this thing a whole other scale of easy camaraderie.

So where does this ridiculous title come from? Well, in my collection I had a bunch of legendary creature originally from a super-old set (naturally titled Legends), which I had obtained by trading my precious Spiritmonger to a guy at Chinese Math and Science Camp in the summer³. Only later did I realize that the reprint versions I had were practically worthless. But they were still cool. So, I was able to leverage that coolness by trading two of them, Stangg and Johan, to Aiden and Noah for some more powerful (and valuable) cards from some recent sets.

But, as we near the finalization of the trade details, adding and removing pieces on both sides to converge to something we’re both happy with, I hit a moment of hesitation. Am I really getting full value of these—after all, only I truly know how not-valuable they are… I tell them to hold up, and Aiden denies me, telling me the trade is happening. Because he already has nicknames designated for Stangg and Johan. They will be hereby deemed Stinky and Joan of Arc!

Well, you can’t deny someone that. So, I compromise on the last piece, we complete the trade, and shortly after I depart Cowley (which has no actual cows) with Todd, only unconsciously appreciating just how effortless of a social day I just had.

N.B. I then proceed to screw things up by NOT inviting Aiden and Noah to my birthday party the Friday after.⁴ Instead, after long deliberation, inviting Jensen who was in my sixth-grade class⁵; and he ends up not even being able to make it. Missing my window to establish a deeper friendship with them⁶, eventually they do become indoctrinated into Steven’s ways—except now it’s insults me about girls, rather than about Magic⁷—Aiden in particular develops a bit of quiet vicious manner, and things between us never get back to what they were here.

He later got into competitive deckbuilding later that year, constructing a green Elf deck that exploited a lot of the super-strong cards from the latest Onslaught block and became unbeatable in our playgroup.
Why that joke was made at least three times, I do not know. But I was too excited at the time to be annoyed (or confused).
Yes, such a thing did exist. Though the fact that all the math and science instruction was in Chinese meant that I retained absolutely none of it. The kids there played Magic though, so that was enough.
For a socially sparse kid who only had two birthday parties in his childhood, I had an embarrassing pattern of doing this, to people I had just been hanging out with (#88).
Ironically, it was Steven—at that time in the “friend” phrase of frenemy, and also going to the party—who gave me the advice to go with Jensen.
Neither of them ever visit my house. And I never visit either of their houses again.
Recall Steven himself gets into Magic later in the year, and I give him an Onslaught tournament pack for his birthday present (#16).